June 10, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By: Aaron Mehta
WASHINGTON — As the Pentagon focuses on developing new technologies such as artificial intelligence and directed energy, department officials have declared the need to ensure foreign nations are not buying their way into the defense-industrial base. But a new report warns China may already have ownership over a key focus: hypersonic weapons.
Hypersonic missiles, which are capable of going faster than five times the speed of sound, are expected to become a backbone of the U.S. military in the coming decades.
As part of its annual Federal Scorecard, data and analytics firm Govini found that tier one suppliers in the hypersonic supply chain — seven major companies that are working most closely with the Department of Defense on the technology development — has done a good job of keeping Chinese-owned companies out of the process.
But at the tier three level, where companies provide smaller but still critical components, the exposure to Chinese suppliers jumps to nearly 10 percent. And that exposure grows slightly by the time it reaches tier five suppliers, with Govini seeing signs of overlap among companies at those lower levels.
“This does not necessarily mean that Chinese parts are ending up in DoD'a hypersonics,” explained Jim Mitre, Govini's senior vice president for strategy and analysis. “However, China may have opportunities to jeopardize the development [of] hypersonics through engagement in the supply chain, and it's critically important for DoD and industry to ensure that's not the case.”
That is “an area that we're regularly working with the department on exploring and unpacking” to understand the challenges in the supply chain, Mitre added.
A series of Pentagon reports in the last two years have raised concerns about the defense-industrial base, particularly when it comes to high-end materials and design knowledge for missiles. In some cases, the only supplier for critical materials come from China, the exact country the U.S. is looking to counter by investing in hypersonic weapons.
In March, the Pentagon announced it was launching a deep dive into the hypersonic industrial base specifically to understand the vulnerabilities at the lower-tier suppliers. That study is ongoing.
Meanwhile, officials have acknowledged that smaller suppliers have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Govini also found that the U.S. is under investing compared to China in the realm of quantum technologies, with the Pentagon's fiscal 2021 research, development, testing and evaluation budget for quantum-related programs decreasing by nearly 10 percent from the previous year. The department has requested $3.2 billion for RDT&E funds related to hypersonic weapons in FY21.
May 21, 2024 | International, Land
As previously reported by the Company, since the beginning of the Swords of Iron war, Elbit Systems has experienced a material increased demand for its products and solutions from the...
March 29, 2019 | International, C4ISR, Other Defence
The inability of artificial intelligence (AI) to represent and model human partners is the single biggest challenge preventing effective human-machine teaming today. Current AI agents are able to respond to commands and follow through on instructions that are within their training, but are unable to understand intentions, expectations, emotions, and other aspects of social intelligence that are inherent to their human counterparts. This lack of understanding stymies efforts to create safe, efficient, and productive human-machine collaboration. “As humans, we are able to infer unobservable states, such as situational beliefs and goals, and use those to predict the subsequent actions, reactions, or needs of another individual,” said Dr. Joshua Elliott, a program manager in DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O). “Machines need to be able to do the same if we expect them to collaborate with us in a useful and effective way or serve as trusted members of a team.” Teaching machines social intelligence however is no small feat. Humans intuitively build mental models of the world around them that include approximations of the mental models of other humans – a skill called Theory of Mind (ToM). Humans use their ToM skill to infer the mental states of their teammates from observed actions and context, and are able to predict future actions based on those inferences. These models are built on each individual's existing sets of experiences, observations, and beliefs. Within a team setting, humans build shared mental models by aligning around key aspects of their environment, team, and strategies. ToM and shared mental models are key elements of human social intelligence that work together to enable effective human collaboration. DARPA's Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST) program seeks to develop foundational AI theory and systems that demonstrate the basic machine social skills necessary to facilitate effective machine-human collaboration. ASIST aims to create AI agents that demonstrate a Machine ToM, as well as the ability to participate effectively in a team by observing and understanding their environment and human partners, developing useful context-aware actions, and executing those actions at appropriate times. The agents developed under ASIST will need to operate across a number of scenarios, environments, and other variable circumstances, making the ability for them to evolve and adapt as needed critical. As such, ASIST will work to develop agents that can operate in increasingly complex environments, adapt to sudden change, and use observations to develop complex inferences and predictions. During the first phase of the program, ASIST plans to conduct experiments with single human-machine interactions to see how well the agents can infer human goals and situational awareness, using those insights to then predict their teammate's actions and provide useful recommended actions. As the program progresses, the complexity will increase with teams of up to 10 members interacting with the AI agents. During these experiments, ASIST will test the agents' ability to understand the cognitive model of the team – not just that of a single human – and use that understanding to develop appropriate situationally relevant actions. Full details on the program can be found in the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) solicitation, which has been posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=9d4acf0aba98916288a541bd07810004&tab=core&_cview=1 https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-03-21b
January 20, 2022 | International, Land
La Tribune rappelle les enjeux liés à la taxonomie en matière de financement des industries de défense. Le quotidien évoque une note de la Banque de France sur la finance durable, datée d'octobre dernier, qui estimait que « les stratégies d'investissements responsables peuvent revêtir plusieurs formes », dont « des stratégies d'exclusion », et que « certaines entreprises sont exclues en raison de la nature de leur activité (par exemple : tabac, alcool, armement, jeux d'argent) ». Une telle classification avait suscité la réaction de la ministre des Armées, Florence Parly : « J'ai constaté, non sans une grande surprise, qu'un projet qui sera soumis à l'Union européenne place les industries de défense sur le même plan que les entreprises des secteurs pornographique ou des jeux d'argent », avait-elle indiqué, soulignant :« nous ne pouvons pas laisser faire cela sans réagir. La taxonomie influe sur le traitement réservé à un secteur d'activité selon sa classification ». La Tribune rappelle que Guillaume Faury, président du GIFAS et CEO d'Airbus, a estimé, lors de ses vœux à la presse début janvier, que le financement des activités de défense est « un vrai sujet de préoccupation » : « Il existe un certain nombre de réticences, parfois des grandes, des organismes financiers, pour des raisons qui sont plus ou moins systémiques ». Dans ce contexte, « on attend très clairement un message positif », a-t-il expliqué. Soulignant le rôle positif et sociétal de la défense, le dirigeant a déclaré souhaiter, de la part des pouvoirs publics, « une influence sur les critères de sélection des bons investissements. Un investissement qui va dans la défense permet d'assurer la sécurité, la prospérité, l'équilibre et la stabilité » d'un pays en général, et de la France en particulier. Plus particulièrement, Guillaume Faury attend « un message positif et une direction claire des autorités en général sur tout ce qui est ESG (Environnement, Social, Gouvernance) et taxonomie », a-t-il insisté. Le président du comité défense du Conseil des Industries de Défense Françaises (CIDEF), Eric Béranger, par ailleurs PDG de MBDA, avait averti également, en juin 2021, lors du Paris Air Forum organisé par La Tribune : « ce qui va sortir du projet de taxonomie de la Commission européenne va être extrêmement important : si les activités de défense sont qualifiées de non durables et, donc, d'une certaine façon non propice à des investissements financiers, ce sera une prescription très importante à destination de tous les investisseurs ». La Tribune du 17 janvier