October 10, 2024 | International, Land
HII is Awarded $75 Million Contract to Support U.S. Navy Integrated Training Systems
HII has performed similar work for the U.S. Navy for two decades.
January 17, 2019 | International, C4ISR
US considers new ways to detect and track enemy missiles
By: Robert Burns, The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering ways to expand U.S. homeland and overseas defenses against a potential missile attack, possibly adding a layer of satellites in space to detect and track hostile targets.
Details on how far the administration intends to press this in a largely supportive Congress are expected to be revealed when the Pentagon releases results of a missile defense review as early as Thursday.
The release was postponed last year for unexplained reasons, though it came as President Donald Trump was trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons. A review might have complicated the talks.
The Trump approach is expected to include emphasis on stopping missiles either before they are launched or in the first few minutes of flight when their booster engines are still burning. Congress already has directed the Pentagon to push harder on this "boost-phase" approach, which might include the use of drones armed with lasers.
Any expansion of the scope and cost of missile defenses would compete with other defense priorities, including the billions of extra dollars the Trump administration has committed to spending on a new generation of nuclear weapons. An expansion also would have important implications for American diplomacy, given longstanding Russian hostility to even the most rudimentary U.S. missile defenses and China's worry that longer-range U.S. missile defenses in Asia could undermine Chinese national security.
Senior administration officials have signaled their interest in developing and deploying more effective means of detecting and tracking missiles with a constellation of satellites in space that can, for example, use advanced sensors to follow the full path of a hostile missile so that an anti-missile weapon can be directed into its flight path. Space-based sensor networks would allow the U.S. to deal with more sophisticated threats such as hypersonic missiles.
"I think that makes a lot of sense," said Frank Rose, a former Pentagon and State Department official and now a senior fellow for security and strategy at the Brookings Institution. "This could make a real improvement in our missile defense capabilities."
Current U.S. missile defense weapons are based on land and aboard ships.
Republican presidents starting with Ronald Reagan, who proposed a "Star Wars" system of anti-missile weapons in space, have been more enthusiastic about missile defense than Democrats. In recent years, however, both parties have argued that better defenses are needed, if only against emerging nuclear powers such as North Korea.
Trump's detailed views on this are not well-known. The national security strategy he unveiled in December 2017 called "enhanced" missile defense a priority, but it also said it was not intended to disrupt strategic relationships with Russia or China, whose missile arsenals the U.S. sees as the greatest potential threat.
John Rood, the undersecretary of defense for policy, said last year that a space-based layer of missile-tracking sensors would not mark a big shift in American policy or as a security threat to others like Russia or China.
"It watches, it detects what others are doing. I don't regard it as a provocative act to observe the missile flights of missiles that are potentially threatening to the United States," Rood said in September. "I don't think having a sensor capability is a sea change for the United States," he added, without stating directly that the Trump administration will pursue this.
Such a system is different than the more provocative idea of putting missile interceptors aboard satellites in space, which is not expected to be part of the Trump strategy. Congress has ordered the Pentagon to study it and some senior Pentagon officials have said recently that space-based interceptors are feasible and affordable. However, Rood in September strongly suggested that that Pentagon is not ready to move ahead with that.
"Those are bridges yet to be crossed, some time away," he said.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said he expects the missile defense review to endorse an expanded role for missile defenses to counter certain Russian and Chinese missiles, especially those that could threaten U.S. allies in Asia and Europe.
“This is likely to stimulate them to accelerate offensive missile programs, like hypersonic vehicles, that can evade our missile defense,” Kimball said.
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September 7, 2021 | International, Aerospace
Aeralis Teams With Atkins, Siemens On Jet Trainer Development
LONDON—UK aerospace startup Aeralis has established teaming agreements with engineering consultancy Atkins and German technology giant Siemens to contribute to the development of its modular jet training aircraft. Siemens will provide software applications to aid the creation of Aerside, Aeralis'...
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November 26, 2020 | International, C4ISR
Could soldiers silently communicate using brain signals in the future?
Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — A breakthrough in decoding brain signals could be the first step toward a future where soldiers silently communicate during operations. New research funded by the U.S. Army Research Office successfully separated brain signals that influence action or behavior from signals that do not. Using an algorithm and complex mathematics, the team was able to identify which brain signals were directing motion, or behavior-relevant signals, and then remove those signals from the other brain signals — behavior-irrelevant ones. “Here we're not only measuring signals, but we're interpreting them,” said Hamid Krim, a program manager for the Army Research Office. The service wants to get to the point where the machine can provide feedback to soldier's brains to allow them to take corrective action before something takes place, a capability that could protect the health of a war fighter. Krim pointed to stress and fatigue signals that the brain gives out before someone actually realizes they are stressed or tired, thus letting troops know when they should take a break. The only limit to the possibilities is the imagination, he said. Another potential future use is silent communication, Krim said. Researchers could build on the research to allow the brain and computers to communicate so soldiers can silently talk via a computer in the field. “In a theater, you can have two people talking to each other without ... even whispering a word,” Krim said. “So you and I are out there in the theater and we have to ... talk about something that we're confronting. I basically talked to my computer — your computer can be in your pocket, it can be your mobile phone or whatever — and that computer talks to ... your teammate's computer. And then his or her computer is going to talk to your teammate.” In the experiment, the researchers monitored the brain signals from a monkey reaching for a ball over and over again in order to separate brain signals. But more work is to be done, as any sort of battle-ready machine-human interface using brain signals is likely decades away, Krim said. What's next? Researchers will now try to identify other signals outside of motion signals. “You can read anything you want; doesn't mean that you understand it,” Krim said. “The next step after that is to be able to understand it. The next step after that is to break it down into into words so that ... you can synthesize in a sense, like you learn your vocabulary and your alphabet, then you are able to compose. “At the end of the day, that is the original intent mainly: to have the computer actually being in a full duplex communication mode with the brain.” The Army Research Office-backed program was led by researchers at the University of Southern California, with additional U.S. partners at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; Duke University; and New York University. The program also involved several universities in the United Kingdom, including Essex, Oxford and Imperial College. The Army is providing up to $6.25 million in funding over five years. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/11/25/could-soldiers-silently-communicate-using-brain-signals-in-the-future/