16 novembre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Emirates says orders 15 Airbus A350-900 worth $6 bln | Reuters
Dubai's Emirates Airline on Thursday anounced an order for 15 Airbus A350-900 wide-body jets, which it said was worth $6 billion.
7 novembre 2019 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
By: Joe Gould
WASHINGTON ― Amid news that thousands of banned Chinese-made surveillance devices are in use across American government installations, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is asking the Pentagon to identify the Chinese gear in use at U.S. military facilities.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper made public Wednesday, Rubio said the Trump administration needs a comprehensive strategy to address the threats posed by foreign-sourced components and subcomponents.
“The Department of Defense must act quickly to identify and remove this equipment as every day that passes only provides our adversaries additional time to infiltrate and exploit our national security networks as well as the ability to monitor U.S. military activities that may be of interest,” Rubio said.
The letter comes after Forbes reported the government has made little progress complying with a legally mandated ban on Chinese surveillance tech. Government contractor Forescout found 3,500 devices from from telecom giants Huawei and ZTE, as well as surveillance camera-makers Dahua and Hikvision, on U.S. government systems a month before the ban was to take effect.
Language in the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act banned the procurement of Chinese-produced cameras and associated electronics to ensure U.S. government installations are not at risk of surveillance by potentially malicious Chinese technology. The provision also prohibited the renewal of any contracts currently in use across the federal government.
“As you continue to posture the Department of Defense in the era of great power competition, we must remain vigilant to attack from every possible source,” Rubio said in his letter to Esper. “I strongly urge you to implement a comprehensive and proactive approach meeting the requirements of the ban cited in the FY 2019 NDAA."
Among other questions, Rubio's letter asked what steps the DoD has taken to address the NDAA's ban on procurement, whether the department has considered removing the technologies, and whether the future will bring further prohibitions on additional products or manufacturers.
Rubio wanted to know whether the DoD has a way to purge nontraditional surveillance gear automatically. “How would you detect non-traditional IP-connected products, those beyond, if future prohibitions on such products materialize?"
https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/11/06/are-banned-chinese-cameras-watching-the-us-military/
16 novembre 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Dubai's Emirates Airline on Thursday anounced an order for 15 Airbus A350-900 wide-body jets, which it said was worth $6 billion.
30 janvier 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
By: Tom Kington ROME — As consensus grows in Italy that military planners need better access to civilian technology, a new law is being proposed to give the country its own version of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The new bill, which its authors claim has backing from the military and Italy's political parties, envisages the setup of a new agency able to stimulate and coordinate the development of civil technologies for military application. “We want to make the newest technology more accessible,” said Alessandra Maiorino, the Italian senator who is steering the bill through parliament. Established in 1958 in response to the Soviet Union launching its Sputnik satellite the year before, DARPA has since teamed with universities, corporations and government partners to fund research programs to improve America's defense capabilities. Technologies it has worked on have also fed back into civilian applications, notably the internet, voice recognition and small GPS receivers. “Thanks to the DARPA system, avangard civilian technologies are considered to have strategic value. This in turn has a cascade effect on the economy and on innovation in the U.S.,” according to the Italian bill. The bill calls for the new Italian agency to be based near Pisa at an existing military research facility. An eight-person management board would include a military director, three civilian researchers and representatives from the four government ministries involved — the Department of Treasury, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Economic Development, and the Ministry for Education, University and Research. The Joint Centre for Innovation and Strategic Technologies, known by its Italian acronym CINTES, will now be discussed in the Senate's Defence Committee, where representatives from the military, academia and industry will be invited to give their opinions, said Maiorino. The bill does not cite the required funding for the agency — a figure which has yet to be decided. However, it claims that Italy must quickly set up its own version of DARPA to keep up with France and Germany, who are already ahead in launching such an agency. The bill claims France's Innovation Défense Lab is now “allowing France's DGA procurement agency to map out and evaluate civilian technologies and acquire those which are of interest to the defense sector.” Germany's planned ADIC agency is cited in the bill as an example of the government investigating “disruptive” technologies in cybernetics and other key technologies. Maiorino, the senator backing the bill in Italy, is a member of the Five Star party, which has previously taken a unfavourable approach to defense investment. Before entering government in 2018, the party called for the cancellation of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. As such, the party's support for the new bill reflects a progressively more positive view of the defense sector since it entered government. https://www.defensenews.com/smr/cultural-clash/2020/01/29/new-bill-could-get-italy-its-own-darpa/
6 janvier 2024 | International, Terrestre
Opinion: The DoD is awake. It has realized new and escalating threats require rapid change, or we may not prevail in the next conflict.