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  • Airbus, Dassault, Leonardo : le drone MALE européen sur la piste de décollage

    December 14, 2018 | International, Aerospace

    Airbus, Dassault, Leonardo : le drone MALE européen sur la piste de décollage

    Par Michel Cabirol L'Organisation Conjointe de Coopération en matière d'Armement a lancé le 31 octobre un appel d'offres portant sur le développement, la production et la phase initiale de maintien en condition opérationnelle du drone MALE européen. Le drone MALE européen est sur la piste de décollage. Le système européen de drone de moyenne altitude et longue endurance MALE RPAS (Medium Altitude Long Endurance Remotely Piloted Aerial System) a franchi le 22 novembre dernier une nouvelle étape importante avec la réalisation de la revue de conception préliminaire, ont annoncé jeudi les trois industriels Airbus, Dassault Aviation et Leonardo. D'ici le milieu de la prochaine décennie, le MALE RPAS, conçu pour opérer dans l'espace aérien non ségrégué, pourra être déployé dans le monde entier pour des missions de renseignement, surveillance, acquisition de cible et reconnaissance (ISTAR). "Ce succès majeur intervient après le lancement par l'Organisation Conjointe de Coopération en matière d'Armement (OCCAR) le 31 octobre d'un appel d'offres portant sur le développement, la production et la phase initiale de maintien en condition opérationnelle du programme", ont précisé les trois industriels dans le communiqué. Cette nouvelle étape permettra aux nations et aux industriels partenaires de commencer le développement du système avec des spécifications harmonisées et une vision claire de sa conception globale. Surtout, la question du prix va être importante mais pas déterminante pour le lancement du programme s'il y a bien sûr toujours une volonté politique. D'autant que l'Allemagne se serait engagée à prendre à son compte les surcoûts liés à la motorisation du MALE. Mi-2017, les pays partenaires avaient conclu un accord sur la configuration du drone, optant in fine pour un système biturbopropulseur. Résultat, la facture pourrait s'élever à plus de 2 milliards d'euros, soit plus du double de l'estimation d'un projet précédent (1 milliard d'euros). Airbus, maître d'oeuvre Désigné comme futur maître d'œuvre, Airbus Defence and Space coordonnera la réponse industrielle à l'appel d'offres avec les principaux sous-traitants : Airbus Defence and Space, Dassault Aviation SA et Leonardo. Airbus va passer un test grandeur nature, le groupe n'a jusqu'ici pas particulièrement brillé dans la conduite de certains grands programmes militaires, dont il a eu la maîtrise d'oeuvre (A400M, drone SIDM, hélicoptère NH90...). Et plus spécifiquement quand le groupe européen a lui-même dû développer des missions de défense dans ces programmes. Selon le communiqué, cet appel d'offres témoigne de la volonté des nations partenaires (France, Allemagne, Italie et Espagne) de poursuivre le programme "à l'issue d'une phase extrêmement fructueuse d'alignement des exigences et d'une démonstration convaincante de la qualité et de l'adéquation de la conception proposée à l'usage prévu". La revue de conception préliminaire du système conclut avec succèsl'étude de définition de deux ans lancée en septembre 2016 par les nations partenaires. Trois d'entre elles avaient signé en mai 2015 une déclaration d'intention en vue du développement commun d'un système de drone européen MALE, puis l'Espagne a rejoint le programme en 2016. https://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/industrie/aeronautique-defense/airbus-dassault-leonardo-le-drone-male-europeen-sur-la-piste-de-decollage-800954.html

  • No AI For Nuclear Command & Control: JAIC’s Shanahan

    September 26, 2019 | International, C4ISR

    No AI For Nuclear Command & Control: JAIC’s Shanahan

    By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY: “You will find no stronger proponent of integration of AI capabilities writ large into the Department of Defense,” Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan said here, “but there is one area where I pause, and it has to do with nuclear command and control.” In movies like WarGames and Terminator, nuclear launch controls are the first thing fictional generals hand over to AI. In real life, the director of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center says, that's the last thing he would integrate AI with. The military is beginning a massive multi-billion dollar modernization of its aging system for Nuclear Command, Control, & Communications (NC3), much of which dates to the Cold War. But the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is not involved with it. A recent article on the iconoclastic website War on the Rocks argued “America Needs A ‘Dead Hand',” a reference to the Soviet system designed to automatically order a nuclear launch if the human leadership was wiped out. “I read that,” Shanahan told the Kalaris Intelligence Conference here this afternoon. “My immediate answer is ‘No. We do not.'” Instead, the JAIC is very deliberately starting with relatively low-risk, non-lethal projects — predicting breakdowns in helicopter engines and mapping natural disasters — before moving on to combat-related functions such as intelligence analysis and targeting next year. On the Pentagon's timeline, AI will be coming to command posts before it is embedded in actual weapons, and even then the final decision to use lethal force will always remain in human hands. The standard term in the Pentagon now for human involvement with AI and weapons now is “human on the loop,” a shift from human IN the loop. That reflects greater stress on the advisory function of humans with AI and a recognition that domains like cyber require almost instantaneous responses that can't wait for a human. Hawkish skeptics say slowing down to ask human permission could cripple US robots against their less-restrained Russian or Chinese counterparts. Dovish skeptics say this kind of human control would be too easily bypassed. Shanahan does see a role for AI in applying lethal force once that human decision is made. “I'm not going to go straight to ‘lethal autonomous weapons systems,'” he said, “but I do want to say we will use artificial intelligence in our weapons systems... to give us a competitive advantage. It's to save lives and help deter war from happening in the first place.” The term “lethal autonomous weapons systems” was popularized by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, which seeks a global ban on all AI weapons. Shanahan made clear his discomfort with formal arms control measures, as opposed to policies and international norms, which don't bind the US in the same way. “I'll be honest with you,” Shanahan said. “I don't like the term, and I do not use the term, ‘arms control' when it comes to AI. I think that's unhelpful when it comes to artificial intelligence: It's largely a commercial technology,” albeit with military applications. “I'm much more interested, at least as a starting point, in international rules and norms and behavior,” he continued. (Aside from the space is governed almost exclusively “It's extremely important to have those discussions.” “This is the ultimate human decision that needs to be made....nuclear command and control,” he said. “We have to be very careful. Knowing ...the immaturity of technology today, give us a lot of time to test and evaluate.” “Can we use artificial intelligence to make better decisions, to make more informed judgments about what might be happening, to reduce the potential for civilian casualties or collateral damage?” Shanahan said. “I'm an optimist. I believe you can. It will not eliminate it, never. It's war; bad things are going to happen.” While Shanahan has no illusions about AI enabling some kind of cleanly surgical future conflict, he doesn't expect a robo-dystopia, either. “The hype is a little dangerous, because it's uninformed most of the time, and sometimes it's a Hollywood-driven killer robots/Terminator/SkyNet worst case scenario,” he said. “I don't see that worst case scenario any time in my immediate future.” “I'm very comfortable saying our approach — even though it is emerging technology, even though it unfolds very quickly before our eyes — it will still be done in a deliberate and rigorous way so we know what we get when we field it,” Shanahan said. “As the JAIC director, I'm focused on really getting to the fielding,” he said, moving AI out of the lab into the real world — but one step at a time. “We're always going to start with limited narrow use cases. Say, can we take some AI capability and put it in a small quadcopter drone that will make it easier to clear out a cave, [and] really prove that it works before we ever get it to a [large] scale production.” “We will have a very clear understanding of what it can do and what it can't do,” he said. “That will be through experimentation, that will be through modeling and simulation, and that will be in wargames. We've done that with every piece of technology we've ever used, and I don't expect this to be any different.” The JAIC is even looking to hire an in-house ethicist of sorts, a position Shanahan has mentioned earlier but sought to clarify today. “It'll be someone who's a technical standards [expert] / ethicist,” he said. “As we develop the models and algorithms... they can look at that make sure the process is abiding by our rules of the road.” “I'm also interested in, down the road, getting some help from the outside on sort of those deeper philosophical questions,” he continued. “I don't focus on them day to day, because of my charter to field now, but it's clear we have to be careful about this.” “I do not see that same approach in Russia or China,” Shanahan said. “What sets us apart is... our focus on real rigor in test and evaluation, validation and verification, before we field capability that could have lives at stake.” https://breakingdefense.com/2019/09/no-ai-for-nuclear-command-control-jaics-shanahan

  • The Pentagon wants a $10B defense industry cash injection. Is Congress listening?

    July 16, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

    The Pentagon wants a $10B defense industry cash injection. Is Congress listening?

    By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON — Pentagon leaders need “around $10 billion” in the next pandemic aid package to cover defense contractors' coronavirus-related costs, according to a top defense leader. But it's unclear how the hefty funding handout will square with Republican skepticism of new deficit spending after already approving aid packages worth trillions. On Monday, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment Alan Shaffer said the money is needed to cover a host of defense contractors' coronavirus-related expenses. Without it, the Department of Defense will have to dip into modernization and readiness funds, potentially jeopardizing smaller firms in the defense industrial base waiting for the cash. “If there is another supplemental or stimulus package for realistic economic adjustment, we could be looking at somewhere around $10 billion in additional program costs,” Shaffer said on the Government Matters television show that aired Monday. Last week, the leaders of Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Huntington Ingalls, Textron, and L3Harris Technologies sent letters to Pentagon acquisition chief Ellen Lord and acting White House budget chief Russell Vought, worried about the health of their smaller subcontractors without additional aid. The CEOs, noting their sector employs 2 million people, warned such a defense budget disruption “would create a ripple effect throughout the defense industrial base, leading to less investment in new technologies and significant job losses in pivotal states just as we are trying to recover from the pandemic,” they wrote in the letter to Vought. It's potentially a potent message for the White House as recent polls show President Donald Trump faces a rockier path to reelection. Trump is trailing Democratic challenger Joe Biden in six battleground states he won in 2015, according to a New York Times survey, and a Real Clear Politics average of polls showed Biden leading Trump by nine points Tuesday. Section 3610 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act allows defense firms to seek reimbursement for pandemic-related expenses, for which Lord has said DoD would request in the “lower end” of “tens of billions of dollars.” But the Democrat-led House Appropriations committee passed a fiscal 2021 defense spending bill Tuesday that included far less: $758 million. “We need to do something,” the subpanel's ranking member Ken Calvert, R-Calif., told Defense News. “The defense industry is not immune to what's happening from COVID-19, like every other sector of the economy, and they've suffered the last few months, just like any business. They've had slowdowns, cost increases, they've had to acquire a lot of [personal protective equipment], and implement new safety guidelines.” Loren Thompson, a defense-industry consultant and analyst with the Lexington Institute, estimates the sector's pandemic-related expenses could total more than $20 billion. Additional emergency money is thought to not only help major firms, but small and medium-sized firms whose slim profit margins and minimal cash reserves mean they're more apt to furlough employees in a pinch — potentially triggering production breaks for major programs. “As far as I know, the big system integrators have not been furloughing defense workers, but at the subcontractor level, some of those shops just don't have a choice,” he said. Still, many GOP lawmakers under pressure from conservative groups have been lukewarm about President Donald Trump's push for tax cuts and infrastructure spending on top of the $3 trillion in funds approved so far. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., — who has been in weeks-long discussions with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on the next phase of coronavirus relief — outlined a proposal last week that emphasized a liability shield for companies operating during the pandemic, but with no mention of defense industry aid. In a recent appearance in Kentucky, McConnell acknowledged the concerns of GOP colleagues who are worried about the mounting deficit. “It does raise a good deal of concern because we now have a debt, a cumulative debt, the size of our economy for the first time since World War II,” he said. “Believe me, we would not have done that under any circumstances.” Some lawmakers from both parties have been wary of new spending that favors a specific industry, particularly after the Pentagon won a timely budget at record levels, said an industry source. Defense firms pleading their case are being asked whether they have tapped other provisions in the CARES Act, like payroll tax deferrals, the employee retention tax credit or a $17 billion emergency loan fund. (Many defense firms have resisted applying for the loans, which allow the government an equity stake.) “You talk to some Democratic offices, and some Republican, and they say the defense bill is already one big stimulus for the defense industry,” said the industry source. “I think that's a mischaracterization because the taxpayer dollars aren't spent to make Lockheed Martin more profitable, it's for planes, ships and submarines that you need, but it's really hard.” In May, Democratic lawmakers questioned Pentagon leaders sharply about why they had spent just 23 percent of the $10.5 billion DoD had received under the CARES Act. The Pentagon responded with with its spending plan for the aid, which allocated $688 million to aid suppliers of aircraft engine parts, shipbuilding, electronics and space launch. This June, the country incurred its biggest monthly deficit ever, $864 billion, which topped the previous single month deficit record, $738 billion in April. With the long-term debt totaling more than $26 trillion and the Congressional Budget Office predicting the deficit will reach $3.7 trillion for the year, some Republicans have voiced concern about the unpredictable effect adding more could have on the economy. “If we're spending a lot of money, we have to be careful that we don't break the country,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., recently told the Wall Street Journal. Fiscally conservative groups have stepped up their lobbying of Republican lawmakers, many of whom consider themselves fiscal hawks but voted to lift budget caps for roughly $1.5 trillion in defense spending in 2019′s two-year budget deal. A coalition of conservative leaders sent a letter to Trump and McConnell last month warning Congress's coronavirus spending must stop because the total is approaching $10 trillion. FreedomWorks Vice President of Legislative Affairs Jason Pye said Republican lawmakers are justifiably concerned about alienating deficit-conscious conservatives ahead of the next election, but they're also genuinely wary. “Most of the members I've talked to are saying they want to either limit the size of the next phase or they don't want to spend any more money,” he said. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/07/14/the-pentagon-wants-a-10b-defense-industry-cash-injection-is-congress-listening/

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