Poland to buy 486 HIMARS launchers from Lockheed Martin

On the same subject

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  December 13, 2023 | International, Aerospace

  Rheinmetall wins major contract: Austria orders state-of-the-art air defence system for €532 million

  The contract encompasses a project period of 48 months starting in February 2024. 

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  April 6, 2018 | International, C4ISR

  In Army’s newest unit, everyone learns cyber skills

  By: Mark Pomerleau Prior to its deployment to Afghanistan, the Army's newest unit received special assistance in cyber and electronic warfare techniques. The 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, or SFAB, is a first of its kind specialized group designed solely to advise and assist local, indigenous forces. As such, these units need specialized equipment and received training from Army Cyber Command on offensive and defensive cyber operations, as well as electronic warfare and information operations, Army Cyber Command commander Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone wrote in prepared testimony before the Senate Armed Services Cyber Subcommittee in early March. The distinct makeup of the unit ― smaller than a typical brigade and lacking all the resources and technical expertise therein ― means the operators at the tactical edge have to do the networking and troubleshooting themselves in addition to advising battalion sized Afghan units. The command's tailored support sought to advise SFAB personnel how best to leverage a remote enterprise to achieve mission effects, according to the spokesman. That means knowing how to perform electronic warfare and cyber tasks are part of every soldier's basic skill set. This was unique support with tailored training to meet the SFAB's advisory role mission, an Army Cyber Command spokesman said. Team members from Army Cyber Command specializing in offensive cyber and defensive cyber to serve as instructors during SFAB's validation exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana in January, a command spokesman told Fifth Domain. Electronic warfare personnel from 1st SFAB were also briefed on how cyber capabilities in use in Afghanistan currently support U.S. Forces. Specifically, the trainers provided the unit's communications teams best practices to harden networks. The Army Cyber Command team discussed planning factors working with down-range networks and mission relevant cyber terrain with the SFAB, specifically, the need to maintain situational awareness of the blue network and ability to identify key cyber terrain, the Army Cyber Command spokesman said. The unit was also given lessons on implementing defensive measure using organic tools. https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/army/2018/04/05/in-armys-newest-unit-everyone-learns-cyber-skills/

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  April 23, 2018 | International, Security

  The unlikely tool that’s improving physical security at military bases

  By: Adam Stone From their perch in the operations center at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., security analysts peer down like hawks over the Naval Research Lab, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling and a half-dozen other major military installations scattered around the national capital region. It takes just 10 people to maintain constant surveillance over all those disparate sites, “but you need machines to help you,” said Robert Baker, command information officer for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command. Those machines include a complex network of cameras and sensors, supported by analytics software. When the software spots a suspect event – traffic headed in the wrong direction, for example – that video feed gets pushed to the foreground for human analysis. This is just one example of how the military looks to technology to improve physical security. The real-world influence of technology is evident across the military: Everything from targeting systems to logistics to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance has been enhanced in some way by IT. Physical security represents an emerging frontier, where artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous technologies and other advances could give the military an edge. Force multiplier At Edwards Air Force Base in California last summer, a security team installed a ground-based radar system to monitor a wide landscape using electro-optical and infrared sensors. The team turned to technology to give them insight across a massive 308,000-acre facility. “The driving need for this system is to proactively defend Edwards AFB. Given the mission of Edwards, and how much terrain we have, we need a system that can overcome the difficulties of patrolling the vast amount of land Edwards presents to our patrols,” Staff Sgt. Alexander Deguzman, an installation security technician with the 412th security forces squadron said in a news release. As at the Navy Yard, the effort at Edwards is all about using some combination of remote sensing, networked surveillance and machine intelligence to create a force multiplier in physical security. Analysts say such initiatives could make bases and installations markedly safer at a lower cost and with less labor required. The rise of artificial intelligence is a critical technology moving forward. Security often involves the constant observation of multiple video and data feeds for prolonged periods of time. Human analysts get tired. They look away for a moment. In short, they miss stuff. “A human can look at things once or twice, but after 100 times they start to lose their edge,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Bob Elder, chair of the cyber and emerging technologies division at the National Defense Industrial Association. “AI goes beyond what a human can do, because it doesn't get tired.” Elder envisions a future in the near-term in which routine surveillance can be carried out by software-supported machines, with computers scanning for anomalies and alerting human analysts to potential threats. That saves on labor. In addition, such as approach also would allow the military to use less highly-skilled operators, relying instead on the machine's expertise and accuracy. Eyes in the sky Industry's interest in this subject has helped bring AI and autonomy to the fore as potential security assets. With the rise of the drones and the imminent arrival of driverless cars, some experts are looking to autonomy as the next logical step in military security. Drones alone don't offer a security fix: Their batteries run down too fast. The military might however consider the use of tethered drones, autonomous ISR assets that can hover in place and remain attached to a power source for ongoing operations. Put one at each corner of a base camp and leaders can put together a big-picture view of any approaching hazard. “This kind of solution is really smart, because you can constantly feed it power, you don't have to worry about it flying away, and if someone tries to damage it or take control of it, you know about it right away,” said Steve Surfaro, chairman of the Security Industry Association public safety working group. Another key industry trend, biometrics, may also point the way forward on physical security. “Investing in facial recognition software ... can improve perimeter security by automating aspects of it to speed up entry to bases for those authorized and focus screening attention on those that represent a risk,” according to a Deloitte report on smart military bases titled “Byting the Bullet.” The networking needs To make the most of the technological imperative around security, experts say, the military will have to give serious thought to issues of infrastructure. Security is becoming a data function: Sensor streams, video feeds, drone surveillance and other methodologies all will require robust network support and substantial compute resources. The data will need to flow freely, even in great quantities, with ample processing available to put it to use. Much of the processing will be done in the cloud, “but you still need to have a reliable connection to that cloud, which means you want diversity and redundancy. At a minimum you want two connections and ideally you want three ways of doing it – wires, line of sight wireless, and satellite,” Elder said. “You need a reliable way to get to your cloud services.” Such an implementation will require, at the least, a significant amount of bandwidth. At the Navy Yard, Baker said he is able to overcome that hurdle through thoughtful network design. In other words: Rather than pushing all the information back to the operations center for processing, new video and sensor analytics takes place on the edge, shrinking the overall networking demand. “The more processing you can do at the edge of the network, the less robust your network needs to be,” he said. Efficient network design weeds out routine activity “and then the really interesting information is being sent for human analysis.” While emerging technologies can enhance the military's security operations, some argue that IT capabilities are not, in themselves, a rationale for upgrading systems that may already be meeting mission. Budgetary constraints apply. “You could make processing faster, but what is the threat that we are trying to counter? If we are seeing zero incidents, why we would gold-plate that area? We want to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars,” Baker said. “At the same time, if there was some high-risk area where we needed to do that better, we would absolutely want to put resources against that.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/04/12/the-unlikely-tool-thats-improving-physical-security-at-military-bases/