Army plans to stop building newest CH-47 variant in FY20, except for special ops

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  7 janvier 2019 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR

  Pentagon Seeks a List of Ethical Principles for Using AI in War

  BY PATRICK TUCKER An advisory board is drafting guidelines that may help shape worldwide norms for military artificial intelligence — and woo Silicon Valley to defense work. U.S. defense officials have asked the Defense Innovation Board for a set of ethical principles in the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. The principles are intended to guide a military whose interest in AI is accelerating — witness the new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center — and to reassure potential partners in Silicon Valley about how their AI products will be used. Today, the primary document laying out what the military can and can't do with AI is a 2012 doctrine that says a human being must have veto power over any action an autonomous system might take in combat. It's brief, just four pages, and doesn't touch on any of the uses of AI for decision support, predictive analytics, etc. where players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are making fast strides in commercial environments. “AI scientists have expressed concern about how DoD intends to use artificial intelligence. While the DoD has a policy on the role of autonomy in weapons, it currently lacks a broader policy on how it will use artificial intelligence across the broad range of military missions,” said Paul Scharre, the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. Josh Marcuse, executive director of the Defense Innovation Board, said crafting these principles will help the department “safely and responsibly” employ new technologies. “I think it's important when dealing with a field that's emergent to think through all the ramifications,” he said. The Board, a group of Silicon Valley corporate and thought leaders chaired by former Google and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt, will make the list public at its June meeting. Defense Department leaders will take them under consideration. Marcuse believes that the Pentagon can be a leader not just in employing AI but in establishing guidelines for safe use — just as the military pioneered safety standards for aviation. “The Department of Defense should lead in this area as we have with other technologies in the past. I want to make sure the department is not just leading in developing AI for military purposes but also in developing ethics to use AI in military purposes,” he says. The effort, in part, is a response to what happened with the military's Project Maven, the Pentagon's flagship AI project with Google as its partner. The effort applied artificial intelligence to the vast store of video and and image footage that the Defense Department gathers to guide airstrikes. Defense officials emphasized repeatedly that the AI was intended only to cut down the workload of human analysts. But they also acknowledged that the ultimate goal was to help the military do what it does better, which sometimes means finding and killing humans. An employee revolt ensued at Google. Employees resigned en masse and the company said that they wouldn't renew the contract. Scharre, who leads the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, said, “One of the challenges for things like Project Maven, which uses AItechnology to process drone video feeds, is that some scientists expressed concern about where the technology may be heading. A public set of AI principles will help clarify DoD's intentions regarding artificial intelligence.” Full artcile: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/01/pentagon-seeks-list-ethical-principles-using-ai-war/153940/

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  11 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Northrop CEO forecasts ‘more consolidation’ for defense sector

  By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― The drive to rapidly develop defense technologies will spur more industry mergers and acquisition activity over the next two decades, and create new entrants in the realm of cyber and artificial intelligence, Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden said Tuesday. “As a result, I believe the industry will look different in terms of its composition. There'll be more consolidation,” Warden said in a wide-ranging interview through the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She also foresaw increased government-industry collaboration. “There will also be more new entrants, and so it's hard to say there will be fewer players, but the ones that exist today will likely continue to consolidate as we have seen in recent years and we've seen in other cycles,” she added. New firms will adapt commercial AI and machine-learning applications for military surveillance as well as command and control, Warden predicted. The executive's comments came after the new deputy defense secretary, Kathleen Hicks, said at her confirmation hearing this month that she is concerned by consolidation in the defense-industrial base and that competition is needed for the U.S. military to maintain an edge over China and Russia. Hicks' office will review deals that involve national security issues. “Extreme consolidation does create challenges for innovation,” Hicks said. “We need to have a lot of different, good ideas out there. That's our competitive advantage over authoritarian states like China, and Russia. And so if we move all competition out, obviously that's a challenge for the taxpayer, but it's also a challenge in terms of the innovation piece.” The U.S. faces a new space race, and the Biden administration should continue work to compete in that domain, said Warden, whose firm saw sales growth last year driven by its space division. Her comments also come in the wake of the Biden administration's affirmed support for Space Force, the military service created under the Trump administration. “Many nations are demonstrating the capability to both operate in space but also have anti-satellite capability, so what we need to focus on is putting in place the norms and technologies that allow us to have freedom of operation in the space domain,” Warden said. Last month, Northrop reported that its Space Systems segment led the company in sales for both the fourth quarter of 2020 and for the full year. The segment was driven by a higher volume on classified programs as well as the Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared and NASA Artemis programs. A ramp-up for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, launch vehicles and hypersonics programs drove the company's Launch & Strategic Missiles sales. Northrop won a $13.3 billion contract in September from the U.S. Air Force to build the GBSD, which replaces the aging Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system. President Joe Biden is expected to launch a review of the nation's expensive nuclear modernization portfolio. Reportedly, the GBSD program could cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $110.6 billion. Warden defended the country's current track on nuclear modernization and said America's triad of nuclear weapons is “very important to keeping the peace.” More broadly, Warden offered a message that seemed calibrated to the new administration, saying the aerospace and defense industry provides platforms like the F-35 fighter as “an aid to diplomacy” and interoperability among allies. “It's hard for anyone to say what would have happened had we not had ICBMs over the last 50 years,” she said, “but lots of very smart statesman, military personnel and civilians alike have studied this through multiple nuclear posture reviews and come out believing that the best posture for our nation is continuing to move forward with the modernization of all three legs of our triad.” https://www.defensenews.com/2021/02/09/northrop-ceo-sees-more-consolidation-for-defense-sector/

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  16 novembre 2017 | International, Aérospatial, Terrestre

  Training foreign troops will be the ‘flagship’ of Canada's new UN peace strategy, top soldier says

  Gen. Jonathan Vance said that despite speculation, there was never a plan in the works to deploy troops on a single UN operation. OTTAWA—Training foreign troops will be the “flagship” of Canada's newly announced peace operations strategy, says the country's top soldier, who concedes that elements of the plan still require months more work. Prime Minster Justin Trudeau on Wednesday took the wraps off his government's long-awaited effort to reengage with United Nations peace missions. Elements of the strategy include $15 million in funding to boost participation by women soldiers in UN operations; an initiative to end the recruitment of child soldiers; and the promise of Canadian personnel to assist with training. It also pledges up to six helicopters, two transport aircraft and a quick reaction force of up to 200 personnel to support UN missions. But apart from Trudeau's promise of a single transport aircraft for UN operations based in Uganda, the plan offered no details on possible deployments. Gen. Jonathan Vance, the chief of defence staff, said it would be “inappropriate” to say when those might start. “I'm not even going to hazard a guess on that one right now. Step number one is now to get into detailed planning with the UN and find out . . . the what, the where and the when,” he said in an interview. This week's announcement was months in the making. The Liberals pledged in the 2015 election to “recommit” to UN peace operations, in part by providing specialized capabilities such as medical teams and engineering support. That promise was followed in August, 2016 by a commitment to deploy up to 600 troops and 150 police officers on UN operations. Canada's contributions to UN peace missions are at their lowest levels in years with just 23 military personnel currently assigned to such operations. That's not likely to change soon. In the wake of Wednesday's commitments, Vance made clear that it will take many months yet of planning and discussions with the United Nations to determine how Canada's offers of personnel and equipment can best fit with ongoing missions. “Some of the ‘when' on smart pledges is years away. Some of the ‘when' on other potential operations is sooner than that,” he said. Some observers criticized the Liberal government for not committing personnel to a single mission, choosing instead to disperse personnel among many possible locations. But Vance said that despite speculation, there was never a plan in the works to deploy troops on a single UN operation, saying, “I've never received guidance that said do a mission with 600 (troops).” Suggestions that troops were headed to Mali, for example, or that the announcement had been delayed “didn't match the reality of the work we were doing,” Vance said. “There were a lot of assumptions made about, ‘hey, we're going to Africa',” Vance said Instead, he said that Canada was working with the United Nations “to figure out a new way of doing business.” And he said repeated fact-finding trips by bureaucrats and politicians, including visits to African countries, were not about scouting any one particular mission. “That's us doing research . . . that allowed us to arrive at an approach that government could consider,' he said. “We've been working for over a year to determine what are the various options available to government in terms of how to improve UN performance overall with Canadian troops,” Vance said. Yet given that Africa is the location of many UN missions so “it's very likely a place where we would offer contributions,” Vance said. The peace support strategy calls for a new training and advisory team to work with a nation before and during a deployment to improve their own ability to conduct peace operations. It also says that Canada will contribute to training centres and schools. Vance said such activities will be the “flagship” of the plan. “We're going to try and leverage the Canadian expertise, one of the best trained militaries in the world and best equipped, . . . so that UN mission performance can improve,” Vance said. Defence analyst Dave Perry said elements of the peacekeeping strategy make sense. The problem, he said, is that the government itself had raised expectations with its drawn-out decision-making and rhetoric about its intentions. “It wasn't just what the government was saying publicly. I think there were also a number of commitments that were strongly intimated to some of Canada's key allies,” Perry said in an interview. “My sense is that the different options that were put forward by the department of national defence for whatever reasons weren't palatable to the government,” said Perry, a senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. While he said the contributions to UN operations were “modest,” Perry said Canada is better off providing military support to other missions, such as coalition efforts to combat Daesh, or NATO roles. “Bluntly, there are better ways of achieving Canadian national objectives in the world that through UN missions,” Perry said. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/11/16/training-foreign-troops-will-be-the-flagship-of-canadas-new-un-peace-strategy-top-soldier-says.html