Difficultés de financement de la BITD : résultats du rapport de l’Assemblée nationale

On the same subject

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  January 7, 2022 | International, C4ISR

  Eying military gains, France goes big on national quantum technology

  Mastering quantum technology is an '€œabsolutely strategic interest'€ for France's national defense, said Defense Minister Florence Parly.

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  February 3, 2021 | International, Naval

  National Defence says $60B warship project delayed until 2030s

  By Lee Berthiaume The Canadian Press Posted February 2, 2021 10:40 am OTTAWA – The Department of National Defence says the first of 15 new warships being built for the Royal Canadian Navy will be delivered years later than expected as officials working on the $60-billion project grapple with unexpected design and construction challenges. The delay means Canada will need to spend more on its 12 aging Halifax-class frigates to keep them floating longer, and is sure to set off a fresh wave of debate and lobbying around what amounts to the largest military procurement in Canadian history. Yet the Defence Department's head of procurement insists the project remains on budget thanks to built-in contingencies, while navy commander Vice-Admiral Craig Baines expressed confidence that his force would not be unduly affected by the delay. That is despite a recent report that outlined concerns about the advanced age of the frigates, which was making it more difficult to find spare parts and conduct other maintenance on the 1980s Halifax-class warships. “When you put ships in saltwater over time, there's going to be an effect,” Baines told The Canadian Press in an interview. “But right now, based on all our estimates on the conditions of the ships, we're very comfortable that we'll be able to transition with this plan.” The delay is nonetheless the latest setback for the new fleet of warships, which are known in military circles as Canadian “surface combatants” and are expected to serve as the Navy's backbone for the better part of the century. The warship project was launched in earnest nearly a decade ago when Irving Shipbuilding in Halifax was selected in October 2011 to build the fleet, with the total cost estimated at around $26 billion and the first ship to be delivered in the mid-2020s. That vague schedule remained largely unchanged, at least on paper, even as the estimated price tag ballooned to $60 billion and Ottawa ordered several smaller ships so Irving would have work until the surface combatants were ready for construction. But Troy Crosby, the Defence Department's assistant deputy minister of materiel, revealed Monday that the first ship is now scheduled for delivery in the early 2030s as officials grapple with the final design and face longer-than-expected construction times. The new warships are based on the Type-26 frigate, which is also being built by the United Kingdom and Australia, but Canadian officials have been making numerous changes to the design to meet Canada's unique military – and industrial – requirements. At the same time, Crosby said the British and Australian experiences have shown that construction of the new vessels will take 7 1/2 years, rather than the original estimate of five years. “So when we look at the overall timeline, we're looking at slightly longer timelines,” he said. “We're looking at the first ship being delivered to us in the early 2030s. ... In this case, we're really more specifically looking at the 2030-31 timeframe.” The schedule slippage comes as the parliamentary budget officer is preparing to release a highly anticipated update on the estimated cost of the warship project. Defence officials have quietly expressed concern the review will show a sizeable increase. Crosby, however, was adamant that the project remains within the $60-billion budget established by the Liberal government in 2017. “The project had originally included a significant amount of contingency that had been put there to address these unknowns,” he said. “That contingency is now being applied, and that's exactly what it's there for. So with that update done, we're still confident at this point that it's going to fit within the budget.” He also said Ottawa will not pony up more money for Irving to retain its workforce as the current plan is to start cutting steel on the first new warship as scheduled in 2023-24, while work on the final design continues. A similar approach is being taken with the Navy's two new supply ships, which are being built in Vancouver. Irving is currently working on a fleet of much smaller Arctic patrol ships for the navy. It originally planned to build five, before the government ordered a sixth in November 2018 to keep Irving's workers busy until the new warships were ready for construction. The government then committed $1.5 billion for two more Arctic patrol ships in May 2019, this time for the Canadian Coast Guard, for the same reason. The delay does mean the navy will need to continue operating its Halifax-class frigates longer, which means investing more money into the ships and managing how and when they are used. Defence analyst David Perry of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute expressed concern about the new delay and what it means for the frigates, some of which are dealing with corrosion and metal fatigue that could limit how long they can remain in service. An internal Defence Department report published last year echoed some of those concerns, saying the navy's maintenance facilities were having an increasingly tough time repairing the frigates thanks in part to a lack of spare parts and the age of the fleet. And while Crosby said the government is working with British and Australian officials as well as industries to find ways to save time, Perry said the warship project has a long history of delays and cost overruns. “At this point in time, this project hasn't met a single one of its major milestones,” Perry said. “So 2030-31 is now the no-earlier-than-that-date for me.” Ottawa has rebuffed repeated calls to scrap its plan to build the ships in Canada, which advocates say could save the country tens of billions of dollars. https://globalnews.ca/news/7614144/national-defence-60b-warship-project/

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  October 21, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Land, C4ISR

  The Army and Air Force are finally on the same page with a plan to connect the military. What happens next?

  Valerie Insinna and Jen Judson WASHINGTON — After years of sometimes contentious discussions, the Army and Air Force have adopted a plan to work together on what they are now calling Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control — the idea that all of the U.S. military's sensors and shooters must be able to send data to each other seamlessly and instantaneously. The agreement, signed Sept. 29 by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown and Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville, paves the way for closer collaboration on “mutual standards for data sharing and service interfacing” that will ultimately allow the services to ensure that new communications gear, networks and artificial intelligence systems they field can connect to each other, reducing the risk of incompatibility. But much is still unknown, including the exact nature of the Army-Air Force collaboration and how much technology the services will be willing to share. Army Futures Command and the Air Force's office of strategy, integration and requirements are tasked with leading the joint effort, which will bridge the services' major avenues for CJADC2 experimentation — the Army's Project Convergence and the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System. Over the next 60 days, the two services will formulate a plan to connect the Project Convergence and ABMS exercises, and ensure data can be transmitted along their platforms, said Lt. Gen. Clinton Hinote, who leads Air Force's strategy office. But that doesn't mean the services are on a path to adopt the same systems architecture, data standards and interfaces. “What the Army and the Air Force are agreeing to is, we're going to be able to see their data, they're going to be able to see our data. And as much as we can, we will come up with common standards,” Hinote said in an Oct. 15 interview. “But even if we can't come up with common standards, we realize that translators are going to be something that will be with us for a long time, and we will build the translators necessary to make sure we can share.” The main point of the discussions was to avoid redundancies, McConville told Defense News on Oct. in a generation, said Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who pointed to the formation of the AirLand Battle doctrine in the 1980s as the last time they worked together so intimately on a new war-fighting concept. “I'm very encouraged that we have the Air Staff and the Army Staff investing countless hours,” he said. “We're laying down the path to get there. And it really starts with cloud architecture, common data standards, and command-and-control systems that you can wire together so that they can share information at the speed of relevance. So that whether it's an F-35 [fighter jet] or an artillery battery, they communicate with each other to prosecute enemy targets.” Battle of the AIs The Army's and the Air Force's goals are roughly the same. The services want to be able to take data from any of the services' sensors — whether that's the radar of an E-3 early airborne warning aircraft or the video collected by an MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone — and detect a threat, fuse it with other information coming in from other platforms, use artificial intelligence to provide a list of options to commanders and ultimately send accurate target data to the weapon systems that will shoot it, all in a drastically shortened timeline. Over the past year, the Air Force held three ABMS demonstrations, with the most recent taking place Sept. 15-25 alongside U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's Exercise Valiant Shield. So far, the service has tested out technology that allows the F-35 and F-22 jets to send data to each other despite their use of different waveforms. It also test tech that connects an AC-130 gunship with SpaceX's Starlink constellation, and used a high-velocity projectile shot from a howitzer to shoot down a surrogate cruise missile. All of those demonstrations were enabled by 5G connectivity, cloud computing and competing battle management systems that fused together data and applied machine-learning algorithms. Meanwhile, during the Army's first Project Convergence exercise held in September, the service tested a prototype of the Extended Range Cannon Artillery, fused data through a new system known as Prometheus and used artificial intelligence to recommend options for shooting a target. A Marine Corps F-35 also participated in some tests, receiving targeting information that originated from a satellite, then passing on information from its own sensors to an Army AI system known as FIRES Synchronization to Optimize Responses in Multi-Domain Operations — or FIRESTORM. Joint Army and Air Force experiments could begin as early as March 2021, said Portia Crowe, the chief data officer of the Army's Network Cross-Functional Team at Army Futures Command. Crowe, who spoke during a Oct. 14 webinar hosted by C4ISRNET, did not elaborate on what would be tested. Much of the early collaboration between the Army's Project Convergence and the Air Force's ABMS will likely involve plugging in new technologies from one service and seeing if they can successfully send data to the other's nodes in the experiment, Hinote said. But that won't be “where the magic happens,” he noted. “The magic is going to happen in the flow of information, and then the development of that information into something that looks new” through the use of artificial intelligence. Felix Jonathan, a robotics engineer from Carnegie Mellon University, inputs data into an autonomous ground vehicle control system during Project Convergence at Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz., which took place Aug. 11-Sept. 18, 2020. (Spc. Carlos Cuebas Fantauzzi/U.S. Army) Though Project Convergence and ABMS are still in their infancies, the Army and the Air Force have adopted different philosophies for incorporating machine learning into the “kill chain” — the sensors and weapon systems that detect, identify and prosecute a threat. While the Air Force is largely experimenting with solutions made by contractors like Anduril Industries and Palantir, the Army is mostly relying on government-owned platforms created by government software coders. “One of the things that I see as being an incredibly interesting exercise — I don't know if this will happen this year or next year, but I'm sure it will happen — is let's compare what we were able to do in the government, using government civilians who are coders and who are programming these machine-learning algorithms to come up with the top three actions [to take in response to a given threat],” Hinote said. “And let's compare that to what [private] companies are doing and their intellectual property. And then, if that gives us insight, then what is the business model that we want to propose?” But as those technologies mature, Hinote said, the services must answer difficult doctrinal and technical questions: How much should the government be involved in shaping the responses given by the algorithm, and how does it balance that requirement with industry's ability to move fast? When an AI gives a commander a list of military options, who owns that data? And how can military operators know the underlying assumptions an AI system is making when it presents a threat to commanders and a set of options for countering it? If they don't understand why an AI system is recommending a course of action, should commanders feel comfortable using lethal force? “How do we know enough about the machine learning and algorithms so that their output is useful, but not a surprise to us? And if it is a surprise, how did it get to that surprise? Because if you don't know that, you're going to feel very weird about using it for lethal force,” Hinote said. “Right now we're kind of feeling our way down that path to see how much trust are we going to have in these algorithms, and developing trust is going to be something you're going to see over and over and over in both Project Convergence and ABMS onramps.” Major barriers The Army and the Air Force aren't the only military entities driving to make CJADC2 a reality. The Navy recently launched its own effort — Project Overmatch — and tapped Rear Adm. Douglas Small on Oct. 1 to lead it. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday has said it is the service's second-most important priority, falling behind only the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine. Coast Guardsmen simulate interdicting a jammer on a vessel in support of an Advanced Battle Management System experiment in the Gulf of Mexico on Sept. 3, 2020. (Staff Sgt. Haley Phillips/U.S. Air Force) In totality, the U.S. military will have at least three separate CJADC2 initiatives, each fielding their own hardware and software. There are good reasons for each service retaining their own programs, according to Hinote, as each domain presents unique challenges, and each service organizes itself differently to project power on land, at sea or in the air. “The Army has been very concerned over scale. They see each of their soldiers as being a node inside the network, and therefore you could have millions of nodes. And they're very concerned that if this was only Air Force-led, that the scale couldn't be reached — we would not have the ability to plug in all of those soldiers and nodes in the network,” Hinote said, adding that it's a valid concern. He added that the Air Force also has its challenges — namely the difficulty of sending data over long distances, and having to connect aircraft and sensors that may be far away from a target. But the result is three large, complicated acquisition programs that will need billions of dollars in funding — and potentially compete against each other for money. To further complicate the issue, the military's existing funding mechanisms aren't optimized for the fast-paced, iterative experimentation and procurement the services seek. One way to overcome this might involve creating a Pentagon-wide fund for CJADC2, and then split it among the services, Hinote said. Another option might include designating one service as the executive agent, giving that force organizing authority and the power of the purse. But both come with drawbacks. “[There are] different models out there, but none of them seem to really fit,” Hinote said. “And so we have been having talks with especially the appropriations defense [committees on] the Senate and House side on what would it look like for a modern military to buy a capability like this, and what would the taxpayers need for understanding that this is good stewardship. And that has not been decided.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/10/20/the-army-and-air-force-are-finally-on-the-same-page-with-a-plan-to-connect-the-military-what-happens-next/