US Air Force gets ready for decision on commercial aerial-refueling services

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  June 27, 2019 | International, Aerospace

  Missileer Improvements Hit Mark, but Still More to Do

  RACHEL S. COHEN Performance and professionalism in the Air Force's nuclear ranks has improved in the last few years following a spate of personnel issues, but there's always more work to be done to ensure the men and women who watch the arsenal are at their best, the service's top uniformed officer said this week. “I believe we've come a long way,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said at a June 26 AFA Mitchell Institute breakfast. “We've all had to make sure that we keep our foot on the gas on this. I'm optimistic, but I'm not comfortable.” Nuclear operators have hit rough patches over the past several years: low morale and lost focus coupled with reports of drug use, weapons mismanagement, a proficiency test cheating scandal, and frequent staff turnover. In response, theservice launched programs to revamp training and regulations and to keep missileers in their jobs longer, rather than send them to other specialties after a few years. The Air Force has also made a conscious effort to offer bonuses, tout missileers' work, and visit the three nuclear missile bases spread across rural Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. Now, the service wants to develop its missile-managing employees' leadership skills at the same time as it develops new nuclear weapons and Northrop Grumman's B-21 bomber. Some airmen at Air Command and Staff College are taking a yearlong course focused on the nuclear enterprise in one effort to bolster leadership in those career fields. “One of the tasks I gave them was to ... give us some fresh thinking on, how do we do command and control if nuclear weapons were inserted into a conventional fight?” Goldfein said. “We built our nuclear command and control to be separate from our conventional command and control.” If the Russians deployed a low-yield, “tactical” nuclear weapon in combat, regional commanders would need the ability to integrate nukes into their otherwise conventionally armed battle plan. However, Goldfein emphasized that a “nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon,” saying many don't believe there is such a thing as a tactical nuke. “Our command-and-control systems right now are not as agile as they need to be,” he continued. “This group of scholars have been doing some extraordinary work, writing papers and thinking about what is the command-and-control mechanism and how does that need to feed into [nuclear command, control, and communications]?” The Air Force's NC3 Integration Directorate has been mulling the idea of dual-use command and control for at least two years, and points to the concept as one of the most complicated security hurdles it faces in bringing the NC3 enterprise into the digital age. Goldfein argues efforts to modernize decades-old NC3 systems also need to dovetail with the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System, envisioned as a network of conventional C2 assets spread across air, land, and space sensors and platforms, as well as with the push into commercial space capabilities. http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/June%202019/Missileer-Improvements-Hit-Mark-but-Still-More-to-Do.aspx

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  July 31, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  Satellite Imagery + Social Media = A New Way to Spot Emerging Nuclear Threats

  BY PATRICK TUCKER A research team is training computers to find and fuse clues from wildly different rivers of digital data. Hiding illicit nuclear programs might be getting harder, thanks to new ways of gleaning and combining clues from various rivers of digital data. That's the conclusion of new research funded in part by the U.S. Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration. Satellites offer one kind of information; social media another — particularly inside countries that may be trying to flout inspections. But large volumes of satellite imagery and social media data aren't similar. You can have one analyst examine satellite pictures and another look at social media posts to see if they align, but the process is time-consuming and generally far from comprehensive. The study's authors developed a method for fusing different types of data in a machine-readable way to offer a much clearer picture. “In light of their ubiquitous emergence, social media increasingly promise to be of great value even though associated applications have thus far remained simple, and their fusion with other data has been largely ad hoc,” the team from North Carolina State University writes in “Fusing Heterogeneous Data: A Case for Remote Sensing and Social Media.” Only by creating a new statistical method for fusing the outputs of satellite data and social media data do you get something you can use to predict what might happen next within a given area of interest, such as a specific nation's nuclear enrichment or weapons development. The researchers looked at satellite and social media data from August 2013, when deadly floods killed eight people and caused widespread damage in Colorado. They sought to show that if you could algorithmically identify which imagery showed the flooding from space, and which geotagged tweets described it on the ground, you could could much more quickly verify one data set against another — that is, you could determine whether incoming social media data supports the conclusions you might be reaching from your satellite data, and vice versa. “Next steps for the project include evaluating nuclear facilities in the West to identify common characteristics that may also be applicable to facilities in more isolated societies, such as North Korea,” notes a press release on the paper. One of the authors, NCSU computer and electrical engineering professor Hamid Krim, said the team would try to “address the insufficient knowledge in general in areas of great interest (e.g. N. Korea and Iran). The goal is to come up with systematic methodologies to transport knowledge about nuclear environments available in other areas (e.g., in the West) to these domains where there is very little available. Creating such an environment in these places of interest will help them detect potential undesired activity.” Of course, there are limitations to media monitoring in Iran and North Korea. The former's social media environment is largely underground, thanks to bans on Twitter and many other social networks. The latter has virtually no social media environment at all. Krim noted that the “adversarial strategy” of social-media censorship makes his team's analysis harder. But even social posts from nearby countries can help illuminate their more secretive neighbors, he said — think tweets from Japan after earth tremors are felt. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/07/satellite-imagery-social-media-new-way-spot-emerging-nuclear-threats/150146/

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  April 30, 2024 | International, Aerospace

  Millennium wins ‘FOO Fighter’ contract for SDA missile tracking