Organizers Cancel Paris Air Show 2021 On COVID-19 Uncertainty

On the same subject

• 

  June 15, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Army releases $1B cyber training request

  Mark Pomerleau The Army released its highly anticipated request for proposals June 11 for a contract that could be worth as much as $1 billion to provide cyber training for the Department of Defense. The Cyber Training, Readiness, Integration, Delivery and Enterprise Technology (TRIDENT) is a contract vehicle to offer a more streamlined approach for procuring the military's cyber training capabilities. The Army is running the contract on behalf of the joint force. The largest part of that contact will be the Persistent Cyber Training Environment (PCTE). PCTE is an online client in which members of U.S. Cyber Command's cyber mission force can log on from anywhere in the world for training and to rehearse missions. Cyber Command leaders have said this element is one of the organization's most critical needs. Currently, no integrated or robust cyber training environment exists. To date, two companies have announced their teams that will be pursuing the contract. ManTech and General Dynamics announced late last year they are joining forces to compete for the opportunity. Raytheon announced at the end of April that it will also compete for the contract. In its announcement, it said it is partnering with Red Hat and VMware. Responses are due Aug. 6. https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/cybercom/2020/06/12/army-releases-1b-cyber-training-request/

• 

  April 23, 2018 | International, Naval

  Are you a small business? The Navy wants to work with you

  By: Daniel Cebul WASHINGTON — To reach its acquisition goals, the Navy wants to make it easier to partner with small businesses. Speaking from the Sea-Air-Space Exposition to a Facebook Live audience, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition James Geurts outlined his views on the important role small businesses play in Navy acquisition programs. “Small business is an incredible source for innovation, for adaptability, for agility, and resilience,” Geurts said. “My main goal [is to figure out], how do we leverage small business for things they are really good at?” Geurts emphasized the importance of small business in achieving U.S. security goals. Looking at the National Defense Strategy for guidance, Geurtz summarized the document to be one focused on how the United States will continue to compete and win as a nation. “Winning teams figure out how to use all the players available, use them for what their strengths are, continue to grow them, and expand,” he said. “Small business is a big piece of that equation for us.” One way small businesses can get connected to the right program is by clearly communicating their technological capabilities and ability to execute awarded contracts. “If you're a small business you've got to let us know what your capabilities are,” Geurts said. By clearly communicating capability, businesses “make it easy for [the Navy] to know what capabilities you have so we can be fully informed in putting a program together,” he added. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/navy-league/2018/04/12/are-you-a-small-business-the-navy-wants-to-work-with-you/

• 

  December 4, 2019 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR

  The US Air Force wants to network all its weapons together. Will simulators be included?

  By: Valerie Insinna ORLANDO, Fla. — As the U.S. military prepares for the release of its fiscal 2021 budget request, Air Force leaders have made clear that a massive financial hike is needed for multidomain command-and-control efforts to connect weapon systems across the joint force. As part of that initiative, it will also be critical for the military to link together simulators so service members can replicate combat on a massive scale, Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Stephen Wilson said during a speech Tuesday at the Interservice/Industry, Training, Simulation and Education Conference. “I know you spent a lot of time yesterday about how to connect and integrate simulators from across our various weapons systems. I can't overstate how important that is,” he said. “Individual weapon system simulators can help our men and women become proficient tacticians, but it's their ability to integrate and connect that will differentiate us against a peer threat. And no one is going to win alone." Wilson said the Air Force plans to spend “a lot of money in this next five-year defense plan” on multidomain command and control, but he did not detail how much funding the service might ask for, or whether that sum will include investments in technology to network together simulators. The service is still in the earliest stages of identifying how to connect its aircraft and space assets with the joint force to fight advanced, near-peer threats like Russia and China. The same goes for its aircraft simulators, which are largely detached from each other. An Air Force program called Simulator Common Architecture Requirements and Standards, or SCARS, will start to transform the simulation enterprise and make it more interconnected, said Col. Phillip Carpenter, the Air Force's senior materiel leader for the simulators program office. “It's an effort to make the entire portfolio more modular, more open-system,” he told Defense News in an exclusive interview. “I'm not going to say [SCARS] is the solution to all of our problems,” but it will “help lay that groundwork so that we become much more interoperable across the board.” Under SCARS, the Air Force wants to create a common, open architecture for its simulators that will impose stricter cybersecurity standards and make it easier for the service to update simulators with new capabilities or threat information. The goal, Carpenter said, is to have a fleet of simulators that can remotely receive software updates, much like a smartphone. The Air Force released a SCARS request for proposals in December 2018 for a 10-year contract worth up to $900 million, according to Bloomberg. The service intends to award a contract for SCARS in 2020 and has received a lot of interest from industry, Carpenter said. Carpenter was clear that SCARS — at least how it is currently conceived — will not enable the Air Force to carry out the type of scenarios Wilson spoke about: large-scale, simulated air operations involving simulators of many different airframes. To achieve that, “we need to work on some of the security pieces so that we can allow multilevel security or some of these other aspects that would allow totality of these systems to participate and fight like they would actually fight in a real world,” Carpenter explained. But Carpenter believes there is potential for other parts of the Air Force — like its space, cyber and intelligence community — or even the other services to adopt SCARS or an architecture that is compatible with it. “I think there is great potential for SCARS to be more than something for just aircraft simulators,” he said. “If somebody is off building a system outside of our portfolio, if it's built to a common standard, I think that would effectively make all the systems, whether they're in our portfolio or not, more interoperable.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/itsec/2019/12/03/the-us-air-force-wants-to-network-all-its-weapons-together-will-simulators-be-included