Northrop Grumman and LIG Nex1 to Collaborate on Electronic Warfare Systems for Korea

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  July 20, 2020 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  What’s industry role in DoD information warfare efforts?

  Mark Pomerleau Government leaders are telling industry they need help with integration as the Department of Defense and individual services push toward a unifying approach to information warfare. Information warfare combines several types of capabilities, including cyber, intelligence, electronic warfare, information operations, psychological operations and military deception. On a high-tempo battlefield, military leaders expect to face against a near peer or peer adversary. There, one-off solutions, systems that only provide one function, or those that can't feed information to others won't cut it. Systems must be multi-functional and be able to easily communicate with other equipment and do so across services. “A networked force, that's been our problem for years. Having built a lot of military systems, a lot in C4 and mission command, battle command, we build them and buy them in stovepipes. Then we think of integration and connecting after the fact,” Greg Wenzel, executive vice president at Booz Allen, told C4ISRNET. “My whole view ... networking the force really is probably the best thing to achieve overmatch against our adversaries.” Much of this networking revolves around new concepts DoD is experimenting with to be better prepared to fight in the information environment through multi domain operations or through Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2). The former aims to seamlessly integrate the capabilities of each domain of warfare – land, sea, air, space and cyber – at will. It also aims to integrate systems and capabilities across the services under a common framework to rapidly share data. While not an official program, JADC2 is more of a framework for the services to build equipment. “It's more likely a mish-mash of service level agreements, pre-scripted architecting and interoperability mandates that you got to be in keeping with those in order to play in the environment,” Bill Bender, senior vice president of strategic accounts and government relations at Leidos, told C4ISRNET of JADC2. “It's going to take a long journey to get there because, oh by the way, we're a very legacy force and ... a limited amount of technology has the interoperability that is absolutely required for that mission to become a reality.” The “information warfare” nomenclature can fell nebulous and hard to understand for industry officials that provide solutions to the Pentagon. “It's a pretty broad definition. I think it's something that the DoD is struggling with, that's what we're struggling with in industry and it also makes it challenging because no one really buys equipment that way,” Anthony Nigara, director of mission solutions for electronic warfare at L3Harris, said. “No one really buys stuff to an abstract term like information warfare.” Others agreed that the term “information warfare” may be too broad, an issue that's further complicated as each service tackles information warfare in their own way. Most members of industry C4ISRNET talked with on the need to integrate described the key theme of a more networked force as a unifying way to think about the new push to information warfare. “There's a lot of discussions about the Joint All Domain Operations or the multidomain operations. When we look at that and we want to say ‘okay, what is information warfare really mean to everyone?” Steven Allen, director of information operations and spectrum convergence at Lockheed Martin rotary and mission systems, told C4ISRNET. “We look at it as how can we get the right information to warfighters in order to fight or how do we get the right information for them to plan? How do we move all that data across whether it's different levels of security or different levels of the warfighting and the data associated with it.” Others expressed the need for contractors to be flexible with how DoD is describing its needs. “Industry has learned to be flexible in responding to messaging calling for new situational awareness capabilities while other established capabilities were being mandated for use in cyber exercises,” Jay Porter, director of programs at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, said. The push to a more information warfare-centric force under the guise of larger concepts to defeat adversaries is pushing the DoD as a whole to fight in a more joint manner. Paul Welch, vice president and division manager for the Air Force and defense agencies portfolio at Leidos, explained that there's a consistent view by the services and the department that they must integrate operations within the broad umbrella of activities called information warfare just as they're integrating warfighting capabilities between the services and across the domains. This goes beyond merely deconflicting activities or cooperation, but must encompass true integration of combat capabilities. Some members of industry described this idea as one part of convergence. “When I talk about convergence, my observation is there is a convergence in terms of of a family of technologies and of a family of challenge problems and how do they come together,” Ravi Ravichandran, chief technology officer of the intelligence and security sector at BAE, told C4ISRNET. Ravichandran provided five specific challenge problems the military may have in which a married suite of technologies can help provide an advantage against adversaries. They include JADC2, overmatch or the notion of assembling technologies in a way better than enemies, joint fires where one service's sensors may be acquiring a target and passing that target off to another service to prosecute it, sensing in the electromagnetic spectrum and strategic mobility to get forces and resources to a particular place at a particular time. Similarly, Welch provided the notional example of an F-35 flying over an area, seeing something on its sensors and sending that information to either an Army unit, a carrier strike group, a Marine Corps unit, or even a coalition partner to seamlessly and rapidly understand the information and act upon it. These sensors must be incorporated into a joint kill chain that can be acted upon, coordinated and closed by any service at any time. Allen noted that when looking at information warfare, his business is examining how to take a variety of information from sensor information to human information to movement information and pull it all together. “There's a lot of discussion on [artificial intelligence] AI and machine learning and it's very, very important, but there's also important aspects of that, which is hey what's the technology to help the AI, what's that data that's going to help them,” he said. “We tend to look very closely with the customers on how do we really shape that in terms of the information you're getting and how much more can you do for the warfighter.” By bringing all these together, ultimately, it's about providing warfighters with the situational awareness, command and control and information they need to make decisions and cause the necessary effects, be it cyber C4ISR, intelligence or electronic warfare, Nigara said. Porter said at Raytheon's Intelligence & Space outfit, they view information warfare as “the unification of offensive and defensive cyber missions, electronic warfare and information operations within the battlespace.” Integrating EW and IO with cyber will allow forces to take advantage of a broader set of data to enable high-confidence decision-making in real time, he added, which is particularly important in the multi-domain information environment to influence or degrade adversary decision making. From a Navy perspective, the ability to share data rapidly across a distributed force within the Navy's distributed maritime operations concept will be critical for ensuring success. “We will certainly have to include the mechanisms with which we share information, data and fuse that data from node to node. When I say node to node, a node may be a ship, a node may be an unmanned vehicle and a node may be a shore based facility,” Kev Hays, director of information warfare programs at Northrop Grumman, who mostly supports the Navy, said regarding areas Northrop is investing. “Linking all those participants into a network ... is critically important. We have quite a bit of technology we're investing in to help communicate point to point and over the horizon and a low probability of intercept and low probability of detection fashion.” Ultimately, the information space is about affecting the adversary's cognitive space, they said. “When it comes to information warfare, it's a lot less tangible ... It's not tank on tank anymore. You're trying to affect people's perception,” James Montgomery, capture strategy lead for information operations and spectrum convergence at Lockheed Martin rotary and mission systems, told C4ISRNET. As a result, he said, it is critical to take the time with the customer to truly understand the concepts and capabilities and how they all fit together in order to best support them. “Really spending time with them [the customer] and understanding what it is that they're attempting to get at. It helps us better shape the requirements but it also helps us better understand what is it they're asking for,” he said. “When you're moving forward and attempting to come together with both a software hardware based solution to something, it takes a lot of talking time and a lot of touch time with that customer to understand where their head's at.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2020/07/19/whats-industry-role-in-dod-information-warfare-efforts

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  February 7, 2019 | International, Security, Other Defence

  DARPA: Intelligent Healing for Complex Wounds

  Blast injuries, burns, and other wounds experienced by warfighters often catastrophically damage their bones, skin, and nerves, resulting in months to years of recovery for the most severe injuries and often returning imperfect results. This long and limited healing process means prolonged pain and hardship for the patient, and a drop in readiness for the military. However, DARPA believes that recent advances in biosensors, actuators, and artificial intelligence could be extended and integrated to dramatically improve tissue regeneration. To achieve this, the new Bioelectronics for Tissue Regeneration (BETR) program asks researchers to develop bioelectronics that closely track the progress of the wound and then stimulate healing processes in real time to optimize tissue repair and regeneration. Paul Sheehan, the BETR program manager, described his vision for the technology as “not just personalized medicine, but dynamic, adaptive, and precise human therapies” that adjust to the wound state moment by moment to provide greater resilience to wounded warfighters. “Wounds are living environments and the conditions change quickly as cells and tissues communicate and attempt to repair,” Sheehan said. “An ideal treatment would sense, process, and respond to these changes in the wound state and intervene to correct and speed recovery. For example, we anticipate interventions that modulate immune response, recruit necessary cell types to the wound, or direct how stem cells differentiate to expedite healing.” The envisioned BETR technology would represent a sharp break from traditional wound treatments, and even from other emerging technologies to facilitate recovery, most of which are passive in nature. Under current medical practice, physicians provide the conditions and time for the body to either heal itself when tissues have regenerative capacity or to accept and heal around direct transplants. Most people are familiar with interventions that include casts to stabilize broken bones or transplants of healthy ligaments or organs from donors to replace tissues that do not regenerate. Passive approaches often result in slow healing, incomplete healing with scarring, or, in some unfortunate cases, no healing at all. Blast injuries in particular seem to scramble the healing processes; 23 percent of them will not fully close. Moreover, research shows that in nearly two thirds of military trauma cases — a rate far higher than with civilian trauma injuries — these patients suffer abnormal bone growth in their soft tissue due to a condition known as heterotopic ossification, a painful experience that can greatly limit future mobility. Although recent experimental treatments offer some hope for expedited recovery, many of these new approaches remain static in nature. For instance, some “smart” bandages emit a continuous weak electric field or locally deliver drugs. Alternatively, hydrogel scaffolds laced with a drug can recruit stem cells, while decellularized tissue re-seeded with donor cells from the patient help avoid rejection by the host's immune system. These newer approaches may indeed encourage growth of otherwise non-regenerative tissue, but because they do not adapt to the changing state of a wound, their impact is limited. “To understand the importance of adaptive treatments that respond to the wound state, consider the case of antibiotic ointments,” Sheehan explained. “People use antibiotics to treat simple cuts, and they help if the wound is infected. However, completely wiping out the natural microbiota can impair healing. Thus, without feedback, antibiotics can become counterproductive.” Recent technologies have begun to close the loop between sensing and intervention, looking for signs of infection such as changes in pH level or temperature to trigger treatment. To date, however, these systems have been limited to monitoring changes induced by bacteria. For BETR, DARPA intends to use any available signal, be it optical, biochemical, bioelectronic, or mechanical, to directly monitor the body's physiological processes and then to stimulate them to bring them under control, thereby speeding healing or avoiding scarring or other forms of abnormal healing. By the conclusion of the four-year BETR program, DARPA expects researchers to demonstrate a closed-loop, adaptive system that includes sensors to assess wound state and track the body's complex responses to interventions; biological actuators that transmit appropriate biochemical and biophysical signals precisely over space and time to influence healing; and adaptive learning approaches to process data, build models, and determine interventions. To succeed, the BETR system must yield faster healing of recalcitrant wounds, superior scar-free healing, and/or the ability to redirect abnormally healing wounds toward a more salutary pathway. DARPA anticipates that successful teams will include expertise in bioelectronics, artificial intelligence, biosensors, tissue engineering, and cellular regeneration. Further, DARPA encourages proposals that address healing following osseointegration surgery, which is often necessary to support the use of advanced prosthetics by wounded warfighters. DARPA will host a Proposers Day on March 1, 2019 in Arlington, Virginia, to provide more information to researchers interested in submitting a proposal for funding. Additional information is available at https://go.usa.gov/xENCQ. A forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement, to be posted to the Federal Business Opportunities website, will include full details of the program. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-02-06a

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  March 12, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  US Air Force’s new trainer jet could become its next light-attack or aggressor aircraft

  By: Valerie Insinna ORLANDO, Fla. — The U.S. Air Force's new T-X jets could be more than just trainers, with aggressor or light-attack missions now on the table for the Boeing-made plane, the head of Air Combat Command said Thursday. Although buying new T-X trainers to replace the more than 50-year-old T-38 fleet still remains a top priority for that program, the service is beginning to explore whether the T-X could be procured for other uses, Gen. Mike Holmes said at the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium. “You could imagine a version of the airframe that could be equipped as a light fighter. You can imagine a version that is equipped as an adversary air-training platform,” he told reporters during a roundtable. "At the informal level, I have some guys that work for me that are thinking through what the requirement might be for those different versions. When or if that transitions and becomes something more formal will depend on a lot of things,” he said, adding that one of those variables is the budget. So what T-X variants could the Air Force pursue? A light-attack T-X The Air Force still hasn't made clear its path forward on the light-attack experiment, but leaders have said they want to broaden the effort to include aircraft beyond the turboprop planes, which were the focus of the first experiments. The T-X, or a low-cost jet like it, could have a role, said Holmes, who declined to get into specifics until the fiscal 2020 budget is released with more details. "An airplane like that, like all the airplanes that competed in the T-X category, an airplane like that at that size and cost per flying hour and capability is something I think we should definitely look at as we go forward in the experiment,” he said. In the first round of light-attack experiments in 2017, the Air Force evaluated one light fighter —Textron's Scorpion jet — but ultimately eschewed it in favor of turboprops like the A-29 and AT-6. While the Scorpion brought with it some added capabilities that the turboprops couldn't replicate — like increased speed and maneuverability, and an internal bay that can host a variety of plug-and-play sensors — the AT-6 and A-29 had two major advantages over the Scorpion. Both are cheaper to buy and already have existing production lines, while the Scorpion has not been purchased by any country. Boeing's T-X won't be grappling with those same challenges. For one, the T-X trainer program gives it a built-in customer dedicated to buying at least 350 planes, covering the cost of setting up a production line and pushing down the price per plane. Holmes also noted that Boeing incorporated its Black Diamond production initiative into the T-X design process. Black Diamond aims to drastically cut production costs by pulling in new manufacturing techniques and technologies from the company's commercial side. “Then if you look at the size of the fleet, if you have more airplanes that are based on a common platform, that almost always brings economies of scale that make it cheaper to operate those airplanes and sustain them for a long time,” Holmes added. Still, an upgunned T-X may be more expensive from a cost standpoint, and it will have to be something that international militaries are interested in buying — and can afford. “We don't have any conclusion about whether that would fit for what we're looking for at a cost point,” Holmes acknowledged. “And as [Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein] talks about, the primary or at least one of the primary components of anything we're going to look at with light attack is going to be how our partners feel about it.” An ‘aggressor' T-X to play the baddie The Air Force plans to award contracts this year to a number of companies that provide “red air” training that simulates how an adversary fights in air-to-air combat, but the service believes its requirement could grow even larger, necessitating the purchase of a new aggressor plane. When the T-X program was still a competition between multiple companies, the Air Force downplayed the T-X as an option for a future aggressor aircraft. However, now that a contract has been awarded, the service is taking a look at whether the new trainer could fit requirements, Holmes said at the conference. The Air Combat Command head spelled out his idea in more depth in a January article in War on the Rocks. The T-X is slated to replace the T-38 Talon, but because flying the Talon is more like operating a 1950s-era fighter than a modern one, only the most very basic fighter tactics can be learned in the seat of that trainer. A T-X, with its flying and sensor capabilities, is much closer to a modern day fighter, and Holmes hypothesized that much of the training that occurs once a pilot starts flying an F-15, F-16, F-22 or F-35 could actually be done inside the T-X. It could also take over “some of or all of the adversary aircraft training requirements for nearby fighter units,” he wrote. “This accelerated seasoning and increased adversary air sortie generation is possible because the T-X's lower operating cost — presently expected to be less than half the cost per hour of a fourth-generation fighter, and perhaps a fifth the cost of a fifth-generation fighter — allows the pilots to train more for the same, or less, cost.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/afa-air-space/2019/03/06/air-forces-new-trainer-jet-could-become-its-next-light-attack-or-aggressor-aircraft/v