Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - December 03, 2019

On the same subject

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  August 18, 2020 | International, Land, C4ISR

  Lockheed develops electronic warfare tools with eye toward multinational interoperability

  Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — As Lockheed Martin works on the U.S. Army's first ground-based integrated signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber system, the company is placing a heavy focus on coalition interoperability. The Army awarded Lockheed a $6 million other transaction authority contract — a highly flexible contracting tool — in May to build the first phase of the Terrestrial Layer System-Large. Boeing subsidiary Digital Receiver Technology also won an award for the program for $7.6 million. The two companies will build and outfit their systems to Stryker vehicles during the 16-month-long phase one, while also participating in operational assessments, after which the Army will choose one company to move on. John Wojnar, director for cyber and electronic warfare strategy at Lockheed, told C4ISRNET in a July interview that the company had a keen eye toward integrating its system with international partners as well as the Army, given the U.S. military doesn't fight alone. “Being able to bring in our coalition partners, maybe starting with the Five Eyes first and in particular the U.K., and aligning the architecture that we provided ... really drove us to the architecture that we came up with,” he said. He added that Lockheed examined the building blocks of the U.K.'s cyber and electromagnetic activities to help inform the offering. Being in close partnership with coalition members is key, he said, so whatever architectures the company designs should be interoperable with partners to maximize effectiveness on the battlefield. Lockheed's system was an internal research and development project that is a companion of sorts to its aerial cyber/electronic warfare system Silent Crow, which the Army awarded a year ago for its Multi-Function Electronic Warfare-Air Large system. Wojnar said the ground system went through testing in September at the Army's Cyber Blitz event, which helps the service understand how to mature cyber and electronic warfare operations with traditional units through actual experimentation with emerging technologies and soldiers at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. “Based on lessons learned from those tests as well as the other activities that have been underway tied to Silent Crow IRAD, we were able to leverage the best of the best to then come up with our TLS-Large system offering,” he said. The work that will be ongoing between now and next summer when the first phase of TLS wraps up, Wojnar added, includes ensuring all the component parts developed internally and externally have been acquired and integrated into the ground vehicles, as well as conducting a variety of software drops. https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2020/08/17/lockheed-develops-electronic-warfare-tools-with-eye-toward-multinational-interoperability/

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  October 1, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Air Force paints a digital future where data from satellites play central role

  by Sandra Erwin In a few months the Air Force will start a series of experiments to try to connect fighter aircraft and other weapon systems into a single network so they can all share critical data and intelligence, much of which is collected by satellites in space. Will Roper, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, described the venture as the “first demonstration of what you could call ‘step 1' of ABMS.” ABMS is short for Advanced Battle Management System, and it is a hard concept to explain because it is not like a traditional piece of hardware or software. It can be best described as a network where data is piped in from sensors located in space, at sea, in the air or on the ground. That information would be instantly analyzed with artificial intelligence tools and shared across the network. This is the type of technology that will “allow us to be more collaborative,” Roper told reporters at the recent 2019 Air Space & Cyber symposium. Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein is “driving this idea across the Air Force,” said Roper. Goldfein has been a champion of ABMS and wants to make it a “large dollar item in our 2021 budget,” said Roper. The thinking is that the Air Force will spend less money on shiny new platforms and more on exploiting data and advanced networks. It would be like the “Internet of Things, but applied to military systems,” said Roper. Air Force leaders initially pitched the ABMS idea to Congress two years ago as a vision of the future where access to timely data is key to success in the battlefield. They suggested that the Air Force should invest in ABMS rather than spend billions on new command-and-control airplanes. Congress gave the plan a skeptical reception but the Air Force will continue to press its case. In a keynote speech at Air Force Association's Air Space & Cyber conference last week, Goldfein described the future as one of “multi-domain operations” where all weapons and military forces receive up-to-the-minute intelligence and are able to share that data, something that ABMS would make possible. “What I'm talking about is a fully networked force where Air Force paints a digital future where data from satellites play central role each platform's sensors and operators are connected,” said Goldfein. While the concept seems straightforward, putting it into practice is not. One of the challenges is how to handle the vast amounts of data available from satellites and the infrastructure required to bring this data to the ground, analyze the data and then transport it to where it's needed. Some of the crucial technologies that will enable ABMS or any similar efforts will come from the world of commercial space and cloud computing. The Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center has recognized this as it pursues a project called CASINO, short for Commercially Augmented Space Inter Networked Operations. CASINO is a spinoff of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Blackjack program that is attempting to demonstrate the military utility of small satellites in low Earth orbit. SMC has made CASINO one of its signature efforts to show how commercial technology could be used to process and distribute data from large LEO constellations. The Pentagon's Silicon Valley-based Defense Innovation Unit on Sept. 10 awarded a contract of undisclosed value to Ball Aerospace and Microsoft to demonstrate cloud processing capabilities in support of the CASINO project. The companies will have to show how simultaneous, worldwide data streams from large, distributed constellations of small satellites can be processed quickly using Microsoft's Azure cloud and Ball Aerospace algorithms. This is about making satellite data more actionable more quickly, Azure Global vice president Tom Keane said. One of the questions this project seeks to answer is “what would it take to completely transform what a ground station looks like, and downlink that data directly to the cloud?” Keane said. Perhaps one option is to place electronically steered flat panel antennas on the roof of a data center to connect multiple LEO satellites. Ball Aerospace algorithms in this project will process data streams from up to 20 satellites. With the data in the cloud, customers can direct it to where it's needed. Clearly, there is a long way to go to achieve what Goldfein calls the “Air Force That We Need” — one where all U.S. and allied forces are connected and get relevant information quickly. But you have to start somewhere. https://spacenews.com/air-force-paints-a-digital-future-where-data-from-satellites-play-central-role/

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  May 16, 2024 | International, Land

  OCCAR contracts MBDA to launch HYDIS² concept phase

  The European Commission selected the HYDIS² project for funding in July 2023 and the governments of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands decided to co-fund.