May 29, 2023 | International, Aerospace
Les responsables américains doutent que l’Ukraine puisse utiliser les F-16 dans sa contre-offensive annoncée.
May 11, 2021 | International, Aerospace
The company is building position, navigation and timing payloads for DARPA's Project Blackjack, a demonstration satellite constellation that will operate in low-Earth orbit.
August 3, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security
Andrew Eversden The Army's first iteration of new network tools, known as Capability Set '21, was heavily influenced by existing network gaps identified by the 82nd Airborne on more than a year's worth of deployments. According to Capt. Brian Delgado, S6 of the 82nd Airborne Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, the “biggest game changer” for soldiers in the field provided in the integrated tactical network kit of Capability Set '21 was the secure but unclassified environment. The SBU environment allows soldiers to more easily share and receive information. In the current network, information that flows through the network is classified, and many lower-level users don't have proper clearances. “Army operational construct requires battalion formations to conduct combined arms missions, but today's network does not support the battalion's organic capacity to deconflict an air picture, nor an ability to combine dismounted, mounted, fires, intelligence and air pictures into a combined operating picture (COP),” Delgado said. “Part of this challenge is due to the fact that dismounted and most mounted COP tools like Nett Warrior (NW) and Joint Battle Command-Platform resided on the Secret enclave. The vast majority of users at the tactical level do not possess Secret clearances, which makes sharing and receiving key information difficult.” Capability Set '21 lets soldiers securely share controlled unclassified information across the network, allowing war fighters on the ground to receive important information regardless of their security clearance. With the new tools, the Army moved from a 100 percent classified network to a 75 percent SBU network. “This means we now were able to use software applications at the Unclassified level in a tactical environment. SBU allowed the utilization of tactical software like the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK) to provide a [combined operating picture] down to the lowest level of leaders,” Delgado said. Col. Garth Winterle, project manager for tactical radios at Army Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, said in a May interview with C4ISRNET that the SBU architecture ”opens the door for a lot of different things,” including improved information sharing with coalition partners. The integrated tactical network kit also unifies the disparate operating picture into a single digital operating picture. The combined operating picture “directly reduces risk in the clearance of fires, combat air support and maneuvering in widely dispersed formations,” Delgado said. “It allowed battalion commanders to fight teams in a dispersed manner that would have been impossible with legacy systems, and therefore greatly reduced the risk to the battalion combat power that enemy indirect fires commonly present,” Delgado added. Capability Set '21 was focused on solving immediate network capability gaps with current technology, while also making network hardware far more expeditionary and while improving network transport capabilities. The capability set includes new radios as well as smaller and lighter servers and satellite terminals. It was designed through collaboration between Army PEO C3T and the Army Network Cross-Functional Team. The Army completed critical design review of Capability Set '21 earlier this year and started procuring new tools this month. Right now, the “majority” of the Army's command-and-control systems sit on large vehicles that aren't useful on expeditionary operations, Delgado said. With the new technology, the integrated tactical network “separated these systems from vehicles, allowing for more network access during early expeditionary operations that we performed,” reducing the reliance on vehicles and allowing soldiers to dismount systems based on needs. Delgado said the new integrated tactical network, or ITN, hardware is “orders of magnitude” smaller than existing tools, providing more flexibility in how units choose command-and-control equipment for operations. “We were able to load a battalion tactical operations center worth of equipment onto a nonstandard small tactical vehicle, and then move it in a matter of hours onto a UH-60 [Black Hawk helicopter] to function as a true command aircraft,” Delgado said. The Capability Set '21 ITN kit also includes radio waveforms that are more resilient, and it allows for data transmission. The 82nd Airborne has previously been reliant on the Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System as well as the Soldier Radio Waveform for tactical radio communications, but Delgado said that both had “limitations regarding their effectiveness and survivability for distributed formations,” and that they didn't allow for SBU transmissions. The Army is investing several new radios with more resilient waveforms as part of its modernization initiative, including the two-channel leader radio. “The ITN presents a significant increase in radio resiliency while operating in a contested environment. Most noteworthy are a resistance to tactical jamming, and a near-complete inability of the enemy to ... find radio broadcasts,” Delgado said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/07/31/soldiers-tout-new-network-tool-as-a-game-changer/
January 8, 2019 | International, C4ISR
Beth Kindig Summary The majority of forecasts favor Amazon for the Pentagon contract while overlooking the partnerships that MS has made with the DoD since Nadella became CEO in 2014. By the first quarter of 2019, Azure Government Secret will support "Secret U.S. classified data or Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) level 6" which is on par with Amazon. The question that remains is if the Pentagon will want to use Amazon for cloud infrastructure while using Microsoft for operating systems and software. In 2019, the biggest cloud customer in the world will be the United States Department of Defense. The DoD is currently reviewing bids to award a single cloud provider a multi-year contract. Obviously, this isn't your typical enterprise IT department, transferring from on-premise servers, or a startup who needs the flexibility of cloud infrastructure to scale. The program is called the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative, or JEDI, and its purpose is to move the DoD's massive computing systems into the cloud. This one contract is worth $10 billion, or 25% of the current market, which currently stands at $40 billion in annual revenue. Many prognosticators and reporters unanimously believe the contract will go to Amazon Web Services. This belief is so strong that vendors, such as Oracle and IBM, made a rebuttal to Congress, believing the terms of the proposal favored Amazon. However, the majority of these forecasts overlook Microsoft's strength in security and IT, and the alliances Microsoft has been forming with the DoD since Satya Nadella became CEO in 2014. Admittedly, guessing a company other than Amazon will win the Pentagon contract is a pure gamble, however, there are strong indicators for Microsoft that should not be overlooked. Background on JEDI Contract The Pentagon contract will move 3.4 million users and 4 million devices off private servers and into the cloud. The security risks of using servers outside the Pentagon's domain are offset by physically separated government regions and hybrid solutions that extend on-premise servers by adding the cloud where necessary. The benefits of artificial intelligence, deep learning, and other technologies like virtual reality are essential for modern warfare as real-time data will inform missions when soldiers are in the field and also help to prepare them for combat. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4231824-microsoft-amazon-win-pentagon-contract