U.S. State Department OKs potential sale of C-17 aircraft support to UAE -Pentagon

On the same subject

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  November 18, 2019 | International, C4ISR

  One way for the Pentagon to prove it’s serious about artificial intelligence

  By: Mark Pomerleau Department of Defense officials routinely talk about the need to more fully embrace machine learning and artificial intelligence, but one leader in the Marine Corps said those efforts are falling short. “We're not serious about AI. If we were serious about AI we would put all of our stuff into one location,” Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, commander of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command and the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, said at an AFCEA Northern Virginia chapter lunch Nov. 15. Smith was broadly discussing the ability to provide technologies and data that's collected in large quantities and pushed to the battlefield and tactical edge. Smith said leaders want the ability to send data to a 50-60 Marine cell in the Philippines that might be surrounded by the Chinese. That means being able to manage the bandwidth and signature so that those forces aren't digitally targeted. That ability doesn't currently doesn't exist, he said. He pointed to IBM's Watson computer, noting that the system is able to conduct machine learning and artificial intelligence because it connects to the internet, which allows it to draw from a much wider data pool to learn from. Military systems aren't traditionally connected to the broader commercial internet, and thus are limited from a machine learning sense. “We have stovepipes of excellence everywhere from interagency, CIA, NSA. The Navy's got theirs, Marine Corps' got theirs, everybody's got theirs. You can't do AI when the machine can't learn from one pool of data,” he said. Brown noted that he was not speaking on behalf of the entire department. Pentagon leadership has come to similar conclusions. Top officials have noted that one of the critical roles the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud program will do is provide a central location for data. “The warfighter needed enterprise cloud yesterday. Dominance in A.I. is not a question of software engineering. But instead, it's the result of combining capabilities at multiple levels: code, data, compute and continuous integration and continuous delivery. All of these require the provisioning of hyper-scale commercial cloud,” Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, director of the Joint AI Center, said in August. “For A.I. across DOD, enterprise cloud is existential. Without enterprise cloud, there is no A.I. at scale. A.I. will remain a series of small-scale stovepipe projects with little to no means to make A.I. available or useful to warfighters. That is, it will be too hard to develop, secure, update and use in the field. JEDI will provide on-demand, elastic compute at scale, data at scale, substantial network and transport advantages, DevOps and a secure operating environment at all classification levels.” Overall, Smith said that industry should start calling out DoD when policies or technical requirements hinder what it can offer. “If we're asking for something that is unobtanium or if our policies are keeping you from producing something we can buy, you've got to tell us,” he said https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/11/15/one-way-for-the-pentagon-to-prove-its-serious-about-artificial-intelligence/

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  July 25, 2023 | International, Other Defence

  EU issues verdict over Edge Group’s takeover of Milrem Robotics

  The case represented the first of its kind, where a third party gained external control of a key company while it was leading a European robotics program.

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  October 15, 2020 | International, Naval

  Defense spending up in San Diego, counteracting pandemic, report finds

  The report found increases in spending and jobs in the defense sector has helped stabilize the local economy ANDREW DYER Defense spending across San Diego County bolstered the local economy during the pandemic this year and now accounts for a quarter of the county's gross regional product, according to a new report released Tuesday. According to the annual Military Economic Impact Report, more than $33 billion in direct payments — via payroll, defense contracts, and retirement and veterans benefits — went to people and companies in the county during the 2020 fiscal year. That spending, along with spillover that researchers call a multiplier effect, equates to a total economic impact of more than $52 billion — 25 percent of San Diego's gross regional product. The numbers show an increase of 5.7 percent in direct spending and a 7.7 percent increase in jobs that pencils out to 342,486 jobs. Numbers in this year's report differ from last year's in part because Rady School of Management at UC San Diego compiled and analyzed the data, using modeling that was more conservative than prior calculations, said Mark Balmert, CEO of the San Diego Military Advisory Council, which commissions the annual report. Almost 60,000 active duty sailors and 50,000 active duty Marines make up the largest factions of employment, the report says, with more than 30,000 local civilians also employed by the Defense Department. Indirect employment linked to defense contracts adds roughly 190,000 jobs — about 15,000 more than fiscal year 2019. The presence of the military and defense industries has softened the economic blow of the pandemic, Balmert said. “The Rady School team did a great job of independently confirming what many of us already know, that the Defense budget provides an incredible stabilizing force during economic downturns such as we are experiencing during COVID19,” Balmert, a retired rear admiral, wrote in an email. The report singled-out the impacts of three Nimitz-class aircraft carriers that call San Diego home — the USS Carl Vinson, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, and the USS Abraham Lincoln. Each ship, the report notes, brings more than 3,000 sailors, making the three together a top-10 employer in San Diego. Each carrier contributes about $767 million to the region, the report says. https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/military/story/2020-10-13/defense-spending-up-in-san-diego-counteracting-pandemic-report-finds