13 février 2024 | International, Aérospatial
The autonomous MQ-4C Triton intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting drone can fly for more than 24 hours.
11 février 2022 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR, Sécurité
Reports indicate artificial intelligence played a key role in the Israel conflict with Hamas in Gaza in May 2021, and artificial intelligence is increasingly being incorporated into systems developed by Israeli defense companies, such as rifles, bombs and other systems.
28 mai 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center needs three things: new acquisition authorities, more staff, and the cloud. With JEDI delayed ‘potentially many more months,' director Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan said, he's turning to an Air Force alternative. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on May 27, 2020 at 2:25 PM WASHINGTON: The legal battle over the JEDI cloud-computing contract has slowed down the Pentagon's AI program, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center acknowledges. In the meantime, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan told an AFCEA webcast last week, JAIC will turn to a new Air Force program our longtime readers are already familiar with: cloudONE. Cloud computing matters for AI because machine-learning algorithms need lots of data and lots of processing power. A shared cloud can offer both with far greater efficiencies of scale than any single organization's in-house network. JEDI was meant to provide a single “general purpose” cloud to all users across the Defense Department, including Shanahan's Joint AI Center. But it has been mired for months in legal battles over which company should have won the contract, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. “It slowed us down, no question about it,” Shanahan told the AFCEA audience. “Azure, AWS, I will never get into a company discussion. I'm agnostic,” he said. “[But] if we want to make worldwide updates to all these algorithms in the space of minutes, not in the space of months running around gold disks, we've got to have an enterprise cloud solution.” JEDI can't be that solution today, Shanahan acknowledged, but “we now have a good plan to account for the fact that it will be delayed potentially many more months.” For instance, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, the Joint AI Center urgently stood up what they call Project Salus – named for the Roman goddess of health and safety – to pull data from 70 different sources, find patterns, and predict trends for US Northern Command and the National Guard. Salus went from a sketch on a “bar napkin” to a functional bare-bones system (what's called a Minimum Viable Product) in 29 days, Shanahan said. With JEDI unavailable, he turned to an existing Air Force cloud run out of Hanscom Air Force Base, which he'd previously used as head of Project Maven. But the Hanscom-based cloud is “an interim solution that will end ... here later in the fall,” Shanahan said. “Because of that, we are pivoting to the cloudONE environment.” CloudONE & Beyond So what's cloudONE? Like JEDI, it's a new cloud-computing capability that the Air Force hopes will be available to a wide range of users from across the Department of Defense. Unlike JEDI, it's not a joint program run by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but a service program, run by the Air Force. In fact, cloudOne is part of a whole package of computing initiatives – deviceONE, dataONE, et al – that the Air Force acquisition chief, Will Roper, began pushing (and branding) aggressively last year. Further, while JEDI is meant as the Defense Department's “general purpose” cloud, Roper's many ONEs are all intended to serve a single purpose, albeit a broad one: military command and control. Together, Roper's projects will make up what the Air Force is calling its Advanced Battle Management System. ABMS, in turn, will be an Air Force component of the future Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) meta-network to share battle data between all the armed services across all five “domains” of warfare: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Artificial intelligence is essential for JADC2, since human analysts can't pull together that much data from that many sources fast enough to make a difference in combat. The JAIC is far too small to build the whole JADC2 network – that's up to the far better-resourced services – but it can help. “We're not here to build JADC2,” he said. “We're here to find AI-enabled solutions that stitch seams together from all the services, who're [each] developing some version of JADC2.” The objective is to automate and accelerate the often-laborious process of bringing American firepower to bear. That “kill chain” includes everything from spotting a potential target with some kind of sensor, confirming what it is with other sensors, deciding to strike it, picking an aircraft, warship, or artillery battery to execute the strike, and then giving that shooter precise targeting data. Currently most of that requires human beings relaying coordinates and orders over the radio, typing them into terminals by hand, or even scrawling them on sticky notes because one network can't transfer data to another. “Accelerated sensor-to-shooter timelines are so important – to me, this is what the next couple of years will be about, and each of the services has a really strong programs in sensor-to-shooter,” Shanahan said. “What we're trying to bring is the AI/ML solutions.” To do that job, however, the JAIC needs more people and more legal authorities to conduct acquisitions on its own – although it will never be the size of the services' acquisition bureaucracies. For example, while Shanahan initially focused on lower-risk, non-combat applications of AI like maintenance, on May 18 the JAIC awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a landmark contract worth up to $800 million for AI “to support warfighting operations [and] decision-making and analysis at all tiers of DoD operations.” But JAIC did so in partnership with the civilian General Services Administration (using GSA's Alliant 2 contract vehicle), just as it's done past contracts through the Defense Information Systems Agency and other established organizations, because it doesn't have the necessary authorities and personnel in-house – yet. “I couldn't ask for better support,” Shanahan said, “but it's not going to be fast enough as we start putting more and more money into this capability development. We need our own acquisition authority.” In particular, he sees JAIC as a potential early adopter of the new streamlined process for software development and acquisition recently rolled out by the Pentagon's acquisition chief, Ellen Lord. The JAIC also needs to get bigger. Founded in summer 2018 with just four staff, JAIC has now grown to 175 personnel (counting contractors) and must keep growing, Shanahan said. But that larger staff won't include Shanahan: JAIC's founding director retires from the Air Force next month. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/joint-ai-center-turns-to-air-force-cloudone-as-jedi-stalls/
30 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense
Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― Democrats unveiled a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief package Monday night without defense industry stimulus funding, hinting that the billions of dollars defense firms sought to diffuse the economic impact of the pandemic are not coming. Defense officials warned they will have to tap modernization and readiness funds if Congress does not appropriate about $10 billion for defense contractors' coronavirus-related expenses, as authorized by Section 3610 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. However, neither the new Democratic measure nor the last draft from Senate Republicans contained any such aid. Smaller than the $3.4 trillion bill that passed the House in May in order to come closer to a compromise with Republicans, the new bill comes as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin are attempting to revive long-stalled aid negotiations. The House bill could be a final attempt to pass coronavirus aid legislation before the Nov. 3 presidential and congressional elections. The House bill does propose nearly $2.5 billion for defense: $320 million in emergency operations and maintenance funding for the services to buy personal protective equipment; $1.4 billion to pay salaries and other needs of military base facilities like child care centers and post exchanges that are usually paid by revenue-generating accounts; and $705 million for the Defense Health Program to cover COVID-19 prophylactics, therapeutics and personal protective equipment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., proposed his own $300 billion bill, but that legislation failed in the Senate earlier this month. That bill left out the $29 billion for defense ― which included $11 billion in Section 3610 reimbursements ― that Republicans proposed in their $1 trillion stimulus in July. The Senate is set to vote on a House-passed continuing resolution to prevent a government shutdown. It would extend the window for Section 3610 reimbursements through Dec. 11, a step sought by trade groups. But there has been no matching appropriation. Defense industry sources say lobbying for aid hasn't gained traction beyond a handful of hawkish Republicans, despite a public push from Pentagon acquisition chief Ellen Lord. The Pentagon's senior-most officials have not been as vocal as Lord, and lawmakers from both parties have been wary of new spending that favors industry after the Pentagon won a timely budget at record levels. “There's never been an appetite for defense stimulus from the parties that matter,” an industry source told Defense News. “I would be shocked if defense, being in neither of the two chambers' bills, ended up in the final bill.” Undercutting the argument that defense industry relief would immediately stimulate the economy, Lord said earlier last week that it will likely take five to six months before industry receives any reimbursements under the CARES Act. Lord also said that only 30 of the hundreds of defense subcontractors shuttered by the pandemic remained closed. Days ago, Lockheed Martin reportedly signed off on a 8.3 percent quarterly dividend increase to pay $2.60 per share and announced plans for an additional $1.3 billion share buyback. Lockheed is one of the main recipients of the Pentagon's accelerated payments to contractors, meant to boost cash flow to large and small defense companies during the coronavirus crisis. In May, Democratic lawmakers questioned Pentagon leaders about why they had spent just 23 percent of the $10.5 billion the department received under the CARES Act. The Pentagon responded with with its spending plan for the aid, which allocated $688 million to aid suppliers of aircraft engine parts, shipbuilding, electronics and space launch. Last week, key progressives, Reps. Marc Pocan and Barbara Lee, demanded an investigation and public hearings into that use of economic stimulus funding for defense contractors, calling it a “Pentagon misuse of COVID funds.” The Pentagon has refuted that characterization. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2020/09/29/new-covid-bill-dampens-hopes-for-defense-industry-aid/