Israeli defense giant picks five startups to develop future tech

On the same subject

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  November 10, 2021 | International, Aerospace

  Airbus unveils jet trainer with eyes on Spain

  The Spanish Air Force is interested in replacing its Northrop F-5M and CASA C-101 Aviojet aircraft.

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  May 22, 2020 | International, Security

  UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency to get latest radar technology from Leonardo

  Rome, May 21, 2020 - The UK Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) will upgrade to Leonardo's latest Osprey radar to support missions such as search and rescue, border protection, fishery and pollution patrols. The Osprey 30 radar will be installed on-board the two customised Beechcraft King Air aircraft provided to the UK MCA by UK-based aviation services company 2Excel. Currently, the UK MCA is operating Leonardo's Seaspray 7300E radar, which has been employed to great effect in support of regular fishery and pollution patrols around the UK. The radar comes equipped with Leonardo's patented small target detection capability, allowing it to spot shipwrecked individuals in the water at long range, even in the most difficult environmental conditions and sea states. Additionally, the radar provides the ability for MCA crews to identify oil spills and rogue polluters at very long range, day or night. 2Excel will build on this success by equipping the MCA King Airs with Leonardo's second generation Osprey radar, the latest entry in its range of E-scan surveillance radars. Osprey benefits from all of the capabilities of the Company's Seaspray family whilst also adding additional modes and optimized overland and coastal imaging capabilities. This makes the radar ideally suited to mixed environment operations, such as along the coast. Traditionally, coastguard aircraft have used radars with restricted fields of view and limited detection capabilities, making searches laborious and resource-intensive. Leonardo's radars solve these problems. The Company is a world leader in E-scan, also known as AESA (Active Electronically-Scanned Array) technology, which uses a matrix of hundreds of tiny radar modules to ‘steer' an electronic beam, rather than mechanically moving the radar to point at a target. With a Leonardo E-Scan radar, crews can lift off, scan in 360 degrees and almost-instantaneously detect, track and classify hundreds of maritime contacts, allowing crews to quickly task cooperating aircraft to deeply search an area of interest. Other E-scan advantages include extremely high reliability, as the radar can continue to operate effectively throughout a mission even if a number of its individual radar modules fail. Customers in 30 countries have selected Leonardo's E-scan radars including the Seaspray and Osprey families, with the US Navy procuring the Osprey 30 radar for its Fire Scout unmanned helicopter programme. View source version on Leonardo: https://www.leonardocompany.com/en/press-release-detail/-/detail/21-05-2020-uk-maritime-and-coastguard-agency-to-get-latest-radar-technology-from-leonardo

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  August 21, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Here’s what US Cyber Command wants next for its training platform

  Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — As the U.S. Defense Department matures its cyber force and training, it wants greater visibility over the readiness of its teams and a more realistic training environment that replicates the entirety of the internet, including social media. These two areas were the focus of the latest industry day for the Persistent Cyber Training Environment, or PCTE, which is U.S. Cyber Command's online client that allows worldwide cyber mission force teams to connect and conduct individual and team training as well as mission rehearsal. The Army is running the program on behalf of Cyber Command and the joint cyber force. The Aug. 19 industry day specifically focused on what the PCTE program office is calling Cyber Innovation Challenge 4. Officials have said that Cyber Innovation Challenge 4 differs from its predecessors, partly because how the program office has matured and better integrated with the operational force at Cyber Command and the service cyber components. The challenges are ways to deliver incremental capability to the training platform. They also serve as competitions to award contracts and layer new technologies onto the platform, oftentimes involving smaller, nontraditional defense companies. There were 78 companies registered to the industry day — 25 percent of which were new to PCTE competitions and cyber innovation challenges. “What do I need from you? The two major areas we're focused on today are cyber mission force assessment, which is improving our ability to assess our training of the force, and two, traffic generation. Increasing the realism of operating [in] the internet,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, commander of Army Cyber Command, told the industry audience during the remote event. These two focus areas emerged from multiple discussions with Cyber Command and the service cyber components, officials said. Part of what is driving the greater need to assess the force and understand its readiness is new reporting requirements from Congress. “The assessment functionally must be able to incorporate defined training standards which will enable USCYBERCOM to accurately measure and maintain team and mission readiness, which has become even more critical with the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act directing quarterly reviews of the cyber mission force's readiness,” said Col. Tanya Trout, the outgoing director of the Joint Cyber Training Enterprise, which is the nonmaterial component to PCTE at Cyber Command. “Being able to demonstrate how we're impacting readiness is the gamechanger.” A staffer for the House Armed Services Committee said the quarterly assessment is set to be delivered along with the quarterly briefing on cyber operations, as mandated in a previous NDAA. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, the committee has been unable to schedule the briefing. The staffer added that despite not having the report in hand, the committee is encouraged to see the Pentagon has made progress in creating metrics to evaluate the cyber mission force. Commanders also want a better way to see how their forces perform during training so they can review scenarios and modify it as needed. Specific requests to industry include planning tools, a scoring engine, an assessment repository and data collection, analytics dashboards and aggregation, and external reporting. “These capabilities will give commanders better tools to assess their force. Commanders will be able to look at data and assess individual ... and unit readiness. These capabilities will also give training managers planning tools to meet commander's goals,” Fogarty said. Regarding traffic generation, Fogarty said there's a need for forces to be able to operate across the continuum of the information environment, not just within a certain set of networks. These include friendly space, gray space — which refers to the neutral area of the broader internet — and adversarial networks (known as red space). “The environment that PCTE replicates has to actually replicate the real-world environment,” he said. “We need a way to define, shape and record realistic traffic emulation capabilities that mirror real-world activities and terrain across the cyber domain. But also, very importantly, in the information environment, that includes social media because it would be very simple for us if all we had to do was worry about just the network. What we have to worry about is the entire information environment.” The program office is now looking for host/user-based traffic activities, cyber traffic terrain, network traffic layers, information operations and social media layers, and traffic command-and-control dashboards. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2020/08/20/heres-what-us-cyber-command-wants-next-for-its-training-platform/