US Air Force awards contracts to start designing F-35 weapon

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  August 28, 2020 | International, Naval

  Navy Turns To AI To Save Billions In Fight Against Rust

  By KELSEY ATHERTON ALBUQUERQUE: The Navy is using Google Cloud to speed up a basic but time consuming task: finding and identifying rust. This approach has already been applied to inspect wind turbines and find potholes in roads, and promises advantages both in speed of inspection and in future predictive maintenance. “The AI technology behind this enabled the US Navy to quickly and seamlessly examine tens of thousands of images to prioritize the needs to be repaired immediately and or later on,” Mike Daniels, vice president of Global Public Sector, Google Cloud, told me in an interview. While Google was unwilling to disclose the exact value of the contract, the promise is that speedy, AI-enabled inspections will lower labor and material costs of inspection and repair enough to more than justify the expenditure on inspection AI. “The tools we're providing can not only save the Navy billions each year, but significantly improve readiness and speed deployment,” said Daniels. “And this is a physical job right now. We're improving results for the inspectors.” If AI-facilitated rust inspection can reduce the amount of time a ship needs to stay in harbor for repairs, it can narrow the window in which catastrophic disasters, like the fire which tore apart the Bonhomme Richard, can happen. This work is being done through Simple Technology Solutions (STS), who was awarded the work as a Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research project. To train the AI, STS flew a drone on inspections to get images of rust. Next, STS combined these drone-filmed images with public domain images of ships, and uploaded both sets to a Google Cloud server. Specifically, the inspections will look for broad area rust and corrosion, as well as subtler damage that human eyes might skip over, like pitting or focused damage. Using native machine learning built into the Google Cloud, STS could then train the algorithm to process, understand and identify rust in the images. This is an iterative process, one where every uploaded inspection improves the accuracy of the next inspection. “There's no classified data that's going to be handled as part of this project,” said Daniels, noting that Google offers a high level of protection for images stored in its cloud by default. As we have seen in the past, aggregated unclassified data can sometimes be enough to reveal classified information, but the immediate utility of cloud-powered inspections should offset any distant concern of weakness revealed through corrosion maintenance. Most importantly, the inspection tool promises savings in time. A widely-cited 2014 report from the US Navy attributed the cost of fighting rust and corrosion at $3 billion. Some of that cost is hard to shake: the paint used to cover rust-scrapped areas can cost as much as $250 a gallon. Catching corrosion quickly and early shortens the amount of time humans need to work to fix a vessel, and should reduce the area that needs repair for each inspection. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/08/navy-turns-to-ai-to-save-billions-in-fight-against-rust/

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  June 23, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR, Security

  DoD Seeks Billions More For COVID-Related Delays

  DoD also looking for tens of billions in extra funding from the White House, public still waiting for specifics on where it will go. By PAUL MCLEARYon June 22, 2020 at 3:16 PM WASHINGTON: The Pentagon knows it needs “lower double digit billions” to cope with COVID-19 related costs, but remains vague about just how much money it is asking the White House to add to the $740 billion already requested for 2021. Defense officials disclosed weeks ago that a request was on its way, and it is now with the White House Office of Management and Budget waiting for approval. The money will be part of a large-scale effort to cover defense industry claims of supply chain and workforce reductions as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, and is covered explicitly by Section 3610 of the coronavirus relief package. Under that rule, contractors can ask the Pentagon and other federal agencies to cover things mandated by new government rules like personal protective equipment, cleaning, and staggering work shifts. Speaking with reporters at the Pentagon this morning, acquisition chief Ellen Lord said “sooner is better, I think, is the best way to put it,” when asked about when the funds will be available. Lord repeated the timeline she has been referring to for weeks, saying “we continue to assess a three-month slowdown to all programs due to COVID-19,” she said, “we have seen inefficiencies across most programs. COVID-19 is shutting down defense manufacturing facilities and production lines, disrupting supply chains and distressing the financial stability of the companies DoD relies on to protect the nation.” The vast majority of defense firms have operated at at least some reduced capacity over the past several months, and Lord said the Pentagon continues to see the biggest impacts in the aviation and ship building supply chains” In order to spur the system, the DoD has sped up planned payments to the defense industry, hitting the $2 billion mark in recent days, and each of the large prime contractors have “confirmed their detailed plans to work with their supply chains to accelerate payments to identify distressed companies, and small businesses.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/06/dod-seeks-billions-more-for-covid-related-delays

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  December 31, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  The Corps’ HIMARS are going airborne as Marines bring them to targets via KC-130s

  By: Shawn Snow The same innovative rocket artillery unit that fired HIMARS from a ship is once again mixing things up, but this time they're doing it with aircraft. The tactic is called HI-RAIN, which is short for HIMARS Rapid Infiltration, where the Corps takes its precision-guided rocket artillery system, stuffs it in a KC-130 and flies it to a location to destroy a target. Once on the ground, the HIMARS crew offloads the system and strikes a target and then rapidly exfils from the target site. The Corps says HI-RAIN is the progression of an aerial artillery raid capability they already have, which can be done with sling loaded M777 howitzers hauled by the Corps' heavy lift helicopters like the CH-53. The MV-22 Osprey is also capable of lifting the M777. Aerial artillery raids provide battlefield commanders flexibility by inserting a long-range fire capability beyond a captured beachhead or behind enemy lines to quickly destroy a target. But the HIMARS will greatly extend the Corps' range of that existing raid capability, which should prove useful should the Corps find itself stretched thinly across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean in a fight with a sophisticated adversary like China. A Marine HIMARS unit known as 5th Battalion, 11th Marines, recently executed a HI-RAIN mission on Dec. 7 as part of an annual exercise with the 1st Marine Division dubbed Steel Knight. For the exercise, Marines with 5/11 loaded two HIMARS systems onto two KC-130 aircraft at Marine Corps Air Station, Camp Pendleton, California, and flew to Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah. Once on the ground, the a HIMARS unit fired one M31A1 GMLRS – Unitary precision rocket, striking a target approximately 15 km away. The GMLRS round is short for Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System. HIMARS are capable of striking targets several hundred kilometers out, the short range was due to range limitations, Marine officials said. The Corps says 5/11 began aerial embarkation testing with KC-130s in 2014, and since then have carried out many HI-RAIN missions across the U.S. from Alaska to Arizona, all during training exercises. Other Marine HIMARS units are honing the same skill. The Corps is also capable of carrying out artillery raids inserting howitzers via helicopter. In August, 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines, carried out the first lift in an austere environment in Australia of an M777 howitzer using an MV-22 Osprey. The Marines of 5/11 are known for their innovative experimentation firing HIMARS from the deck of the amphibious transport dock Anchorage in fall 2017. https://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/your-marine-corps/2018/12/28/the-corps-himars-are-going-airborne-as-marines-bring-them-to-targets-via-kc-130s