November 8, 2022 | International, C4ISR
Four questions with France's military cyber mission lead
France foresees its future military force as heavily relying on systems of systems, whose networks are interconnected across the battlefield.
May 14, 2020 | International, Aerospace
Special Ops Budget Crunch Looms, But New Aircraft Demo Coming
And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform," said SOCOM acquisition czar Jim Smith.
By PAUL MCLEARY and THERESA HITCHENSon May 13, 2020 at 4:32 PM
WASHINGTON: Like the rest of the Defense Department, Special Operations Command is preparing for flat to declining budgets in the coming years as the national debt spirals to $25 trillion and the economy flattens due to COVID-19 related shutdowns.
At the moment, the command that trains, equips and sustains the nation's elite covert operators boasts a $13 billion budget, $7 billion of which goes directly into buying and repairing new gear, with another $800 million pumped into research and development. And that's the unclassified part of the budget.
The command wants to protect those investments, Jim Smith, SOCOM's top acquisition executive, told reporters this morning. But fiscal realities being what they are, “right now, our planning assumptions are based on a flat budget out through the next seven years or so,” he said. “And then, if you take into account inflation, you might even have a slightly downward pressure on our overall budget.”
Just recently, Defense Secretary Mark Esper suggested that the budget pressure might force his hand in cutting older, legacy systems earlier than planned to pull savings toward priority modernization programs like the $500 billion the DoD plans to spend on the refurbishment of the nuclear triad over the next decade.
Earlier this month Esper declared, “we need to move away from the legacy, and we need to invest those dollars in the future. And we have a lot of legacy programs out there right now — I could pick dozens out from all branches of the services” that could be cut or curtailed.
Asked by Breaking Defense if pressure on SOCOM budgets could lead to the command walking away from bigger and older systems, Smith said “SOF is a little different. There is a propensity for us to accept a near-[commercial] solution and get it into the fight very quickly. And for that reason, we tend not to sustain equipment or the 20-year, 30-year life cycles that you see in the services.”
That's not to say “we don't have the same pressures,” as the services in finding savings, he added. “We're trying to divest in a force that you know likes to hold on to things. And so we have very rich dialogue at the command level, I can assure you, about trying to divest over some of our larger programs going on.”
One area commanders want to grow is close air support and ISR in areas without large, improved landing strips via the Armed Overwatch program. Lt. Gen. Jim Slife, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, said in February at the Air Force Association's annual meeting that the aircraft would replace AFSOC's U-28s — and focus more on plane's close air support, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions.
Smith today explained that effort is standing on the shoulders of the Air Force's defunct Light Attack Aircraft effort.
“We are on the backs of the Air Force's effort. We're using the same program managers and engineers,” Smith said. “Everything that was learned by the Air Force in their light attack experiment is being leveraged into ours.”
The Air Force's long-running light attack aircraft saga — that at one point was expected to involve procurement of up to 300 airplanes — began way back in 2011, when the Air Force initiated a program to procure what it then called “light air-support” aircraft for use in insurgencies.
In 2017, the program morphed into what the service called the Light Attack Experiment, aimed at developing a concept of operations that involved US allies as well as fleshing out an overall acquisition strategy. In 2018, then-Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the service had set aside $2.4 billion in the fiscal year 2019 budget's five-year cycle to acquire agile, armed reconnaissance aircraft — once it had tested out its chosen competitors: Textron's AT-6 and the Sierra Nevada-Embraer team's A-29.
In October 2019, facing a threat from Congress to strip the program from its control, the Air Force issued a request for proposal to Textron and Sierra Nevada to buy “two or three of both” companies' turboprops. Finally, in February this year, the Air Force threw up its collective hands and gave up the quest to buy light attack aircraft in quantity — purchasing only two each of the AT-6 Wolverine and A-29 Tucanos for continued experimentation.
Several of the companies who originally fought it out way back in the day under the Air Force effort, as well as Textron and Sierra Nevada, are now throwing their hats in the SOCOM ring. Spokespeople for Air Tractor (which had formally protested the Air Force's contract award in the light attack competition), Sierra Nevada and Textron confirmed to Breaking Defense today that they are all in for the live-fly demonstration expected in November.
The plan is for SOCOM to buy up to 75 of the aircraft over seven years, beginning with a $106 million request in the 2021 budget to kick things off.
The Special Operations community is as interested in what it can put on one of these planes as it is in the aircraft itself.
“At the end of the day, I'm going to deliver a weapon system,” Smith said. “And so what's really important to me is what the vendor brings to the table, in terms of their ability to integrate weapons onto a non-developmental platform. I think the Air Force, you know, there was a lot of focus on the actual platforms. I don't think you'll see that from SOCOM. We are far more interested in the integration capability of our eventual industry partners on the platform.”
https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/special-ops-budget-crunch-looms-but-new-aircraft-demo-coming
On the same subject
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July 30, 2018 | International, Naval
Navy practices with key anti-mine asset: dolphins
By: Andrew C. Jarocki WASHINGTON ― When it comes to minesweeping at the 2018 Rim of the Pacific exercises, the top sonar for the job isn't located on any of the 46 ships and five subs sailing in the maneuvers. Instead, the Navy relies on dolphins. The highly-trained creatures “search for and mark the location of undersea mines” according to a description by the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program, which also deploys sea lions to recover suspicious objects at deep depths. The dolphins “possess the most sophisticated sonar known to science,” allowing them to find mines in any depth or light when mechanical equipment is often less reliable, the Navy says. That skill proves especially useful in crowded coastal waters or on murky sea floors. Navy RIMPAC footage released to the public shows dolphins, overseen by human trainers, finding practice mines and placing markers near them. Their reward? A steady stream of fish treats. https://www.navytimes.com/news/2018/07/27/navy-practices-with-key-anti-mine-asset-dolphins/
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June 19, 2019 | International, C4ISR, Other Defence
Can AI help limited information have endless potential?
By: Kelsey D. Atherton Humans are remarkably good at choosing to act on limited information. Computers, less so. A new DARPA program wants to train artificial intelligence to process and evaluate information like humans do, and produce actionable results on far smaller datasets than presently done. It's a program of such important DARPA's giving it VIP status, or a least VIP as an acronym: Virtual Intelligence Processing. “Successful integration of next-generation AI into DoD applications must be able to deal with incomplete, sparse and noisy data, as well as unexpected circumstances that might arise while solving real world problems,” reads a solicitation posted June 14. “Thus, there is need for new mathematical models for computing leading to AI algorithms that are efficient and robust, can learn new concepts with very few examples, and can guide the future development of novel hardware to support them.” To create these mathematical models, DARPA wants partners to look inward, creating AI inspired by the robust and massive parallelism seen in the human neocortex. If it is the architecture of the brain that makes humans so especially skilled at processing information quickly, then it is an architecture worth studying. “In order to reverse engineer the human brain,” the solicitation continues, calmly, “we need to apply new mathematical models for computing that are complete and transparent and can inform next-generation processors that are better suited for third-wave AI.” It is DARPA's nature to inject funding into problem areas it sees as both yielding future results and not presently served by the market, and this is not different. The solicitation explicitly asks for mathematical models that have not already been the focus of AI development. It's also looking for models that can inform the development of future hardware, rather than programs that can run on existing machines. DARPA is interested in how the hardware works in simulation, but wants partners to hold off on actually making the hardware for the model. So, the plan goes: create a mathematical model, inspired by brains, to process information on a small and limited data set, and then design it for hardware that doesn't exist yet. Easy as that sounds, the solicitation also asks proposers to talk about the limitations of the algorithms when applied to military tasks, and specifically limitations related to accuracy, data, computing power and robustness. Working from limited information is an expected future of military machines going forward. Between electronic warfare, denied environments and the very nature of battlefield events as rare and hard to record moments, doing more with on-board processing of limited data should enable greater autonomy. Even in the rare case where a weapon system transmits data back for algorithm refinement, that data set will be orders of magnitude smaller than the big data sets used to train most commercial machine learning tools. Should a proposer's idea be accepted and they follow through both Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the project, the total award is set at $1 million. A tidy sum, for anyone who can figure out the math to make a future computer run on sparse information as effectively as a human brain. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/06/18/can-brain-inspired-ai-run-on-lean-data/