L'Allemagne et la Suède se joignent à la future initiative européenne pour le développement d’un avion de transport européen de nouvelle génération

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  February 2, 2021 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  These five items should top Biden’s defense priorities

  By: Sean Kennedy The Biden administration has the opportunity to institute reforms in several crucial areas at the Department of Defense. First and foremost, it should eliminate the overseas contingency operations account. The continued justification for the OCO has reached the stage of parody. Originally intended for emergency spending in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the account has transitioned into a slush fund designed to inflate spending at the DoD far above the baseline budget and for purposes unrelated to foreign wars. In fiscal 2015, approximately 50 percent of OCO funding was for nonemergency items. An August 2019 Congressional Budget Office report noted that approximately 85 percent of funding for the OCO in FY20 and FY21 “is designated for base-budget and ‘enduring' activities,” funding maintenance in support of foreign operations that will continue regardless of force size. OCO spending has long outpaced the military's presence in combat zones. In FY08, the U.S. deployed an average of 187,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. OCO spending topped $187 billion that year, equating to $1 million per service member. The DoD currently has approximately 5,000 troops stationed in these countries, meaning the $70.7 billion in OCO spending in FY20 equates to $14.1 million in funding per service member — more than 14 times the amount in FY08. With President Joe Biden unlikely to substantially increase the military's footprint in Afghanistan and Iraq, outsized OCO spending will continue in FY21 and beyond, barring reform. The DoD has received approximately $2 trillion from the OCO since 2001. Were it considered to be a federal agency, the FY20 OCO funding would make it the fourth largest, dwarfing spending at all other agencies except the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs. The incoming administration must also expand efforts to make DoD finances more transparent and accountable. The bookkeeping is so abysmal that areas within the DoD have been on the Government Accountability Office's list of programs at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement since 1995. The financial black hole is nowhere more evident than in the DoD's inability to pass a clean audit, unlike every other federal agency. On Nov. 16, 2020, the Pentagon announced that for the third straight year it failed its financial review. Progress has been incremental, with seven of 24 DoD agencies thus far producing clean audits. However, the DoD estimates that it will not be able to pass an audit before 2027, or 37 years after it was required to do so by law. The DoD must also determine the replacement mechanism for the chief management officer position, which was the No. 3 civilian slot until it was eliminated in the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite identifying $22.3 billion in savings between FY18 and FY21, legislators bowed to Pentagon pressure, distributing the duties and responsibilities of the role to various existing positions with far less authority. The acquisition side is also a mess, including several infamous procurement disasters that epitomize the Pentagon's systemic problems. The foremost example is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The program has been under continuous development since the contract was awarded in 2001, and has encountered innumerable delays and cost overruns. Total acquisition costs now exceed $428 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion. The total costs for the F-35 are estimated to reach $1.727 trillion over the lifetime of the program. On Jan. 14, 2021, then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller labeled the Joint Strike Fighter a “piece of sh*t.” Enough said. Many of the problems with the F-35 program can be traced to the decision to develop and procure the Joint Strike Fighter simultaneously. Whenever problems have been identified, contractors needed to go back and make changes to aircraft that were already assembled, adding to overall costs. Of course none of this has stopped the Pentagon from asking for Joint Strike Fighter funding, and members of Congress from supplying it, oftentimes exceeding the request from the DoD. This trend continued in FY20, when legislators added $2.1 billion in earmarks to fund the acquisition of 22 Joint Strike Fighters beyond the amount requested by the Pentagon, bringing the total amount of earmarks for the program to $8.9 billion since FY01. Lastly, the Biden administration would do well to introduce some stability into Pentagon leadership. Every defense secretary brings to the job different priorities for the government's largest bureaucracy. President Donald Trump burned through two confirmed and four acting secretaries, the most for any administration. President Biden should endeavor to reverse this churn. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/02/01/these-five-items-should-top-bidens-defense-priorities/

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  September 4, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Harnessing Quantum Technologies at Room Temperature

  Quantum research in both information science and sensing shows great promise for enabling a host of new defense applications. A major hindrance to transitioning breakthroughs from the laboratory to practical use, however, is the extensive equipment needed to cool and trap atoms to exploit their quantum features. To address this challenge, DARPA has announced its Science of Atomic Vapors for New Technologies (SAVaNT) program. SAVaNT seeks to advance the performance of room-temperature atomic vapors to enable future opportunities for unprecedented combinations of low size, weight, and power (SWaP) with performance across multiple Department of Defense domains. “The SAVaNT program will explore a new suite of technologies based on room-temperature atomic vapors to address important gaps for military-relevant applications,” said Tatjana Curcic, program manager in DARPA's Defense Sciences Office. “We're interested in innovative research proposals that significantly advance the performance of atomic vapors for electric field sensing and imaging, magnetic field sensing, and quantum information science.” The program is focused on warm atomic vapors as opposed to cold-atom technology, which requires cooling atoms to very low temperatures with lasers to reduce thermal noise. This process has enabled the world's most accurate atomic clocks with unprecedented levels of timing precision. But the apparatuses needed to cool the atoms can fill up a laboratory, making laboratory atomic clocks impractical for field use. The warm atomic vapors approach, on the other hand, doesn't require complex laser-cooling and allows for a larger number of atoms, boosting the signal. The challenge, however, is that thermal environment effects – even at room temperature – significantly mitigate how long the quantum effects, or coherence, can last. SaVaNT researchers will demonstrate novel methods in three technical areas to overcome limitations due to thermal effects: Technical Area 1 seeks to develop a Rydberg sensor – which uses atoms to sense electric fields – that would provide ultra-narrow bandwidth, high-sensitivity electric field detection for millimeter waves. Technical Area 2 focuses on Vector Magnetometry to enable low-SWaP, room-temperature, quasi-DC magnetic field sensors. The third technical area will address vapor quantum electrodynamics to enable critical components for quantum networks at room temperature. Current methods require either cryogenics or laser cooling and trapping. A Proposers Day for interested proposers will be held virtually via webinar on Sept. 3. The Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) solicitation with full details is available here: https://go.usa.gov/xGr4C https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2020-09-01a

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  February 4, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  U.S. Air Force Defines Radical Vision For Command And Control

  By Steve Trimble The U.S. Air Force has released the full, sweeping vision for the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), a two-year-old concept that proposes to disrupt modern norms for the service's command-and-control doctrine, military acquisition policy and industrial participation. The newly released ABMS architecture defines not a traditional program of record but 28 new “product lines” divided into six major components. The implementation strategy is not focused around traditional acquisition milestones measured in years, but rather development “sprints” fielding morsels of new capabilities every four months. The rights for much of the technology, including a new radar, communication gateway and software-defined radio, are claimed not by an industrial supplier, but by the Air Force itself. USAF adopts lead systems integrator-like model ABMS architecture built on government ownership The release of the strategy on Jan. 21 comes three weeks before the Air Force plans to release a budget plan that would shift $9 billion over the next five years for a “Connect the Joint Force” initiative. The proposed funding would come from retiring certain capabilities, including aircraft fleets, within the next five years, with a clear implication: The Air Force is willing, if Congress approves, to trade some capability now to obtain the ABMS over time. “I think of it as we're finally building the ‘Internet of Things' inside the military, something that is very overdue,” says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, explaining the ABMS to journalists during the unveiling of the architecture in the Pentagon. The scale of the project's ambition has evolved since the ABMS was first proposed in 2018. Air Force leaders unveiled the concept two years ago as a replacement for the airborne Battle Management and Command and Control (BMC2) suite on the Northrop Grumman E-8C Joint Stars fleet. By September 2018, Roper first suggested the same technology could be applied to replace the aging fleet of Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joints and, sometime in the 2030s, the Boeing E-3C Airborne Warning and Control System. Those aims remain intact, but the revealed architecture clarifies that the goals of the ABMS are far broader. If the system is fully realized, the Air Force will create a “combat cloud” on a mobile ad hoc network, transposing the Internet of Things model from civilian technology to the battlefield. As a result, the nearly four-decade-old concept of a centralized command-and-control center—either ground-based or airborne—would be swept away by a future, decentralized digital network. Using computer processors and software algorithms instead of humans, machines would identify targets from sensor data, select the weapons and platforms to prosecute the target automatically, and finally notify the human operator when—or, crucially, whether—to pull the trigger. Roper compares the ABMS' effect on command and control to commercial services on a smartphone, such as the Waze app for drivers navigating traffic. Waze is not driven by a human staff monitoring and reporting traffic hazards, who then review each request for directions and customize a recommended route. Instead, Waze harvests traffic and hazard data from its users, while algorithms mine that information to respond to user requests for services. The Air Force's command-and-control system is constructed around the human staff model, but Roper wants to move the entire enterprise to the Waze approach. “If it didn't exist in the world around us, you'd probably say it was impossible,” Roper says, “but it does [exist].” The challenge for the Air Force is to defend and, if successful, execute that vision for the ABMS. The Air Force needs to secure the support of the other armed services, whose participation is vital to extracting the benefits of such a system. Moreover, the Air Force needs to sell the concept to Congress, despite a system that lacks obvious employment connections to specific legislative districts, such as future factory sites and operational bases. Roper acknowledges the problem of building support for an architecture, rather than a platform, such as a new fighter, bomber or ship. “Those are easy things to sell in this town. You can count them,” he says. “But the internet is not something that's easy to count or quantify, even though we're all very aware of its power.” The Air Force has briefed congressional defense committee staffs on the ABMS concept, but some remain skeptical. A Capitol Hill staffer familiar with the ABMS program doubts that other services will support the Air Force's vision. The ABMS model also appears unlikely to be embraced by industry, the staffer says. A key point of Roper's plan requires companies to cede some intellectual property rights on key elements of the ABMS architecture to the Air Force. But the Air Force is not waiting. Development of the ABMS started last year, even before an analysis of alternatives is completed. In December, the service staged the first demonstration of four new capabilities: transmitting data on a low-probability of intercept link via a gateway between stealthy Air Force and nonstealthy Navy fighters; connecting a C-130 to the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation; demonstrating a cloud-based, command-and-control network up to a “secret” classification level; and setting up an unclassified common operational picture display at a remote command center inside a tent. As the second in the planned series of triannual events, the Air Force plans to stage the next ABMS demonstration in April, this time involving U.S. Space Force, Strategic Command and Northern Command. Roper, an Oxford-trained physicist, has little patience for the military's traditional development process, although he has made exceptions for complex, hardware-driven programs, such as the Northrop Grumman B-21 bomber and the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. For most other programs, Roper wants to trickle out new features at Silicon Valley-speed. A common refrain by military acquisition reformers for decades has been to emphasize delivering an incomplete, “80% solution” sooner than waiting for a system that meets each of sometimes hundreds of detailed requirements. However, for Roper the timeline for delivering even an 80% solution in certain cases is far too long. “[We should] covet the 10-15% solutions that take the next step forward,” Roper said. “Because the learning in that step is so valuable to keep the velocity.” To execute the ABMS vision, Roper appointed Preston Dunlap last year as the lead architect. Unlike a traditional program executive officer (PEO), the architect is a role introduced to the Air Force by Roper, who previously in his career served as the chief architect for the Missile Defense Agency. The six components and 28 production lines for the ABMS are spread across multiple program offices, rather than consolidated under a single PEO. Thus, the role of the architect is to define the vision and then shape acquisition schedules as the various technologies reach maturity. Under Dunlap's architecture, the ABMS is built around six components: new sensors feeding databases in a cloud-based computing environment using software-defined radios, with new apps fusing the data into a common operational picture and integrated effects allowing cruise missiles, for example, to automatically retask sensors on other platforms during flight. Among the 28 product lines, the Air Force proposes to own the rights to the radar, software-defined radio and communications gateway. The Air Force's role resembles the lead systems integrator (LSI) model used for a series of largely failed acquisition programs 15-20 years ago, including the Army's Future Combat System and Coast Guard's Deepwater. In this case, however, the LSI is the Air Force, not an industrial supplier. Such an approach is not unprecedented. The Navy is using a similar model to manage the MQ-25A program, with Boeing selected as a subcontractor to deliver the air vehicle and Naval Air Systems Command providing the ground station and integrating both on an aircraft carrier. The gateway used in the first ABMS demonstration in December offers an example, Roper says. “We took a radio system that was actually built in concert with Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to be able to deal with both platforms with the waveforms, and then a Honeywell antenna was able to speak across the frequencies associated with both radio systems,” Roper said. “So we got those three primary vendors working together underneath our government leadership.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/us-air-force-defines-radical-vision-command-control