Navy creating unmanned, AI operations hub within US Southern Command

On the same subject

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  November 23, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Russian Hackers Deploy HATVIBE and CHERRYSPY Malware Across Europe and Asia

  Russia-linked TAG-110 hacks 62 victims across 11 nations using HATVIBE and CHERRYSPY malware.

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  October 18, 2018 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  Air Force looks for help on new, hard-to-jam, satellite waveform

  By: Adam Stone In the face of a rising near-peer threat to electronic communications, the Air Force is pressing forward with efforts to develop a new, more resilient, harder-to-jam waveform that soldiers could use on the battlefield. The service expects to receive responses from industry soon on a recent request for information around protected satellite communications. The request sought industry guidance on how best to implement a new, more resilient protected tactical waveform (PTW), which enables anti-jamming capabilities within protected tactical SATCOM. “The Air Force is looking to protect our warfighter's satellite communications against adversarial electronic jamming,” the Air Force's Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) said in a written statement to C4ISRNet. The threat comes from “adversarial electronic jammers that are intended to disrupt and interfere with U.S. satellite communications,” leaders at SMC said. Protected tactical SATCOM is envisioned to provide worldwide, anti-jam communications to tactical warfighters in benign and contested environments. The quest to solidify satellite communication links has taken on increasing urgency in recent years. As satellite communications has emerged as an integral component in the military's command and control infrastructure, potential adversaries have stepped up their ability to disrupt such links. “Tactical satellite communications are vital to worldwide military operations,” the agency noted. “Our adversaries know this and desire to disrupt U.S. satellite communications. The Air Force is fielding Protected Tactical SATCOM capabilities to ... ensure warfighters around the globe have access to secure and reliable communications.” Industry is expected to play a key role in the development and deployment of any new waveform. Officials at SMC said that early prototyping efforts will be conducted through the Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC), which is managed by Advanced Technology International. SpEC acts as a vehicle to facilitate federally-funded space-related prototype projects with an eye toward increasing flexibility, decreasing cost and shortening the development lifecycle. The organization claims 16 prototype awards to date, with some $26 million in funding awarded. Understanding the protected tactical waveform Government documents describe PTW as the centerpiece of the broader protected tactical SATCOM effort, noting that it provides “cost-effective, protected communications over both military and commercial satellites in multiple frequency bands as well as broader protection, more resiliency, more throughput and more efficient utilization of satellite bandwidth.” A flight test last year at Hansom Air Force Base suggested the emerging tool may soon be ready to deliver on such promises. While SMC leads the PTW effort, Hanscom is working in collaboration with MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MITRE Corp. to conduct ground and airborne terminal work. Researchers from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory flew a Boeing 707 test aircraft for two and a half hours in order to use the waveform in flight. With a commercial satellite, officials gathered data on the PTW's ability to operate under realistic flight conditions. “We know this capability is something that would help our warfighters tremendously, as it will not only provide anti-jam communications, but also a low probability of detection and intercept,” Bill Lyons, Advanced Development program manager and PTW lead at Hanscom, said in an Air Force news release. The test scenario called for the waveform to perform in an aircraft-mounted terminal. Evaluators were looking to see whether its systems and algorithms would function as expected in a highly mobile environment. “Everything worked and we got the objectives accomplished successfully,” Ken Hetling, Advanced Satcom Systems and Operations associate group leader at Lincoln Laboratory, said in an Air Force press release. “The waveform worked.” Asking for industry input should help the service to chart its next steps in the development of more protections. While the request does not specify when or how the Air Force intends to move forward, it is clearly a matter not of whetherthe military will go down this road, but rather when and how. https://www.c4isrnet.com/c2-comms/satellites/2018/10/05/air-force-looks-for-help-on-new-hard-to-jam-satellite-waveform/

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  October 8, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

  Democrats face internal ‘fight’ on defense spending, says Smith

  Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― The Democratic split over the size of future defense budgets will come to a head in the new Congress, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., predicted Tuesday. The outcome of the long-simmering dispute would take on higher stakes if some pre-election polling becomes a reality and Democrats retake Congress and the White House. Though President Donald Trump and his supporters claim the Democratic Party has been hijacked by the far left, Smith's remarks suggest the party's future direction, at least on defense spending, is not yet settled. Instead of slashing next year's $740 billion defense budget, as some progressives want, Smith is pushing, “a rational Democratic, progressive national security strategy,” as he called it. That stance seems to align Smith with his party's pragmatic standard-bearer, Joe Biden, who's said he doesn't foresee major defense cuts, if elected. “I don't think that rational policy involves 20 percent defense cut, but that fight is going to be had,” Smith said at an event hosted by George Mason University. “There are extremists on the right and extremists on the left, and what I'm trying to do is say, ‘Let's go for pragmatic problem solving.' I don't see extremism solving problems.” If Democrats are swept into power Nov. 3, it will be by voters opposed to President Donald Trump from across the political spectrum, Smith said. To hold on that mandate, Democrats would need to govern with a broad coalition and not overreach from the left on issues like defense. “Okay, we can win an election because people are appalled by Donald Trump,” Smith said, “but that doesn't mean that they're endorsing us in any sort of huge, dramatic way.” After the House passed an early version of last year's defense policy bill without Republicans aboard, negotiations to reconcile it with theWhite House and GOP-held Senate dragged for months before a compromise bill passed Congress with progressive priorities stripped from it, leaving them dissatisfied. This year, many of the progressives' priorities were deflected from the House's version of the bill, and it passed the chamber with support from more than half of Republicans and more than two-thirds of Democrats. Military spending remains popular with most Republicans, and they largely opposed progressive amendments in the House and Senate this summer to slash the authorization bill by 10 percent. HASC member Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., called the House amendment, “a deeply irresponsible stunt.” Biden and congressional Democrats are already under pressure from progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who have been part of a campaign to direct spending away from the military in favor of healthcare, education and jobs. Massive spending on national security, they say, didn't protect the country from COVID-19. “You have a progressive movement in the party now that is really motivated and mobilized around foreign policy and national security issues, and that's not going away,” Matt Duss, a Sanders foreign policy aide, told Defense News last month. “That is something a President Biden will have to work with, and I think his team understands that.” As both Biden, Trump and lawmakers of both parties have called for the U.S. to extricate itself from the Mideast and end the “endless wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Smith said it's important to educate a war-weary American people about why it's unwise to retreat from the world stage ― marked by hotspots in Libya, Syria and West Africa. “We've got to make the case to them: ‘Here's why the defense budget is what it is, here's why we're trying to accomplish what we're trying to accomplish, and here's why it's in your best interest,'” Smith said. “And we're going to be very aggressive about having public hearings and public discussions to listen to people, to listen to those concerns and try to address them.” The Pentagon's five-year defense plan indicates it will request flat defense spending after 2021, and ― amid pandemic-related expenses and historic deficits ― the budget is widely expected to stay flat regardless of who is president. Smith pretty much echoed that view Tuesday. “I think the reasonable assumption is yeah, the defense budget is going to be flat for a while ― and there is no reason on Earth in my view that we cannot defend the United States of America for $700 to $740 billion,” Smith said. “So I think the better question, the question to focus on, is how do we get more out of it?” On that one, Smith echoed some ideas from his committee's bipartisan Future of Defense Task Force. Its report emphasized the need, in order to compete with a surging China, to divest from some legacy programs and heavily invest in artificial intelligence, among other potentially game-changing technologies. Citing a spate of acquisition failures, Smith said Washington has to work with its defense contractors “about how we spend our money and the results we get for that money.” He also acknowledged the need to protect key contractors stressed by the pandemic's economic impacts and strengthen the industrial base overall. Smith defended the Pentagon's allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic relief funding for items like jet and submarine parts instead of increasing the country's supply of medical equipment. The remarks seemed to set him at odds with liberals like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who have asked the Defense inspector general to look into the department's “reported misuse” of funds. The Democrat-led House Oversight and Reform Committee, Financial Services Committee, and select subcommittee on the coronavirus crisis are conducting a joint investigation. “Three committees in Congress are now investigating this, and I'm not one of them because there's nothing to investigate here, in my view,” Smith said. “This was part of the CARES Act: We gave a billion dollars to DoD to deal with COVID-related expenses. Very specifically, it said one of the COVID related expenses you could deal with was the defense industrial base, which they did. And now we're chewing on them for doing that.” Smith said the Pentagon did “nothing illegal,” but he suggested it's reasonable to explore whether DoD balanced the money it received appropriately and whether its payments to large contractors are flowing to smaller, more vulnerable firms, as they should. “I think it is important to make sure we keep the industrial base going,” Smith said, “but there's going to be pressure on that [decision].” https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/10/07/democrats-face-internal-fight-on-defense-spending-says-smith/