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August 5, 2021 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

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  • How DoD can improve its technology resilience

    December 17, 2020 | International, C4ISR

    How DoD can improve its technology resilience

    Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense must bolster its resilience in mission platforms in order to stay ahead of threats, a new think tank report says. With the military's shift toward great power competition, or conflict against nation states, its systems and platforms will be under greater stress than technological inferior adversaries battled during the counterterrorism fight of the last decade-plus. Systems and networks are expected to be contested, disrupted and even destroyed, meaning officials need to build redundancy and resilience in from the start to work through such challenges. In fact, top defense officials have been warning for several years that they are engaged in conflict that is taking place below the threshold of armed conflict in which adversaries are probing networks and systems daily for espionage or disruptive purposes. “Resilience is a key challenge for combat mission systems in the defense community as a result of accumulating technical debt, outdated procurement frameworks, and a recurring failure to prioritize learning over compliance. The result is brittle technology systems and organizations strained to the point of compromising basic mission functions in the face of changing technology and evolving threats,” said a new report out today by the Atlantic Council titled “How Do You Fix a Flying Computer? Seeking Resilience in Software-Intensive Mission Systems.” “Mission resilience must be a priority area of work for the defense community. Resilience offers a critical pathway to sustain the long-term utility of software-intensive mission systems, while avoiding organizational brittleness in technology use and resulting national security risks. The United States and its allies face an unprecedented defense landscape in the 2020s and beyond.” This resilience, is built upon three pillars, the authors write: robustness, which is the ability of a system to negate the impact of disruption; responsiveness, which is the ability of a system to provide feedback and incorporate changes on a disruption, and; adaptability, which is the ability to a system to change itself to continue operating despite a disruption. Systems, the report notes, are more than just the sum of its parts — hardware and software — but rather are much broader to include people, organizational processes and technologies. To date, DoD has struggled to manage complexity and develop robust and reliable mission systems, even in a relatively benign environment, the report bluntly asserts, citing problems with the F-35′s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) as one key example. “A conflict or more contested environment would only exacerbate these issues. The F-35 is not alone in a generation of combat systems so dependent on IT and software that failures in code are as critical as a malfunctioning munition or faulty engine — other examples include Navy ships and military satellites,” the authors write. “To ensure mission systems like the F-35 remain available, capable, and lethal in conflicts to come demands the United States and its allies prioritize the resilience of these systems. Not merely security against compromise, mission resilience is the ability of a mission system to prevent, respond to, and adapt to both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions, to optimize efficacy under uncertainty, and to maximize value over the long term. Adaptability is measured by the capacity to change — not only to modify lines of software code, but to overturn and replace the entire organization and the processes by which it performs the mission, if necessary. Any aspect that an organization cannot or will not change may turn out to be the weakest link, or at least a highly reliable target for an adversary.” The report offers four principles that defense organizations can undertake to me more resilient in future conflicts against sophisticated adversaries: Embrace failure: DoD must be more willing to take risks and embrace failure to stay ahead of the curve. Organizations can adopt concepts such as chaos engineering, experimenting on a system to build confidence in its ability to withstand turbulent conditions in production, and planning for loss of confidentiality in compromised systems. Improve speed: DoD must be faster at adapting and developing, which includes improving its antiquated acquisition policies and adopt agile methodologies of continuous integration and delivery. Of note, DoD has created a software acquisition pathway and is implementing agile methodologies of continuous integration and delivery, though on small scales. Always be learning: Defense organizations operate in a highly contested cyber environment, the report notes, and as the department grows more complex, how it learns and adapts to rapidly evolving threats grows in importance. Thus, it must embrace experimentation and continuous learning at all levels of systems as a tool to drive improvement. Manage trade-offs and complexity: DoD should improve mission system programs' understanding of the trade-offs between near-term functionality and long-term complexity to include their impact on systems' resilience. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2020/12/14/how-dod-can-improve-its-technology-resilience/

  • BAE begins major reshuffle of Army, Marine Corps vehicle work sites

    March 29, 2023 | International, Land

    BAE begins major reshuffle of Army, Marine Corps vehicle work sites

    BAE Systems' York facility will move some programs elsewhere to make room for an accelerating Armored Multipurpose Vehicle production line this summer.

  • Army Takes Its Radio Network Commercial

    August 21, 2018 | International, C4ISR

    Army Takes Its Radio Network Commercial

    By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. ARLINGTON: As the Army reboots its battlefield radio networks, it's jettisoning exquisitely custom-made military waveforms and moving to simpler — but more capable — commercial radio protocols. The move is underway on three fronts, Maj. Gen. David Bassett, the two-star Program Executive Officer for command, control & communications – Tactical (PEO C3T), says: The Army's already moving its backpack-mounted tactical radio, the Manpack, from the milspec Soldier Radio Waveform (SRW) to the commercial TSM waveform, with both Harris and Rockwell Collins now integrating TSM in their radios. (Special operators already use TSM). They're currently selecting vendors to do the same for their handheld Leader Radio, mainly used by junior and non-commissioned officers on foot. Bassett's staff told me to expect an award sometime in September. They're exploring alternatives to the Wideband Networking Waveform (WNW) as the “backbone” of the Army's tactical network. TSM is one candidate but there are others, including some still in development, Bassett told me in an interview here. It's all part of a wider effort to rebuild the Army's command, control, and communications (C3) networks for war against a high-tech great power. Speaking at a cyber and networks conference held here Aug. 2 by the Association of the US Army, Bassett said the Army will conduct operational testing of new command systems — including two lower-complexity alternatives to complement the current mainstay, JBC-P — and start fielding them, he said, “this fall.” Why the rush? Army systems like WIN-T(Warfighter Information Network – Tactical) worked adequately as long as we had big bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, with plenty of time to set up extensive infrastructure and minimal enemy interference. China and Russia, however, have cutting-edge cyber and electronic warfare attackers to hack the network software, powerful electronic warfare units to jam its transmissions, and long-range precision guided missiles that can easily target large, stationary command posts. So last year Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley ordered a crash program of improvements, cancelling planned WIN-T upgrades in favor of new technologies, many from the thriving commercial IT sector. “It was kind of a shock to the system,” the Army's Chief Information Officer, Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, told the AUSA conference. “The Army came forward and said there were some programs it wanted to halt and some things it fundamentally wanted to do differently.” Appealing To Industry Gen. Milley's announcement met with initial resistance, including on Capitol Hill, but inspired intense interest from industry. Maj. Gen. Bassett himself had come to the AUSA conference from a meeting in Raleigh, one corner of North Carolina's thriving“research triangle,” where he had briefed 400 representatives from some 126 companies. “Down in Raleigh, the challenge that I gave them was learn how you fit into our network design. Propose solutions that will fit into our network,” Bassett said. “We want them to become part of that infrastructure rather than competing with it.” https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/army-takes-its-radio-network-commercial-can-you-hear-me-now

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