«Nous nous adaptons de façon encore plus réactive à l’évolution des menaces» : entretien avec Joël Barre

On the same subject

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  July 16, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Iranian Hackers Deploy New BugSleep Backdoor in Middle East Cyber Attacks

  Iranian hacker group MuddyWater shifts tactics, deploying new backdoor BugSleep in cyberattacks targeting Middle East and European countries.

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  August 29, 2019 | International, Land

  Swiss seek package deal of ground-based weapons, combat aircraft

  By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany — The Swiss government plans to make the integration of combat aircraft and ground-based air defense assets a key benchmark in its planned $8 billion Air 2030 program, according to officials. Program leaders disclosed the desire for a high degree of interplay between the two competing missile-defense offers and four possible aircraft types during a news conference in the capital Bern earlier this month. The comments reveal a new front in the selection criteria for one of Europe's most prized defense acquisitions, where the air and ground portions had always existed as separate tracks. Fear of fratricide in Switzerland's small and crowded airspace is one of two key factors driving the need for close integration between ground and aerial assets, said Swiss Air Force Col. Marco Forrer. Given the country's alpine terrain and the requirement to hit targets more than 50 kilometers away and over 12 kilometers high, official are concerned about erroneously downing civilian planes, he said. “That's why BodLuv has to be integrated into the Air Force operational picture and command-and-control network,” Forrer said, referring to the German-language acronym for the ground-based program Bodengestützte Luftverteidigung. Forrer added that a high level of integration also is crucial to keeping costs down, enabling air defenders to engage targets with greater precision and — hopefully — fewer misses. Of the total Air 2030 program, $6 billion is slated for a new fleet of aircraft, while $2 billion is budgeted for ground-based defenses. In the aerial segment, the planes in play are the Airbus Eurofighter Typhoon, the Lockheed Martin F-35, Dassault's Rafale and Boeing's F-18 Super Hornet. In the ground segment, Swiss officials are left with choosing between Raytheon's Patriot and the SAMP-T system, which is made by an MBDA-Thales consortium called Eurosam. Israel's Rafael, which was also invited to bid with its David's Sling system, never responded to the invitation, presumably following pressure by the Israeli or American governments to stay out of the race. Swiss officials have complained that they never got a straight answer explaining Rafael's abstention, and the company's non-response has left them worried about the losing an element of competition in the race that could make for lower costs. “It can have a negative impact on the competitive situation,” said Christian Catrina, who oversees Air 2030 at Switzerland's defense ministry. “We will never know if so and how strongly. We would have appreciated having three contenders.” Following a similar wave of aircraft tests in Switzerland over the spring and early summer, evaluations of the two ground-based systems, namely regarding their radar sensors, began this month. First up is the Patriot system with a two-week test, which will end Aug. 30; SAMP-T is next, beginning Sept. 16. The tests will take place at an army range near Menzingen, central Switzerland, where the Swiss operated the Bloodhound weapon system until its retirement in the late 1990s. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/08/28/swiss-seek-package-deal-of-ground-based-weapons-combat-aircraft/

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  September 26, 2018 | International, Naval, C4ISR

  On the new battlefield, the Navy has to get software updates to the fleet within days, acquisition boss says

  By: David B. Larter The Navy has to get software updates and patches to the fleet within days if it's going to win in the future, the Department of the Navy's acquisition boss said Sept. 25 at Modern Day Marine. James Geurts, assistant secretary of the Navy for research, acquisition and development, said the fleet has been working on the rapid development of software to get needed upgrades to the ships ahead of pier-side availabilities, a pace he said was too slow for the modern battlefield. “We recently did one of our proof-of-principles to say: ‘How do you take ... software, get it system certified, get it cyber certified then get it out over the airwaves, uploaded on to a ship and into the combat system in 24 hours,” Geurts said. “My view is unless we get to the point where I can identify a software requirement, whether it's an [artificial intelligence] algorithm or something, find the solution, get it checked out on the network, give it whatever cyber-proofing it needs and get it into the fight in less than a week, we are not going to be successful in the long run.” The Navy has increasingly found that its current systems are capable of adjusting to new threats through software upgrades rather than buying new systems and installing them, a time-consuming and cripplingly expensive process that has been the norm in years past. Geurts said the Navy had to have a software architecture that was amenable to rapid upgrades so that developers would not need to re-test the underlying architecture each time a patch or fix is uploaded. Furthermore, the service also has to develop cyber security standards that don't just weigh whether or not something can be compromised but begin to think of it more in terms of risks associated. “The answer isn't yes or no, it's ‘Commander here is your risk.' And then weigh the risk of doing that [upgrade] versus a potential cyber impact so that commanders can make reasonable command decisions. Because there is always a risk to not doing something. We often talk about the risk of doing something, we don't often talk about the risk of not doing it.” Geurts told a gaggle with reporters after the talk that he was not talking about uploading whole new programs that sailors might be unfamiliar with but more iterative upgrades. "Don't take that to an extreme to where we will load on something that nobody has ever seen before, but it could be that there is a particular issue or new need, and you can envision us testing and training that shore-side, making sure it's right – we don't want to wait for the ship to come home we could potentially blast that out [to the fleet.]" The Navy is also working more with having digital doppelgangers of its combat system on board its ships so that new technologies can be tested by the crew and commanders before its uploaded into the main combat system, a hedge against reaping unintended consequences by uploading a feature or patch without knowing exactly how it will fit into the ship's systems. "The other thing we are doing a lot with is digital twins, where [the ship] might have the combat system that it's fighting with as well as a digital twin,” Geurts explained. “So you might be able to upload that new feature in the digital twin so you could have both, then it's up to the commander whether it's something you adopt or not.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/digital-show-dailies/modern-day-marine/2018/09/25/on-the-new-battlefield-the-navy-has-to-get-software-updates-to-the-fleet-within-days-acquisition-boss-says