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February 14, 2024 | International, Naval

Navy selects principal cyber advisor to replace St. Pierre

“Each and everyone of us in this room today has a responsibility to cybersecurity,” said Scott St. Pierre, the service's current principal cyber advisor.

https://www.defensenews.com/cyber/2024/02/14/navy-selects-principal-cyber-advisor-to-replace-st-pierre/

On the same subject

  • Naval Group-led team gets €2 billion mine-hunter contract for Belgian, Dutch navies

    May 23, 2019 | International, Naval

    Naval Group-led team gets €2 billion mine-hunter contract for Belgian, Dutch navies

    By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany – The Belgian defense ministry has awarded a consortium led by France's Naval Group a nearly €2 billion contract to deliver mine-hunting ships and drones to the navies of Belgium and the Netherlands, according to the shipbuilder. The announcement on Wednesday came after the customary review period by the Belgian legislature had passed. The Brussels government announced in March that it planned to select Belgium Naval and Robotics, a joint venture of Naval Group and ECA Group, to produce 12 vessels equipped with around 100 drones for the two countries. Six vessels will go to Belgium, the other six to the Dutch. Finding and disabling sea mines is a key mission for the two neighboring countries. Their navies are configured mainly to defend territorial waters and the nearby English Channel, which allows passage to the North Sea. The offer by Naval Group and ECA Group leans heavily on undersea drones to deal with the treacherous weapons. The ships will be built to launch and recover the ECA Group's “Inspector 125” unmanned boats, which carry various autonomous underwater drones for finding mines and setting them off from a safe distance. The contract is expected to last 10 years, according to a consortium statement. An initial three-year development phase is to be followed by a production stage, putting the first system in the water by 2024. The two companies hope that the high-profile deal will generate additional sales elsewhere in the world. “The Belgian and Dutch navies being a reference in mine warfare within NATO, the choice of our consortium is a major asset for export,” a statement reads. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/05/22/naval-group-led-team-gets-2-billion-mine-hunter-contract-for-belgian-dutch-navies

  • Air Force to Add 12 Weapons Systems for AI/ML-Informed Predictive Maintenance This Year

    July 14, 2020 | International, Aerospace

    Air Force to Add 12 Weapons Systems for AI/ML-Informed Predictive Maintenance This Year

    The U.S. Air Force is to add a dozen weapons systems to its Enhanced Reliability Centered Maintenance (ERCM) model that employs artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) for predictive maintenance. Those systems are the Boeing [BA] F-15 fighter, B-52 bomber, RC-135 reconnaissance plane, C-17 transport, and A-10 Thunderbolt II close air support aircraft, the Lockheed Martin [LMT] AC/MC-130 gunships, F-16 fighter, and HH-60 helicopter, the Bell [TXT] and Boeing CV-22 tiltrotor, the Northrop Grumman [NOC] RQ-4 Global Hawk and the General Atomics‘ MQ-9 Reaper. “We have a couple of different initiatives under what we would call the umbrella of predictive maintenance,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Warren Berry, the service's deputy chief of staff for logistics, engineering and force protection, said during a July 9 Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies' Aerospace Nation virtual discussion. “One is Condition Based Maintenance Plus [CBM+]. We have three weapons systems in there right now: the C-5, the KC-135, and the B-1. They've been doing it for about 18 to 24 months now, and we're starting to get some real return on what it is that the CBM+ is offering us. The other element is called Enhanced Reliability Centered Maintenance [ERCM], which is really laying that artificial intelligence and machine learning on top of the maintenance information system data that we have today and understanding failure rates and understanding mission characteristics of the aircraft and how they fail, and then laying that into the algorithms that then tell us when parts are likely to fail based on failure rates and the algorithms we plug in.” “We're in the process of adding another 12 weapons systems under the ERCM umbrella this calendar year,” Berry said. Defense Daily has asked Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) for the names of the 12 systems. AI/ML is to assume a significant role in predictive maintenance for the 11 combatant commands (COCOMs). In April last year, the Pentagon said that the new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) had delivered its first product, a predictive Engine Health Model (EHM) maintenance tool for Sikorsky [LMT] Black Hawk helicopters, to U.S. Special Operations Command's 160th Special Operations Regiment (SOAR) for use with SOAR's MH-60 helicopters. JAIC said that its Joint Logistics Mission Initiative (MI), one of six JAIC AI projects, is working “to develop a repeatable, end-to-end AI ecosystem” to bring EHM to scale across the Black Hawk fleet. EHM, developed in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, “predicts the probability of an engine hot start so decision-makers can consider next steps,” including replacing the engine or holding it back for training missions instead of deployments in high-risk missions, Army Col. Kenneth Kliethermes, JAIC's Joint Logistics MI lead, said in a recent JAIC blog post. Another JAIC mission initiative, the Joint Warfighting MI, “is working with several COCOMs to build, test, and expand its Smart Sensor, a video processing AI prototype that rides on unmanned aerial vehicles and is trained to identify threats and immediately transmit the video of those threats back to manned computer stations for real-time analysis,” according to the JAIC blog post. Army Col. Bradley Boyd, the lead for the Joint Warfighting MI, said that the Smart Sensor could lead to “a dramatic reduction in the amount of data that has to be pushed back for a human to cull through.” “Instead of staring at one video feed and hours and hours of trees and rocks and nothing happening, that person can instead be monitoring 10 video feeds because they are only seeing the stuff that really matters,” Boyd said in the JAIC blog post. https://www.defensedaily.com/air-force-add-12-weapons-systems-ai-ml-informed-predictive-maintenance-year/army/

  • How COVID-19 Is Affecting The Defense Industrial Base

    November 6, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

    How COVID-19 Is Affecting The Defense Industrial Base

    Jen DiMascio The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated some of the risks that have always existed in the defense industrial base. Although government assistance and a robust Pentagon budget have helped offset initial trials, more challenges are looming. One of the biggest risks to the defense industrial base is that some companies serving the military are too heavily leveraged toward the commercial sector or too reliant on international companies, financial analysts told Aviation Week's DefenseChain Conference. “Some of these places are two weeks from bankruptcy,” says Chris Celtruda, managing principal at Destiny Equity Partners, says. Suppliers are beginning to falter because of a combination of factors, including the need to comply with cybersecurity standards, the pressure that prime contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin have applied to them and their reliance on commercial business. A prime example is the recent bankruptcy of Impresa Aerospace, a Wichita-based company that made parts using computer numerical control machines as well as sheet metal parts and assemblies for Boeing and Lockheed military aircraft but was highly dependent on its work for the commercial Boeing 737 MAX. The U.S. federal Paycheck Protection Program helped delay some business failures, but others are inevitable, says Rick Nagel, managing partner of Acorn Growth. “The Impresa bankruptcy is an example of a lot more insolvencies we may see,” he adds. Weakness among niche companies could pose a problem for the Defense Department in the future. “I'm always amazed at how many critical systems have multiple single points of failure on major programs,” he says. At the Pentagon, officials have been working to keep essential suppliers afloat and to keep production moving through its sprawling international industrial base. For the U.S. Army, that has meant initial disruptions to Apache fuselage production in India and to the flow of generators from Mexico. The Pentagon and the State Department helped ease the stoppage, but the incident has caused them to review the full range of risks to its international supply chain. “I think that we can navigate through this, though it's certainly always going to be complex in today's global economy,” says Patrick Mason, deputy program executive officer for U.S. Army Aviation, adding that he is in the position of putting pressure on vendors to reduce cost, particularly to provide savings on multiyear aircraft contracts. One trend emerging along with the pandemic is a movement toward onshoring or reshoring overseas business for reasons of cybersecurity and the protection of the U.S. industrial base. As that happens, and as the commercial aviation market sags, Raanan Horowitz, president and CEO of Elbit Systems of America sees opportunity. “We are trying to position ourselves around some of those discontinuities,” Horowitz says, adding that the company likes going after opportunities that are not necessarily glitzy but hold value. “We are intensifying efforts toward looking at licensing, taking over orphan product lines and positioning ourselves to be part of the long-term solution.” Horowitz says Elbit is investing in U.S. infrastructure to capture new business. Industry officials see broad support for bringing more of the defense supply chain back to the U.S. The shift stems in part from the COVID-19-related economic downturn but also from longstanding concerns about China. In the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress passed restrictions on contracting with companies that use Chinese telecommunications equipment. Though companies first look for the best value, the threat posed by Chinese parts that either do not work or could transmit classified information back to China is an ongoing concern, says John Luddy, vice president for national security policy at the Aerospace Industries Association. “The concept of reshoring of supplies to better connect our allies and friends, both from a production standpoint and from an operational functionality and alliance standpoint, I think the volume is getting turned up on that a little bit,” he says. “There's also a strong impetus in Congress to look at exactly how vulnerable we are. That's going to be a more intense discussion in the year to come than it has been.” And that trend toward reshoring could have unintended consequences, warns Steve Grundman, founder and principal of Grundman Advisory. “I'm genuinely concerned that benign moves to secure our supply chain to prevent nefarious supplies and code [coming] into particularly our defense supply chain or commercial aerospace supply chain could slip very easily into protectionism,” Grundman says. “If you want to really put pressure on the defense budget, ask the defense industry to reshore the supply chain. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/supply-chain/how-covid-19-affecting-defense-industrial-base

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