France to request multibillion-dollar defense budget boost in 2023

On the same subject

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  June 19, 2019 | International, C4ISR, Other Defence

  Can AI help limited information have endless potential?

  By: Kelsey D. Atherton Humans are remarkably good at choosing to act on limited information. Computers, less so. A new DARPA program wants to train artificial intelligence to process and evaluate information like humans do, and produce actionable results on far smaller datasets than presently done. It's a program of such important DARPA's giving it VIP status, or a least VIP as an acronym: Virtual Intelligence Processing. “Successful integration of next-generation AI into DoD applications must be able to deal with incomplete, sparse and noisy data, as well as unexpected circumstances that might arise while solving real world problems,” reads a solicitation posted June 14. “Thus, there is need for new mathematical models for computing leading to AI algorithms that are efficient and robust, can learn new concepts with very few examples, and can guide the future development of novel hardware to support them.” To create these mathematical models, DARPA wants partners to look inward, creating AI inspired by the robust and massive parallelism seen in the human neocortex. If it is the architecture of the brain that makes humans so especially skilled at processing information quickly, then it is an architecture worth studying. “In order to reverse engineer the human brain,” the solicitation continues, calmly, “we need to apply new mathematical models for computing that are complete and transparent and can inform next-generation processors that are better suited for third-wave AI.” It is DARPA's nature to inject funding into problem areas it sees as both yielding future results and not presently served by the market, and this is not different. The solicitation explicitly asks for mathematical models that have not already been the focus of AI development. It's also looking for models that can inform the development of future hardware, rather than programs that can run on existing machines. DARPA is interested in how the hardware works in simulation, but wants partners to hold off on actually making the hardware for the model. So, the plan goes: create a mathematical model, inspired by brains, to process information on a small and limited data set, and then design it for hardware that doesn't exist yet. Easy as that sounds, the solicitation also asks proposers to talk about the limitations of the algorithms when applied to military tasks, and specifically limitations related to accuracy, data, computing power and robustness. Working from limited information is an expected future of military machines going forward. Between electronic warfare, denied environments and the very nature of battlefield events as rare and hard to record moments, doing more with on-board processing of limited data should enable greater autonomy. Even in the rare case where a weapon system transmits data back for algorithm refinement, that data set will be orders of magnitude smaller than the big data sets used to train most commercial machine learning tools. Should a proposer's idea be accepted and they follow through both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the project, the total award is set at $1 million. A tidy sum, for anyone who can figure out the math to make a future computer run on sparse information as effectively as a human brain. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/06/18/can-brain-inspired-ai-run-on-lean-data/

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  July 2, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Strategic Air Bases Receive First Counter-UAS Systems

  RACHEL S. COHEN Several Air Force installations with strategic assets are now armed with systems to protect against small unmanned aircraft that might loiter nearby. Steve Wert, the Air Force's digital program executive officer helping to roll out counter-UAS systems, said the service had fielded initial capabilities to an undisclosed number of US Strategic Command and Air Force Global Strike Command sites. Speaking at an Air Force Life Cycle Management Conference recently in Dayton, Ohio, Wert described the new systems as “a command-and-control capability integrated with some detection and some jamming,” but did not mention kinetic attacks. “Much more work to do,” he said. “We're finding the typical problems you will find on some bases. In order to have a radar providing detection, you actually have to build a tower. Building towers is hard because you have to do environmental assessments.” The systems provide “a composite suite of options” to sense and defeat drones attempting to enter restricted airspace around nuclear, space, electronic warfare, long-range strike, and missile defense resources, Air Force spokeswoman Laura McAndrews said. “The concept of ‘tailored and layered defense' provides the ability to execute kinetic solutions, such as traditional ballistic rounds and capture nets, coupled with other countermeasures that disrupt the operator's ability to navigate drones in our restricted airspace,” she said. The Air Force and Army are also collaborating on using 40 mm ammunition with nets that deploy and wrap around the drones to bring them down. “We've had some recent success working with the Army on kinetic defeat, successful test round firings,” Wert said. “The idea of a net round is probably a good solution, but that system's becoming accurate enough where the training rounds are directly hitting UAVs, so very good results there.” In May, Pentagon acquisition chief Ellen Lord told reporters Defense Department officials were concerned that military personnel weren't aware of their options for addressing UAVs and the services weren't sharing their ideas. Combatant command representatives and acquisition officials meet each month to discuss the right way forward. That's generated a list of counter-UAS systems in the DOD with details on their maturity, how many are deployed, and how they are used, Lord said. The Air Force is also working toward laser and microwave weapons for that purpose. The FAA already regulates how and where small UAS are allowed to fly, though those rules are evolving in collaboration with the Pentagon, which called the issue a high priority earlier this year. “I really do think of these UAVs as something that's low-cost, it's easy to manipulate,” then-acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told the Senate Appropriations Committee in May. “We need to develop the capabilities and the rules because, quite frankly, this airspace is shared by so many different authorities, so it's as much about rules to operate in space as it is the technologies to defeat them.” Over the past few years, Defense Department officials have pointed to instances of enemy combatants dispatching small drones for strike and intelligence-gathering in the Middle East and of unmanned aerial vehicles lingering near high-end aircraft. US Strategic Command did not answer how many little aircraft have been spotted lately or if the number is growing. "So far, they've been incidental activities,” STRATCOM boss Gen. John Hyten said at a 2017 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "But the fact that they're occurring, and then if you watch what is happening overseas in the [US Central Command theater] with the use of lethal UAVs and the use of UAVs for surveillance on the part of a terrorist adversary, I'm very concerned that those same kind of UAVs could be employed against our weapon storage facilities, especially on the nuclear weapon storage facilities." Air Combat Command chief Gen. Mike Holmes in 2017 also noted two incidents that interfered with operations on the same day and required reports to Air Force leadership. Conventional military assets need similar policies and protections as STRATCOM has put in place over the past few years, allowing workers to track and engage drones when needed, he argued. "At one base, the gate guard watched one fly over the top of the gate shack, tracked it while it flew over the flight line for a little while, and then flew back out and left," Holmes said. "The other incident was an F-22 . . . had a near collision with a small UAS, and I don't have anything that I can do about it." http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/July%202019/Strategic-Air-Bases-Receive-First-Counter-UAS-Systems.aspx

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  April 28, 2023 | International, C4ISR

  Addressing OT security under the National Cybersecurity Strategy

  Lessons learned from modernizing IT won’t apply to OT because of the latter's unique operating requirements.