February 26, 2021 | International, C4ISR
Multi-skilled AI
Human intelligence emerges from our combination of senses and language abilities. Maybe the same is true for artificial intelligence.
November 13, 2020 | International, Naval
BAE Systems wins $30M in naval IT contracts
WASHINGTON — BAE Systems was awarded two task order contracts to provide and integrate an information warfare platform aboard five U.S. Navy vessels, the company announced Nov. 11.
Under the two task orders, worth more than $30 million, BAE will integrate the platforms into the Navy's Consolidated Afloat Network Enterprise Services — the Navy's tactical afloat network.
"These two task orders permit us to continue our high-quality, high volume production and integration service, assembling and delivering CANES to the Navy safely and affordably,” Mark Keeler, vice president and general manager of BAE Systems' Integrated Defense Solutions business, said in a statement. “CANES takes advantage of commercial-off-the-shelf insertion, which brings operational agility to the warfighter and savings to the U.S. Navy.”
Under the first task order, BAE will produce two fully integrated CANES racks for two Blue Ridge-class command ships, according to the release. That work is expected to be completed by February 2022.
The company will provide the same services for two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and a Virginia-class submarine under the second task order, expected to be completed by March 2022.
Work will be performed at the BAE Systems facility in Summerville, South Carolina. Naval Information Warfare Systems Command in San Diego, California, awarded the contracts.
BAE Systems also announced earlier this week that it won a five-year, $94 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract to deliver engineering, test and evaluation support for sensors, in addition to communication, control, and weapons systems for manned and unmanned air platforms. The contract was awarded by the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division.
"We are bringing new advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and autonomy to the Airborne Systems Integration Division,” Keeler said in a news release. “Our state-of-the-art digital engineering capabilities, and extensive experience in integrating airborne systems are further strengthening the warfighter's ability to meet mission requirements and ensuring combat readiness in the field.”
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August 23, 2018 | International, C4ISR
Here’s how one Army leader sees the future of war
By: Mark Pomerleau The Army of the future will be leaner and that means junior officers will have more responsibility and more capability in their hands, a top Army general said Aug. 21. Lt. Gen. Theodore Martin, deputy commanding general of Training and Doctrine Command, said in future wars a platoon or company may be the unit that takes action. Martin, speaking at the TechNet Augusta conference, said that units have become smaller since World War I. Then, the U.S. military fought with huge field armies. World War II was fought with armies and corps, the Korean and Vietnam Wars were fought primarily with divisions, and the modern counterinsurgency wars have been fought with brigades, Martin said. With a potentially smaller, and leaner, structure, the junior officers that will command these units will have have capability within their power. “The type of assets that now reside at the brigade level, my grandfather ... if he were alive today [he] would be totally flabbergasted by what a colonel can bring to bear on the battlefield under his or her own authorities,” Martin said. Brigades today are led by colonels. In the future, Martin envision a lieutenant who will have grown up in a multidomain world with an education in the Army that is much different than that of today, and which prepared him or her for the future fight. Army leaders will expect that a platoon will take advantage of electronic warfare, cyber and information operations. This could mean the platoon will throw an electronic warfare grenade that will blind enemy mission command systems, jam radios and block similar attacks to keep friendly radios online. Then, as the platoon gets closer to its objective, perhaps they will send an email to the enemy commander saying something like their wife is cheating on them or their bank account has been emptied, as a way to create an additional distraction, Martin said. Martin acknowledged this vignette seems a little far-fetched, but in the multidomain battlefield “that's what we're going to be facing and it's a race to capability,” he said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/show-reporter/technet-augusta/2018/08/22/heres-how-one-army-leader-sees-the-future-of-war/
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February 18, 2019 | International, C4ISR
DARPA: Five Teams of Researchers Will Help DARPA Detect Undersea Activity by Analyzing Behaviors of Marine Organisms
Goliath grouper, black sea bass, and snapping shrimp, along with bioluminescent plankton and other microorganisms, are set to be the unlikely heroes of DARPA's Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program. Five teams of researchers are developing new types of sensor systems that detect and record the behaviors of these marine organisms and interpret them to identify, characterize, and report on the presence of manned and unmanned underwater vehicles operating in strategic waters. This new, bio-centric PALS technology will augment the Department of Defense's existing, hardware-based maritime monitoring systems and greatly extend the range, sensitivity, and lifetime of the military's undersea surveillance capabilities. DARPA first announced the PALS program in February 2018 with the goal of incorporating biology into new solutions for monitoring adversary movements across the seemingly endless spaces of the world's oceans and seas. Ubiquitous, self-replicating, self-sustaining sea life is adaptable and highly responsive to its environment, whereas maritime hardware is resource intensive, costly to deploy, and relatively limited in its sensing modalities. According to PALS program manager Lori Adornato, “Tapping into the exquisite sensing capabilities of marine organisms could yield a discreet, persistent, and highly scalable solution to maintaining awareness in the challenging underwater environment.” The DARPA-funded PALS teams must develop or apply technologies to record stimulus responses from observed organisms, and develop combined hardware and software systems that interpret those responses, screen out false positives, and transmit analyzed results to remote end users. The teams' solutions will incorporate technologies such as hydrophones, sonar, cameras, and magnetic, acoustic, and kinetic sensors. The team led by Northrop Grumman Corporation, under principal investigator Robert Siegel, will record and analyze acoustics from snapping shrimp and optical activity by bioluminescent organisms. The team led by the Naval Research Laboratory, under principal investigator Lenny Tender, will integrate microbial organisms into a sensing platform to detect and characterize biological signals from natural microorganisms that respond to the magnetic signatures of underwater vehicles. The team led by Florida Atlantic University, under principal investigator Laurent Cherubin, will record and analyze vocalization cues from goliath grouper in tropical and subtropical environments. The team led by Raytheon BBN Technologies, under principal investigator Alison Laferriere, will use snapping shrimp as sources of opportunity for long-range detection, classification, and tracking of underwater vehicles. The team led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, under principal investigator David Secor, will tag black sea bass with sensors to track the depth and acceleration behaviors of schools of fish that are perturbed by underwater vehicles. DARPA is also funding the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, Division Newport, under principal investigator Lauren Freeman, to develop a seafloor system that uses a hydrophone array and acoustic vector sensor to continuously monitor ambient biological sound in a reef environment for anomalies. The system will analyze changes in the acoustic signals radiated by the natural predator-avoidance response of coral reef ecosystem biota, which could offer an indirect mechanism to detect and classify underwater vehicles in near-real time. DARPA conceived of PALS as a four-year research program with the expectation that researchers will be able to publish results for review by the broader scientific community. However, if DARPA identifies any of the data, results, or technical specifications as controlled unclassified information, DARPA will require the PALS researchers to protect them to prevent proliferation outside of official channels. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-02-15