US Air Force will buy E-7 Wedgetail in 2022, Boeing exec claims

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  May 14, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  The Army network plan to ‘compete everything’

  Andrew Eversden The Army recently conducted a critical design review for technologies it plans to deploy for Capability Set '21, one of the first pieces of its battlefield network modernization. In the review, the Army tested various elements of Cap Set '21, such as tactical radios and satellite terminals. Now, the service is making a series of capability trade offs — assessing affordability, technical maturity and density across formation. For example, the Army is weighing trade-offs between how many of its two-channel Leader radios and more affordable single channel radios will ultimately end up in an infantry brigade. Col. Garth Winterle, project manager for tactical radios at the Army's Program Executive Officer for Command Control Communication - Tactical, and Lt. Col. Brandon Baer, program manager for helicopter and multi-mission radios (HAMMR), talked with C4ISRNET about the decisions made during the critical design review and what these choices mean for the next batch of equipment known as Capability Set '23. This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity. C4ISRNET: What decisions were made during the critical design review (CDR)? COL. GARTH WINTERLE: We went from a 100 percent classified network, hard to get people security clearances, very expensive, NSA-certification required for everything as part of the network architecture, to 75 percent secure but [with an] unclassified architecture at battalion and below. That really adds a lot of flexibility — not only in the addition of affordable commercial technologies that really add capability rapidly because that shaves about 24 months off potential fielding timeline if you don't have to go to NSA — but it keeps a very strong encryption using some of the same algorithms you use for NSA certified radios. It's secure. It's not unsafe. While it's unclassified, it's still very well encrypted. It's just a different way of doing business. So it really opens the door for a lot of different things. Plus, it really improves the ability to share data with coalition and multinational partners, who are also operating at that security level. C4ISRNET: Can you explain the Terrestrial Transmission Line of Sight (TRILOS) radio and the capability trade off you made? WINTERLE: The quantities were adjusted in order to afford more flexible, more expedient and pretty much more affordable options at the brigade level and below. There's a system called TRILOS. Think of a big dish on a portable tower. If you can line it up with another big dish on a portable tower over pretty long distances, you can get very high data throughput very quickly ... It's purpose is to connect large command nodes together and enable them to share data much, much better. So one of the things we looked at as part of the CDR, and we experimented with, is a new smaller expeditionary version. I talked about a giant dish on a portable tower. We went to the company we worked with called Silvus. They have a smaller, little four antenna radio, it's about the size of your home WiFi router [and] does the same thing in slightly less bandwidth. It's not as capable, but it performs that same function. And it's much, much lighter, much easier to pack out and we're actually putting those under quadcopters, like a drone, that are tethered [so] they operate off a line. So you can raise that up in the air and hold that radio up in the air and get really good range to connect two of those radios together to share data. By trading out one system of those large dishes on the tower, we're able to buy a significant quantity of the smaller systems. TRILOS, those dishes on towers, still remain in the architecture. But just by reducing the quantity marginally, we're able to really add a much more expeditionary much, much lighter, easier to set up. And we can buy it in larger quantities to increase the quantity out in the architecture to increase that capability. C4ISRNET: Can you describe how the Army intends to procure some of the Integrated Tactical Network components? WINTERLE: The intent is to compete everything. Single channel radios are a prime example. We're getting ready to invite vendors that have conforming radios to an industry day to basically have a radio run off. [We want them to] provide us enough radios so we can get them integrated and start assessing them against each other and against the current offering from the vendor that actually went through the experiment. It's going to be a fully competitive action. It is important to note though that I can't just go out and buy a new radio and, boom, I can field it. There is an amount of time where we are going to have to procure a limited quantity of the systems that went through the experiment until I can get those other radios through enough lab-based experimentation and integration, so that I know they work on the network. So even though they might be very similar [to] what we experimented with, there will be a delay so I can actually start fielding those to operational units. But [our] intent is to start that as soon as possible as part of the procurement fielding next year — this competitive run off of single channel radios. Anywhere else where there was a stand-in capability where we know from market research that there's other vendors, we'll perform the same sort of competitive actions. C4ISRNET: What are some of the lessons learned from Capability Set '21 that can be applied to Capability Set '23? WINTERLE: We're going to have a design review every year. The year prior to the preliminary design review, which is the year we're in right now for Cap Set '23, focuses on small-scale experimentation and a kind of assessment of ‘what are those technologies that going to compete to be added to the architecture as part of the preliminary design review' in April of next year. So we picked April. We just did this CDR in April. So the preliminary design review for Cap Set '23 is next April. We've partnered with the network cross functional team to help conduct research and development funded activities of certain key technology that they want to see added to the architecture in Cap Set '23. C4ISRNET: How has the Army's capability set testing structure been suited for COVID-19? LT. COL. BRANDON BAER: Traditionally, we do a large operational type test, where our approach has been lab-based testing, [cyber]-based testing, and then doing what we're calling soldier touchpoints. They're smaller experiments, but we're doing more of them. It gives us an opportunity to capture data, soldier feedback at different points of time. We call it developmental operations or DevOps. We can go back and tweak the stuff, fix any problems, get it back out there and continue to collect feedback. But I think it's extremely important due to current conditions with COVID-19, and everything else. Because everything has kind of gone into a large pause. And if we would have had a large pause during operational tests, it could be six months or a year before we have another opportunity to do that, where when you're doing multiple events ... we're capturing data at different times and different soldier feedback, you're not reliant upon one event. As we move forward, I see continuous benefits through that. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2020/05/13/the-army-network-plan-to-compete-everything/

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

  Nearly all defense companies have reopened from COVID-19

  By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — As large chunks of the country begin to scale back restrictions caused by COVID-19, the companies of the defense industrial base have largely reopened for business, the Pentagon's top acquisition official said Monday. Speaking to reporters, Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said that only 33 total companies in the industrial base, largely smaller services providers tracked by the Defense Logistics Agency, remain closed for business. “Out of 10,509 companies [the Defense Contract Management Agency] tracks: we are down to two closed, and 267 companies having closed and reopened,” Lord said in her remarks. “Out of 11,413 companies DLA tracks: 31 are closed with 661 having closed and reopened.” That is an improvement from April 30, when Lord said there were 93 defense-related companies tracked by DCMA closed, with 437 of the DLA tracked companies shut down at that time. “We see an enormous amount of recovery in the defense industrial base. It depends on location and what type of work is being performed, but there is enormous progress coming back,” she said. “Obviously, for manufacturing, we need people on the line. So, we're doing things differently in terms of following CDC guidelines and so forth. “We don't know what that new normal will be on speed, but we see an enormous amount of recovery.” Lord acknowledged that the efforts to stabilize the defense industrial base would be ongoing, noting officials “continue to see the greatest impacts both domestically and internationally in the aviation and shipbuilding supply chains.” She added that advanced progress payments to companies has hit over $2 billion, and that all of the prime contractors have “confirmed their detailed plans to work with their supply chains to accelerate payments to identify distressed companies, and small businesses.” The department is still tracking a roughly three-month period of delays that could have repercussions on major defense programs, Lord said, although she declined to give any specific examples. “We have seen inefficiencies across most programs,” Lord said. “DoD continues to partner with our industry partners to do everything possible to keep programs on schedule and to minimize the cost and schedule impacts. This is obviously a dynamic situation, and the overall impacts will not be completely known for a while as we work through how we operate over the next few months.” https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2020/06/22/nearly-all-defense-companies-have-reopened-from-covid-19/

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  March 23, 2020 | International, Land

  The trouble when military robots go underground

  By: Kelsey D. Atherton Picture the scene: A rural compound in northwest Syria. An underground tunnel beneath the compound, where a cornered man with a suicide vest and two children hides from a raid by the U.S. Army's Delta Force. Outside the compound on Oct. 26, waiting and at the ready, was a robot. The vested man was later identified as Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant. “We had a robot just in case because we were afraid he had a suicide vest and if you get close to him and he blows it up, you're going to die. You're going to die. He had a very powerful suicide vest,” President Donald Trump said in a press conference about the raid in the following days. “The robot was set, too, but we didn't hook it up because we were too — they were moving too fast. We were moving fast,” the president continued. “We weren't 100 percent sure about the tunnel being dead ended. It's possible that there could have been an escape hatch somewhere along that we didn't know about.” In this case, the robot never went in the tunnels. Picture the scene, four months later, in the damp subterranean levels of the never-finished Satsop nuclear power plant outside Elma, Washington. There, engineers and scientists are testing the machines and algorithms that may guide missions for a time, preparing for a time when the robots won't remain on the sidelines. None of the robots fielded at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Subterranean Challenge urban circuit in Elma in February are particularly battle-ready, though a few could likely work in a pinch. Apart from a single human commander able to take remote control, the robots navigate, mostly autonomously. As captured on hours of video, the robots crawled, floated, rolled and stumbled their way through the course. They mapped their environment and searched for up to 20 special artifacts in the special urban circuit courses, built in the underground levels around a never-used cooling tower. The artifacts included cellphones emitting bluetooth, Wi-Fi and occasionally video. They included red backpacks and thermal manikins warmed to the temperature of humans playing an audio recording, and they included carbon dioxide gas and warm blowing vents. This urban circuit is the second of three underground environments that DARPA is using to test robots. Phones, manikins and backpacks are common across the tunnel, urban and cave settings that constitute the full range of subterranean challenges. The straightforward mission of the contest is to create machines that are better at rescue in environments that are dangerous and difficult for first responders, who are humans. If robots can find people trapped underground, then humans can use their energy getting to those same people, rather than expend that energy searching themselves. A subtext of the Subterranean Challenge is that the same technologies that lead robots to rescue people underground could also lead infantry to find enemies hiding in tunnel complexes. While Delta Force was able to corner al-Baghdadi in Syria, much of the military's modern interest in tunnel warfare can be traced back to Osama bin Laden evading capture for years by escaping through the tunnels at Tora Bora. Underground at Satsop, the future of warfare was far less a concern than simply making sure the robots could navigate the courses before them. That meant, most importantly, maintaining contact with the other robots on the team, and with a human supervisor. Thick concrete walls, feet of dirt, heavy cave walls and the metals embedded in the structure all make underground sites that the military describes as passively denied environments, where the greatest obstacle to communication through the electromagnetic spectrum is the terrain itself. It's a problem military leaders, particularly in the Army, are hoping to solve for future iterations of their networks. Team NUS SEDS, the undergrad roboticists representing the National University of Singapore Students for Exploration and Development of Space, arrived in Washington with one of the smallest budgets of any competitor, spending roughly $12,000 on everything from robot parts to travel and lodging. One of their robots, a larger tracked vehicle, was held up by U.S. Customs, and unable to take part in the competition. Not to be deterred, at the team's preparation area, members showed off a version of the most striking design innovation at the competition: droppable Wi-Fi repeaters. As designed, the robots would release a repeater the moment they lost contact with the human operator. To lighten the data load, the onboard computers would compress the data to one-hundredth of its size, and then send it through the repeater. “It's like dropping bread crumbs,” said Ramu Vairavan, the team's president. Unfortunately for NUS SEDS, the bread crumbs were not enough, and the team only found one artifact in its four runs between the two courses. But the bread-crumb concept was shared across various teams. Besides the physical competition taking place underground at Satsop, the urban circuit held a parallel virtual challenge, where teams selected robots and sensors from a defined budget and then programmed algorithms to tackle a challenge fully autonomously. The repeaters, such a popular innovation in the physical space, will likely be programmed into the next round of the virtual challenge. The first DARPA Grand Challenge, launched in 2004, focused on getting roboticists together to provide a technological answer to a military problem. Convoys, needed for sustaining logistics in occupied countries, are vulnerable to attack, and tasking humans to drive the vehicles and escort the cargo only increasing the fixed costs of resupply. What if, instead, the robots could drive themselves over long stretches of desert? After much attention and even more design, the March 2004 challenge ended with no vehicle having gone even a tenth the distance of the 142-mile track. A second Grand Challenge, held 18 months later, delivered far more successful results, and is largely credited with sparking the modern wave of autonomous driving features in cars. Open desert is a permissive space, and navigation across it is aided by existing maps and the ever-present GPS data. This is the same architecture that undergirds much of autonomous navigation today, where surface robots and flying drones can all plug into communication networks offering useful location data. Underground offers a fundamentally unknowable environment. Robots can explore parts of it, but even the most successful team on its most successful run found fewer than half of the artifacts hidden in the space. That team, CoSTAR (an acronym for “Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient robots) included participants from Jet Propulsion Laboratory, CalTech, MIT, KAIST in South Korea and Lulea University of Technology in Sweden. CoSTAR used a mixture of wheeled and legged machines, and in the off-hours would practice everywhere from a local high school to a hotel staircase. Yet, for all the constraints on signal that impeded navigation, it was the human-built environment that provided the greatest hurdle. On a tour of the courses, it was easy to see how an environment intuitive to humans is difficult for machines. Backpacks and cellphones were not just placed on corners of roofs, but on internal ledges, impossible to spot without some aerial navigation. Whereas the tunnel course held relatively flat, the urban circuit features levels upon levels to explore. Stairs and shafts, wide-open rooms with the jangly mess of a mezzanine catwalk, all require teams and robots to explore space in three dimensions. Between runs, the humans running the competition would adjust some features, so that completing the course once does not automatically translate into perfect information for a second attempt. “How do we design equally hard for air and ground?” Viktor Orekhov, a DARPA contractor who designed the course, said. “There's an art to it, not a science. But there's also a lot of science.” Part of that art was building ramps into and out of an early room that would otherwise serve as a run-ending chokepoint. Another component was making sure that the course “leveled up” in difficulty the further teams got, requiring more senses and more tools to find artifacts hidden deeper and deeper in the space. “Using all senses is helpful for humans. It's helpful for robots, too,” said Orekhov. Teams competing in the Subterranean Challenge have six months to incorporate lessons learned into their designs and plans. The cave circuit, the next chapter of the Challenge scheduled for August 2020, will inevitably feature greater strain on communications and navigation, and will not even share the at least familiarity of a human-designed spaces seen in the urban circuit. After that, teams will have a year to prepare for the final circuit, set to incorporate aspects of tunnel, urban and cave circuits, and scheduled for August 2021. DARPA prides itself on spurring technological development, rather than iterating it in a final form. Like the Grand Challenges before it, the goal is at least as much to spark industry interest and collaboration in a useful but unexplored space. Programming a quadcopter or a tracked robot to find a manikin in a safety-yellow vest is a distant task from tracking and capturing armed people in the battlefields of the future, but the tools workshopped in late nights at a high school cafeteria between urban circuit runs may lead to the actual sensors on the robots brought along by Delta Force on future raids. The robots of the underground wars of tomorrow are gestating, in competitions and workshops and github pages. Someday, they won't just be brought along on the raid against a military leader. Wordlessly — with spinning LiDAR, whirring engines, and millimeter-wave radar — the robots might lead the charge themselves. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/03/20/the-trouble-when-military-robots-go-underground/