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By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin on Monday won a $1.4 billion contract to sustain the global F-35 enterprise for the U.S. military and international customers. According to Lockheed, the contract provides for “air system maintenance; pilot and maintainer training; depot activation; sustaining engineering; Automatic Logistics Information System (ALIS) support, data analytics and predictive health management; and supply chain logistics” for all U.S. and international F-35s through April 30, 2019. Of the $1.4 billion sum, about 73 percent will be paid by the U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy, while the other 27 percent will be covered by international customers. The cost of sustaining the F-35 has been a growing concern for leaders across the Defense Department, from F-35 joint program executive officer Vice Adm. Mat Winter to Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. Bloomberg reported in March that the Air Force could be forced to cut as many as 590 F-35As from its 1,763 program of record should sustainment costs not improve. While Air Force leadership, including Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein, have said they have no plans to slash the program, reducing F-35 sustainment costs to that of fourth generation fighters like the F-16remains a big priority. Bridget Lauderdale, Lockheed Martin vice president of F-35 global sustainment, addressed the sustainment cost issue in a news release. “We are taking aggressive actions to improve F-35 aircraft availability and reduce sustainment costs. As the sustainment system matures and the size of the operational fleet grows, we are confident we will deliver more capability at less cost than legacy aircraft,” she stated. The company has already taken some steps to try to improve readiness and repair costs, including expanding the supply chain, buying spare parts ahead of need to boost availability and achieve economies of scale, and investing in diagnostic and data analytics technologies, it said. So far, more than 280 F-35s have been delivered and operate from 15 bases worldwide. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2018/04/30/lockheed-gets-14b-contract-for-f-35-sustainment/

By: Adam Stone The arm of the U.S. Marine Corps charged with tackling emerging threats has inked a deal that it says will allow it to do more realistic testing. “You want a sparring partner who reflects your adversary's capabilities,” said Lt. Col. Dan Schmidt, head of the field testing branch at the USMC Warfighting Lab. Enter MD5, the National Security Technology Accelerator. The Marine lab will identify challenges, develop warfighting concepts and design wargames and experiments. MD5 also will provide a platform upon which to accelerate these evolving concepts. Together the partners will support an Adaptive Threat Force Cadre, specially trained individuals who can share with their cohorts new and evolving response methodologies in the face of a wide range of threats. While the Marine lab will bring a military sensibility to the table, MD5 offers a private-sector approach. It is represented in this collaboration by Quantico, Va. based training-solutions contractor Guard Unit. “MD5 is designed to bring a commercial mindset to help solve problems in DoD,” said Zenovy Wowczuk, chairman of Guard Unit. “We bring technologists and other folks who haven't been standardized with DoD doctrine. They are private sector free thinkers, so they reflect the future adversary who also hasn't been indoctrinated into that mindset.” Schmidt laid out a number of specific warfighting challenges the partners seek to address. The partnership aims to tackle pervasive challenges in the information environment, issues around electronic warfare, cyber security, and command and control. The Marines want to look at technological fixes as well as organizational changes that could make the force more responsive to these threats. “How do we dominate and operate effectively with decentralized execution in a contested information environment?” Schmidt said. “Maybe if we just change a little bit of how we train and organize, we can dramatically impact the way we execute. We have a whole year of experiments lined up to flesh that out.” They also plan to look at hybrid logistics in support of future fighters. “We may have to spread out to greater distances with smaller units. Then you have to move blood plasma to the point of injury in a contested environment with contested networks. Now you are facing a whole new set of problems,” he said. Hybrid logistics could resolve some of these issues by combining the planning skills of human experts with artificial intelligence, robotics and rich data tracking. Another area of interest involves dense urban operations, an emerging combat scenario that brings my it myriad new concerns and challenges. “We know that the Marine Corps will fight expeditionary wars in mega-cities and we are in the process of discovering the implications of that,” Schmidt said. This exploration will likely dig deep into issues of networking, spectra and cyber strategy. “You have tunnels and skyscrapers and all this electromagnetic density,” Schmidt said. “We are in the early stages of developing an urban campaign plan, which has to include a range of emerging technologies. Our ground combat element, our logistics, our electronic environment ― all will play into how we fight in this environment.” MD5's close ties to industry could prove beneficial here. “We could pull in subject matter experts who have done city planning, who understand where the weak points are, and we could mount that data against the Marine Corps force to see how they react,” Wowczuk said. “We could pull from [off-the-shelf] technology to make it very difficult for the Marine Corps to do their job.” Early collaborations between the Marine and MD5 already have proven out the powerful potential of a bringing commercial-side view to the fight. In one experiment, a mock adversary was able to cull social media to gather critical intelligence on Marine activities. “We weren't used to that paradigm, where there is this rich environment of people on Snapchat taking pictures of us. They showed us just how easy it is to gather information, and from there we can devise new ways to protect some of our intelligence interests,” Schmidt said. “We would not have seen that without MD5. This is all about having an alternative perspective.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/electronic-warfare/2018/05/03/the-sparring-partner-who-roughs-up-marines-with-snapchat/

By: Kelsey Atherton For drone delivery to make sense, with existing capabilities of drones, the cargo needs to be relatively light, it needs to have tremendous value, and it needs to urgently travel the last mile by air. This is why, to the extent we've seen drones used for delivery in the wild, it's more likely as a means to carry contraband into a prison than it is a practical alternative to the postal service. But there's one other cargo that fits the description, and that's blood itself. Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, the Pentagon's stand-up Silicon Valley-focused acquisition house, is looking for a drone that can carry a modest cargo of blood, through the dark of night toward where it's most needed. Call it “Dronesferatu.” From FCW: The specs of the solicitation from the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental -- the ability to deliver a 5-pound package over 100 kilometers in “austere environments” -- strongly suggest that they're looking at an unmanned aerial vehicle system that supports refrigeration or other means of temperature control. “These deliveries, ideally automated, will provide essential items to critically wounded military personnel as quickly as possible after an injury occurs,” the April 23 solicitation states. “Ability to sustain a very high frequency of operations over an extended period of time is critical. Speed of delivery, reliability and robustness to failure and interference, response time, and overall delivery throughput are critical.” Getting the right blood to the right people as fast as possible means saving lives. To that end, DARPA's funded research into metabolic rate reduction to see if there's a way to make people bleed out more slowly, or into using female hormones to similarly prolong the survivable time without transfusion. In 2013, the U.S. Army conducted a study on pre-hospital transfusion for battlefield casualties being medically evacuated in Afghanistan, and in 2012 Canadian Blood Services even tested the viability of paratroopers transporting blood for transfusion. Consider blood drones complementary to this field of work. Early tests by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Uganda's Makerere University proved that small vials of blood transported by drone were just as viable as blood transported by car. Those same researchers followed up with a test of blood delivery from ship-to-shore, for possible use in response to coastal areas hit by natural disasters, where the roads are impassable but drones could still safely fly. The American startup Zipline demonstrated its own blood delivery drones in 2016, and has for a year and a half worked on delivering blood by robot to parts of Rwanda. DIUx's ask, that a drone fly over 60 miles and carry 5 pounds of blood, is not far off from what Zipline's drones can already do, with the company stating a range of 100 miles and a cargo capacity of just under four pounds. Weight and range tradeoffs are at the heart of aviation design, so it's likely that vendors have already pitched something within the bounds of the solicitation. Should that drone make a fast turnaround from ask to prototype to useful tool, the troops fighting abroad may gain a better shot at surviving otherwise-fatal blood loss. Unlikely that the reverse-vampire drones will look like bats, though. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/05/03/diux-wants-drones-that-are-drones-out-for-blood/

Anna Hrushka Army installations across Hawaii will receive $2.6 billion in funding over a 32-year period to build and upgrade facilities, as part of he Army's Hawaii Infrastructure Readiness Initiative. According to a statement released by U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, the Army will begin with an initial five-year investment of $350 million in military construction “to improve the shortfall of aviation facilities at Wheeler Army Air Field that are necessary to support a number of new aircraft the Army has brought to Hawaii in recent years, including AH-64 Apaches with the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade.” The initial funding will also be used to improve operations facilities at Schofield Barracks. “This long-term plan to upgrade and build new facilities represents the Army's commitment to Hawaii and our key role in the region,” Schatz said in a statement. “The planned funding is critical to Hawaii, to the Army's success, and to our national security. Fulfilling this plan will require timely and predictable funding, and the Department of Defense has my commitment to provide just that as we get back to the regular business of passing appropriations bills on time.” https://www.bizjournals.com/pacific/news/2018/05/02/hawaii-to-receive-2-6b-to-improve-army-facilities.html

David Axe The Army hopes that technology can solve the info-overload problem that technology has created, and free up people to do what people do best. With drones and tiny sensors spreading across the planet, the US Army is worried that there's simply too much information for soldiers to process. So the ground-combat branch wants to hack troops' brains, and develop new technologies and methods for pairing human beings and artificial intelligence. The idea is for the AI—"intelligent agent" is the term the Army uses—to process raw information, leaving the human soldier to do what they're best at: make decisions, especially creative ones. "In theory, intelligent agents will have parallel computational power that is much greater than that of humans," Dr. Jonathan Touryan, a neuroscientist at the Army's Human Research and Engineering Directorate in Maryland, said in an Army release. "In developing human-agent integration principles, we hope to accentuate the strengths of both while mitigating individual weaknesses." For its main human-AI integration effort, the Army teamed up with private industry and universities in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. The resulting Cognition and Neuroergonomics Collaborative Technology Alliance began in 2010 and is scheduled to continue in its current form until at least 2020. One recent experiment involved two people—a driver and passenger—traveling together along a busy highway. The passenger, acting as a sort of surrogate AI, talked to the driver in order to test how well a human being can remember and respond to new information while under stress. "What we're interested in doing is understanding whether we can look at the synchrony between the physiologies—the brain response or the heart rate response—between the driver and passenger, and use that synchrony to predict whether the driver is going to remember the information the passenger is telling them after the drive is over," Dr. Jean Vettel, an Army neuroscientist, said in an official release. The resulting data could help the Army determine when and how an AI should relay information to a soldier in combat. This man-machine division of labor could become even more important in coming years. The Defense Advanced Research Project's Squad X initiative, which began in 2013, aims to “increase squad members' real-time knowledge of their own and teammates' locations ... through collaboration with embedded unmanned air and ground systems." More drones and sensors means more information for troops to sort through during a firefight or some other life-or-death situation. Separately from the Army's Cognition and Neuroergonomics Collaborative Technology Alliance and DARPA's Squad X, the military has been working on an “implantable neural interface” that could allow soldiers and AIs to directly communicate. That's right, a brain modem, one that translates data into electronic impulses that are compatible with a human being's own thoughts. Inspired by the rapid advancements in cochlear implants and other medical implants, DARPA began work on the modem in 2016 as part of a four-year, $60-million program. Experts say the brain modem might not work. “The big challenge is you're talking about interfacing with the human brain—that's not a trivial thing," Dr. Bradley Greger, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University, told me. But for the Army, it could be worth taking a chance on this and similar technology. Drones and sensors are steadily getting better, smaller, cheaper and more numerous. There's more data by the day. "Humans simply cannot process the amount of information that is potentially available," Touryan said. "Yet, humans remain unmatched in their ability to adapt to complex and dynamic situations, such as a battlefield environment." The Army hopes that technology can solve the info-overload problem that technology has created, and free up people to do what people do best: think creatively. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59j7ja/the-army-is-working-on-brain-hacks-to-help-soldiers-deal-with-information-overload

By: Brandon Knapp The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants to leverage human-artificial intelligence teaming to accelerate the military's cyber vulnerability detection, according to agency documents. The task of securing the Pentagon's diverse networks, which support nearly every function of the military's operations, presents a nightmare for defense officials. The current time-intensive and costly process involves extensively trained hackers using specialized software suites to scour the networks in search of vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited, but the scarcity of expert hackers makes detecting cyberthreats a challenge for the Defense Department. DARPA's Computers and Humans Exploring Software Security (CHESS) program seeks to bolster existing cyber defenders with a new tool that would render much of the current toolkit ancient history: artificial intelligence. The program aims to incorporate automation into the software analysis and vulnerability discovery process by enabling humans and computers to reason collaboratively. If successful, the program could enhance existing hacking techniques and greatly expand the number of personnel capable of ethically hacking DoD systems. To achieve its goal, DARPA will solicit proposals from industry across five technical areas, including developing tools that mimic the processes used by expert hackers and ultimately transitioning a final solution to the government. “Through CHESS, we're looking to gather, understand and convert the expertise of human hackers into automated analysis techniques that are more accessible to a broader range of technologists,” the DARPA program description reads. “By allowing more individuals to contribute to the process, we're creating a way to scale vulnerability detection well beyond its current limits.” While DARPA sees artificial intelligence as an important tool for enhancing cybersecurity efforts, officials emphasize the essential role humans play in the collaborative process. “Humans have world knowledge, as well as semantic and contextual understanding that is beyond the reach of automated program analysis alone,” said Dustin Fraze, the I2O program manager leading CHESS. “These information gaps inhibit machine understanding for many classes of software vulnerabilities. Properly communicated human insights can fill these information gaps and enable expert hacker-level vulnerability analysis at machine speeds.” The CHESS program will span three phases lasting a total of 42 months. Each phase will focus on increasing the complexity of an application the CHESS system is able to analyze effectively. https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/04/27/darpa-wants-to-arm-ethical-hackers-with-ai/

By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON ― The Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced this week that it is reducing a surcharge on American defense goods sold abroad from 3.5 percent to 3.2 percent, effectively dropping the price foreign nations have to pay when buying weapons through the Foreign Military Sales system. The change will go into effect June 1. The funding from the surcharge is used to support the FMS process, by which the U.S. government acts as the go-between for industry and a foreign customer, using the American acquisition system. The announcement comes days after the Trump administration rolled out a new set of guidelinesfor conventional arms transfers and unmanned systems as part of a broader push to increase American weapon sales abroad. The U.S. sold $41.9 billion in arms through the FMS process in fiscal 2017, per a DSCA statement. Based on that figure, the U.S. took in roughly $1.46 billion through the 3.5 percent surcharge. Reducing it to 3.2 percent would drop that number to around $1.34 billion. DSCA head Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper tied the surcharge cut directly to that broader goal, saying in the announcement that the change “will immediately reduce the cost of doing business for our international partners.” “It demonstrates the Department of Defense's commitment to charge only what is needed in order to support the administration of the FMS program which includes the sale of defense articles, defense services, and military training,” Hooper added. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/04/27/us-makes-it-cheaper-for-foreign-nations-to-buy-american-weapons/

PARIS (Reuters) - Quatre groupes européens, dont le français Thales, ont annoncé mardi leur intention de coopérer pour doter le futur drone de surveillance européen de fonctions avancées de traitement de données et de communications. L'italien Elettronica, l'allemand Hensoldt, l'espagnol Indra et Thales précisent dans un communiqué commun avoir signé un protocole d'accord pour fournir des fonctions de renseignement, de surveillance, d'acquisitions de cibles et de reconnaissances (Istar) au futur drone en préparation par leurs quatre pays. "L'équipe est ouverte à la coopération avec d'autres entreprises", soulignent les quatre groupes. La phase de développement du drone MALE (haute altitude longue endurance) devrait démarrer en 2019. Airbus Defense and Space, Dassault Aviation (premier actionnaire industriel de Thales) et l'italien Leonardo avaient signé le contrat d'étude de définition en août 2016. Thales apportera son expertise dans les systèmes de missions de défense en se basant sur les technologies de connectivité, de big data (traitement massif de données), d'intelligence artificielle et de cybersécurité, fait valoir Patrice Caine, PDG du groupe français, cité dans le communiqué. (Cyril Altmeyer, édité par Matthieu Protard) https://www.capital.fr/entreprises-marches/thales-et-trois-groupes-comptent-equiper-le-futur-drone-male-1284701

By: Sebastian Sprenger BERLIN ― Airbus, Dassault and Leonardo have revealed the first full-scale model of an envisioned European drone at the Berlin Air Show, upping the the visibility ― and scrutiny ― of a project meant to epitomize the continent's growing military profile. Thursday's mock-up unveiling was orchestrated with big fanfare on the tarmac of Schönefeld airport south of the German capital. Featuring climactic music, lights and dissipating smoke, the ceremony organizers were lucky enough to catch a momentary break between a hefty mix of rain showers, sunshine and wind gusts, considered typical April weather here. The medium-altitude, long-endurance aircraft rides on a twin-turboprop propulsion system and will come in a strike-capable configuration when it reaches the actual flying stage in the mid-2020s. Germany, France, Italy and Spain have a hand in the program, though only the first three are considered the principal main industry partners, with Germany's Airbus in the lead. Notably, companies are building the unmanned plane so it can operate immediately in the dense European airspace. Past practice of first acquiring a drone and later worrying about requisite certifications has proven to be problematic, especially for the Germans. The mock-up is based on a vehicle configuration agreed by the partner nations in mid-2017. In January, the program passed a systems requirements review, prompting another study phase that should last through 2018 and lead to another milestone, a “system preliminary design review,” the companies wrote in a statement. “While still a lot of work lies ahead of us, this full-scale model represents a first milestone of what Europe can achieve in a high-technology sector if it bundles its industrial strength and know-how,” said Dirk Hoke, CEO of Airbus Defence and Space. Hoke told reporters he views the approach to the drone as a learning experience for a new combat aircraft development that is on the horizon between Germany and France. In addition, he told Defense News there is some hope of redemption for problem-plagued projects of the past. For example, the European drone will come in one base configuration for all the countries that users can then move to expand, avoiding too many separate build types that came to haunt the A-400M, Hoke said. “This is a chance to prove that we can work in a different way together,” he said. One of the configurations will entail a strike package, though officials said they had yet to think about the particulars of that mission set. In an apparent nod to Germany, Hoke told Defense News that the combat capability would depend on political sensitivities in each user nations, and that customers can opt to solely install the reconnaissance features. Armed drones are a thorny subject in Germany, as the weapons conjure up images of the U.S. government's targeted killing of suspected terrorists, which many in the country reject. By the time the issue of armaments comes up for the Eurodrone, however, there may already be a resolution. That's because upcoming parliamentary decisions could lead to Germany's first-ever armed drone, the Heron TP, leased through Airbus from Israel. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/techwatch/2018/04/26/companies-unveil-eurodrone-model-at-berlin-air-show/