October 10, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security
CISA flags a critical Fortinet flaw under active exploitation. Palo Alto Networks and Cisco also release urgent security patches.
https://thehackernews.com/2024/10/cisa-warns-of-critical-fortinet-flaw-as.html
November 23, 2024 | International, Aerospace
Fort Worth, TEXAS – November 21, 2024 – Elbit Systems of America (Elbit America) received a firm Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract from the United States Air Force (USAF) to...
July 3, 2018 | International, Aerospace
By: Tom Kington ROME ― Italy's new populist government may slow down but not reduce its order of F-35 fighter jets, while trimming its manpower in Afghanistan, Defence Minister Elisabetta Trenta has told Defense News. In one of her first interviews since taking office at the start of June, Trenta said Italy remained a faithful ally of the U.S., but added she was skeptical about sanctions imposed on Russia by the West. A former defense academic at the Link University in Rome and a veteran of the Italian Army's civil reserve unit, Trenta was named defense minister by a coalition government formed in June, which groups the anti-migrant League party and the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. Five Star officials promised last year to scrap Italy's purchase of 90 F-35 fighters, but Trenta said the new government would not cut orders, even if it might stretch out its purchase plan. “It's a program we inherited and we have lots of questions; that is why we will evaluate the program considering the industrial and technology benefits for national interest, as we are the new government,” she said. “What I would like to do is lighten the load since we have other spending commitments in Europe. We will try to stretch out deliveries instead of cutting the order, which would reduce offsets and mean penalties,” she said. Foreign military invovlement Trenta met U.S. national security adviser John Bolton on June 26 as he visited Rome, and she confirmed the new government's strong ties with the U.S. “The U.S. is our historic ally, we have never doubted that,” she said. Trenta said she told Bolton that Italy aims to reach NATO's defense spending target of 2 percent of gross domestic product. “But we would also like our strong presence in military missions recognized as an added value,” she said. She said that presence would still be substantial despite the government's plan to trim its headcount in Afghanistan from 900 to 700, if and when replacements could be found to step in from other nations. “We don't want to undercut stability or reduce support for Afghans. We want to start a change of pace, as established by the previous government, keeping at the same time the mission operative,” she said. “We don't want to weaken the mission, so we will look for other partners to take over tasks like logistics.” The minister said she asked Bolton for help launching a planned Italian military mission to Niger in Africa to help combat people smugglers who send migrants across the Sahara to Libya, where they embark on boats heading for Europe. The mission was announced last year but has been blocked by the Niger government, she said. She said she also asked Bolton to help Italy take a “leadership” role in bringing peace to lawless Libya, noting she would visit the country next month in hopes of meeting Gen. Khalifa Haftar, the military commander hostile to the United Nations-backed Tripoli government that is supported by Italy. Italy has been irked by French diplomacy in Libya, including backing for Haftar and support for elections by year-end. The election plan, Trenta said, was “not the best thing to do — the U.S. has seen in Iraq what happens when you rush things.” Butting heads France and Italy have meanwhile bickered this month over differing plans to deal with migrants arriving in Europe, but Trenta said no amount of political arguing would derail a planned merger between the naval operations of Italian shipyard Fincantieri and France's Naval Group. “Both countries are planning on the deal going ahead — there has been no impact from the migration discussion,” she said. The new government in Rome has not yet signed up to a French plan for a multinational rapid intervention force, which would contain fellow European Union members, but also the U.K., which is planning to leave the EU. France said it wants the initiative to exist separately to the EU's Permanent Structured Cooperation initiative for security and defense. Trenta said Italy would probably sign. “As a new government, we wanted to study it and make sure it does not weaken the EU PESCO initiative,” she said. Italy's new government rattled its European allies earlier this month when Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said he would like to end sanctions that were imposed on Moscow after Russia's 2014 annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Trenta shares his view. “We have to consider Italy's strategic interests — sanctions have damaged Italian exports, and it would be a good idea to evaluate alternative instruments,” she said. “We see the U.S. as an ally, but we don't see Russia as a threat — we see it as an economic partner,” she said. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2018/06/29/italys-new-defense-minister-commits-to-f-35-butts-heads-with-france/
September 10, 2019 | International, C4ISR
By: Heiko Borchert und Christian Brandlhuber As the United States, China and Russia are accelerating their use of artificial intelligence in military settings, Europe risks falling behind unless leaders on the continent take steps to bundle their efforts. Estonia, Finland, France, Germany and the Netherlands presented a food-for-thought paper in May 2019, posing a series of questions aimed at boosting defense-relevant AI research in Europe. Our suggestion: Create a data mobility framework that would guide future concepts, models, algorithms, data sharing, access to elastic computing power, and sophisticated testing and training. Key challenges have yet to be addressed. Among them is a solid conceptual framework to help underline the benefits for armed forces. Second, AI solutions need to be integrated into a complex web of legacy systems, which puts a premium on interoperability. Third, defense AI solutions must comply with legal requirements. Finally, Europe lacks a common, trusted defense data pool. European leaders should take a lesson from the military mobility project, which simplifies and standardizes cross-border military transport procedures to ease the movement of personnel and equipment. Europe needs to match physical mobility with digital mobility. Data needs to travel, too. To stimulate defense AI solutions, the continent needs a platform economy that emerges around a portfolio of relevant infrastructure elements and services that a new “Center for Defense AI” could build. For the platform to become attractive, the data acquisition strategy must focus on the need to share. Readiness to share must be incentivized by a data pool that offers true, added value. Therefore, the center would offer access to data on anything from missile defense to combat aircraft maintenance under strict, government-controlled regulation, enabling users to build novel use cases for military scenarios. Mission-critical systems cannot rely on a single machine-learning technology but require a combined approach to data fusion that increases reliability and reflects the specific requirements of the different domains like land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. In addition, data must be validated to avoid manipulation. This data pool would become enormously attractive if the center managed to establish arrangements with the European Union and NATO to share data collected in international operations. This would provide an unprecedented opportunity to develop future concepts, models and algorithms based on real-life data reflecting mission requirements, environmental conditions in different theaters of operation and adversarial behavior. In addition, the European Defence Agency and NATO's Science and Technology Organization should make use of the joint data pool for their defense AI projects, thus expanding the data pool as well as the concepts and models used for data curation and solutions development. With the help of the European Defence Fund, the center could establish the first European defense data pool spanning across military services, missions and domains. This will drastically reduce data-handling costs, as data curation activities required for every single defense AI project can be pooled. While hugely important, data is only a means to develop capabilities-based AI solutions. That's why the center would offer complementary services addressing two current shortfalls: First, commonly available computing capacity required for large-scale learning is somewhat novel to the defense industry. A new defense AI cloud would significantly enhance data mobility by offering elastic computing capacity up to supercomputer levels, and dedicated data fusion capabilities currently unavailable to train very large-scale, AI-based data fusion models. Second, the center could provide a sophisticated simulation environment to run AI operations in a realistic battlefield environment. Based on its trusted data sources, the center and defense AI developers could join forces to build a defense AI app store. Apps could capture different sensor and effector characteristics or emulate particular patterns of adversarial behavior. Defense contractors and defense procurement agencies could use these apps to verify and validate new AI systems as if they had access to the respective algorithms, but without exposing the original vendor to the risk of being reverse engineered. In addition, the simulation environment would be instrumental to assess the ethical, legal and societal impact of AI solutions, thus providing a sound basis to decide on the use of AI systems and to enhance live, virtual, constructive training solutions. Europe should take bold steps toward channeling its collaborative defense AI activities, building on the strengths of each partner: The center would offer joint services; defense AI developers could concentrate on designing and producing intelligent sensors, effectors and decision-making solutions, while military end-users would contribute capabilities-based thinking and operational experience. Heiko Borchert runs Borchert Consulting & Research, a strategic affairs consultancy based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Christian Brandlhuber is senior adviser at Reply, a European IT systems integrator, and coordinates the company's AI strategy and activities. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/2019/09/09/jump-starting-europes-work-on-military-artificial-intelligence/