Netherlands to deploy Reapers to Romania

On the same subject

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  January 8, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  US Air Force logistics officer talks basing, drones in the Pacific

  "We learned a lot of skills that were multi-capable back in the late 1980s that we are now dusting off."

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  March 29, 2019 | International, C4ISR, Security, Other Defence

  DARPA Seeks to Make Scalable On-Chip Security Pervasive

  For the past decade, cybersecurity threats have moved from high in the software stack to progressively lower levels of the computational hierarchy, working their way towards the underlying hardware. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has driven the creation of a rapidly growing number of accessible devices and a multitude of complex chip designs needed to enable them. With this rapid growth comes increased opportunity for economic and nation-state adversaries alike to shift their attention to chips that enable complex capabilities across commercial and defense applications. The consequences of a hardware cyberattack are significant as a compromise could potentially impact not millions, but billions of devices. Despite growing recognition of the issue, there are no common tools, methods, or solutions for chip-level security currently in wide use. This is largely driven by the economic hurdles and technical trade-offs often associated with secure chip design. Incorporating security into chips is a manual, expensive, and cumbersome task that requires significant time and a level of expertise that is not readily available in most chip and system companies. The inclusion of security also often requires certain trade-offs with the typical design objectives, such as size, performance, and power dissipation. Further, modern chip design methods are unforgiving – once a chip is designed, adding security after the fact or making changes to address newly discovered threats is nearly impossible. “Today, it can take six to nine months to design a modern chip, and twice as long if you want to make that same design secure,” said Serge Leef, a program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “While large merchant semiconductor companies are investing in in-house personnel to manually incorporate security into their high-volume silicon, mid-size chip companies, system houses, and start-ups with small design teams who create lower volume chips lack the resources and economic drivers to support the necessary investment in scalable security mechanisms, leaving a majority of today's chips largely unprotected.” To ease the burden of developing secure chips, DARPA developed the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. AISS aims to automate the process of incorporating scalable defense mechanisms into chip designs, while allowing designers to explore economics versus security trade-offs and maximize design productivity. The objective of the program is to develop a design tool and IP ecosystem – which includes tool vendors, chip developers, IP licensers, and the open source community – that will allow security to be inexpensively incorporated into chip designs with minimal effort and expertise, ultimately making scalable on-chip security pervasive. Leef continued, “The security, design, and economic objectives of a chip can vary based on its intended application. As an example, a chip design with extreme security requirements may have to accept certain tradeoffs. Achieving the required security level may cause the chip to become larger, consume more power, or deliver slower performance. Depending on the application, some or all of these tradeoffs may be acceptable, but with today's manual processes it's hard to determine where tradeoffs can be made.” AISS seeks to create a novel, automated chip design flow that will allow the security mechanisms to scale consistently with the goals of the design. The design flow will provide a means of rapidly evaluating architectural alternatives that best address the required design and security metrics, as well as varying cost models to optimize the economics versus security tradeoff. The target AISS system – or system on chip (SoC) – will be automatically generated, integrated, and optimized to meet the objectives of the application and security intent. These systems will consist of two partitions – an application specific processor partition and a security partition implementing the on-chip security features. This approach is novel in that most systems today do not include a security partition due to its design complexity and cost of integration. By bringing greater automation to the chip design process, the burden of security inclusion can be profoundly decreased. While the threat landscape is ever evolving and expansive, AISS seeks to address four specific attack surfaces that are most relevant to digital ASICs and SoCs. These include side channel attacks, reverse engineering attacks, supply chain attacks, and malicious hardware attacks. “Strategies for resisting threats vary widely in cost, complexity, and invasiveness. As such, AISS will help designers assess which defense mechanisms are most appropriate based on the potential attack surface and the likelihood of a compromise,” said Leef. In addition to incorporating scalable defense mechanisms, AISS seeks to ensure that the IP blocks that make up the chip remain secure throughout the design process and are not compromised as they move through the ecosystem. As such, the program will also aim to move forward provenance and integrity validation techniques for preexisting design components by advancing current methods or inventing novel technical approaches. These techniques may include IP watermarking and threat detection to help validate the chip's integrity and IP provenance throughout its lifetime. AISS is part of the second phase of DARPA's Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) – a five-year, upwards of $1.5 billion investment in the future of domestic, U.S. government, and defense electronics systems. Under ERI Phase II, DARPA is exploring the development of trusted electronics components, including the advancement of electronics that can enforce security and privacy protections. AISS will help address this mission through its efforts to enable scalable on-chip security. DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on April 10, 2019 at the DARPA Conference Center, located at 675 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia 22203, to provide more information about AISS and answer questions from potential proposers. For details about the event, including registration requirements, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=6770487d820ee13f33af67b0980a7d73&tab=core&_cview=0 Additional information will be available in the forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement, which will be posted to www.fbo.gov. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-03-25

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  September 26, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  Why Federal A&D Spending Is The Modern Interstate Highway System

  bY Michael Bruno Lockheed Martin recently broke ground on two new buildings in Courtland, Alabama, a small town 45 mi. west of Huntsville. The buildings will house the manufacturing and testing of hypersonics weapon programs. Lockheed expects to move at least 72 new jobs into Courtland and add another 200 in Huntsville over the next three years. It is big news for Courtland, which saw its population drop to 609 in the 2010 U.S. Census from 769 in 2000. But in the grand scheme of things, the dozens or perhaps hundreds of jobs involved—it is unclear how many are new hires versus relocations or backfill—are a fraction of Lockheed's roughly 105,000-person workforce. Yet it is what President Donald Trump wants to see—and where—and a result of record national security spending of $750 billion annually under his administration that includes new technology priorities such as hypersonics. Not surprisingly, Alabama's powerful Republican Senate appropriator Richard Shelby and Gov. Kay Ivey as well as Lockheed Chairman, CEO and President Marillyn Hewson and officials from the Air Force, Army and Navy made sure to be in Courtland for the public relations event Sept. 16. In 2016, Trump campaigned with a promise to provide a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to upgrade America. Roads, bridges and airports featured prominently. After he took office, Trump latched on to a contentious Republican proposal to outsource FAA air traffic control, which the White House called the cornerstone of his infrastructure push. All of it died legislatively. But before Democrats or others try to score points over the failure, they should understand Trump has still delivered. The truth is that Trump's defense spending and government support of commercial aviation and space are today's equivalent of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. They have been what passes for infrastructure spending, just without roads, bridges and airports. Increasingly, the employment figures are adding up, and so are the beneficiaries such as Courtland. The U.S. aerospace and defense (A&D) industry was responsible for more than 2.56 million jobs in 2018, a 5.5% gain over 2017, thanks primarily to a return to growth across the top tier and supply chain, according to September statistics from the Aerospace Industries Association. The trade association says A&D accounted for 20% of all U.S. manufacturing jobs and paid nearly $237 billion in wages and benefits last year, up 7.72% from 2017. In 2018, the average wage of an A&D worker was $92,742, an increase of 1.36%. That made the average A&D salary 87% higher than the national average salary of a U.S. worker. Hewson promises to hire thousands of workers, almost all in the U.S. “Roughly 93% of our employees are U.S.-based, as are 93% of our 16,000 suppliers, making Lockheed Martin a proud driver of broad-based economic development and opportunity in America,” the company says. A map of employment shows the company has at least 100 employees in half of the 50 states. This is the story across the industry, which is the model for farming taxpayer-funded work across the states in order to build political coalitions to support major A&D programs. On the same day of the Courtland event, Northrop Grumman unveiled its industry team bidding for the Ground-based Strategic Deterrent, including a contractor army of more than 10,000 people in at least 32 states. But all good things come to an end, and warnings are emerging that A&D's infrastructure-like run could sunset. “Trump is now in full ‘2020-reelection mode,' with continued 2022-26 defense funding growth rapidly becoming a secondary issue,” notes longtime defense consultant Jim McAleese. He points to a Sept. 9 rally in North Carolina at which Trump characterized the “rebuilding” of the U.S. military as “complete.” This can matter a lot to communities where federal A&D spending is focused. The Pentagon began to push out information this year to help states and local communities understand how much they depend on defense appropriations. In a report unveiled March 19 at the Brookings Institution, the Defense Department found the top 10 states by total defense spending received in fiscal 2017 accounted for $239.7 billion of the $407 billion total tracked that year. “There's no obvious correlation of red states or blue states, not that there should be,” noted Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and Brookings analyst. Officials say communities should plan ahead. “It gets back to the rural areas,” says Patrick O'Brien, director of the Pentagon's Office of Economic Adjustment. “Some rural areas see a lot of defense spending; others do not. Where it is occurring, you probably have a very important facility or you have an important presence. And it's up to these local officials to get a better handle on it.” https://aviationweek.com/defense/why-federal-ad-spending-modern-interstate-highway-system