8 mai 2024 | International, C4ISR
5 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
Brexit turns up the heat on access rules to EU defense coffers
By: Sebastian Sprenger
COLOGNE, Germany — European leaders should modify rules to include Britain and the United States in their defense-cooperation efforts, ending a simmering dispute that could turn toxic over time, according to the director general of the European Union Military Staff.
“We will find a way [on] how to engage the United States and other third-party states,” Lt. Gen. Esa Pulkkinen told Defense News in an interview in Washington last week. But he cautioned that the unresolved issue could become a “permanent” thorn in the side of relations with the United States, in particular.
At issue are the conditions for access to the multibillion-dollar European Defence Fund and its associated collaboration scheme, the Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO. The funds are meant to nurse the nascent defense capabilities of the continent's member states, with the idea that NATO would be strengthened in the process.
Officials have left the door open for the U.K., which recently left the EU, as well as its defense companies to partake in individual projects, given the country's importance as a key European provider of military capabilities. But the exact terms have yet to be spelled out, requiring a balancing act between framing member states as primary PESCO beneficiaries while providing a way in for key allies.
Defense officials in Washington previously criticized the EU initiative, complaining that it would needlessly shut out American contractors. European leaders countered that the program is first and foremost meant to streamline the bloc's disparate military capabilities, stressing that avenues for trans-Atlantic cooperation exist elsewhere.
“EDF and PESCO isn't everything in the world,” Pulkkinen said in Washington. “We are not going to violate any U.S. defense industrial interests.
“The defense industry is already so globalized, they will find a way [on] how to work together.”
While European governments have circulated draft rules for third-party access to the EU's defense-cooperation mechanism, a final ruling is not expected until discussions about the bloc's budget for 2021-2027 are further along, according to issue experts.
Officials at the European Defence Agency, which manages PESCO, are taking something of a strategic pause to determine whether the dozens of projects begun over the past few years are delivering results.
Sophia Besch, a senior research fellow with the Centre for European Reform, said the jury is still out over that assessment. “The big question is whether the European Union can prove that the initiatives improve the operational capabilities,” she said.
Aside from the bureaucratic workings of the PESCO scheme, the German-French alliance — seen as an engine of European defense cooperation — has begun to sputter, according to Besch.
In particular, Berlin and Paris cannot seem to come together on operational terms — whether in the Sahel or the Strait of Hormuz — at a time when Europe's newfound defense prowess runs the risk of becoming a mostly theoretical exercise, Besch said.
The EU members' ambitions remain uneven when it comes to defense, a situation that is unlikely to change anytime soon, according to a recent report by the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
“The dispute around the concept of strategic autonomy has not led to any constructive consensus, and it will likely affect debates in the future,” the document stated. “Member states and the EU institutions will continue to promote different concepts that encapsulate their own vision of defense cooperation.”
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13 février 2020 | International, Terrestre
DARPA wants commanding robots to work like a video game
By: Kelsey D. Atherton In a fake city in Mississippi, DARPA is training robots for war. In December 2019, at a camp southeast of Hattiesburg, hundreds of robots gathered to scout an urban environment, and then convert that scouting data into useful information for humans. Conducted at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, the exercise was the third test of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enable Tactics (OFFSET) program. OFFSET is explicitly about robots assisting humans in fighting in urban areas, with many robots working together at the behents of a small group of infantry to provide greater situational awareness than a human team could achieve on its own. The real-time nature of the information is vital to the vision of OFFSET. It is one thing to operate from existing maps, and another entirely to operate from recently mapped space, with continuing situational awareness of possible threats and other movement through the space. Dating back to at least 2017, OFFSET is in part an iterative process, with contractors competing for and receiving awards for various ‘sprints,' or narrower short-turnaround developments in coding capabilities. Many of these capabilities involve translating innovations from real-time strategy video games into real life, like dragging-and-dropping groups units to give them commands. For the exercise at Camp Shelby, the swarms involved both ground and flying robots. These machines were tasked with finding specific items of interest located in buildings at Camp Shelby's Combined Arms Collective training Facility. To assist the robots in the field experiment, organized seeded the environment with AprilTags. These tags, which are similar to QR codes but trade complexity of data stored for simplicity and robustness in being read at difference, were used to mark the sites of interest, as well as hazards to avoid. In practical use, hazards seldom if ever arrive with barcodes explicitly labeling themselves as hazards, but for training the AprilTags provide a useful scaffolding while the robots coordinate in other ways. “As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags,” wrote DAPRA, “human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items.” That information is relayed in various ways, from updated live maps on computer screens to floating maps displayed in real time in augmented reality headsets. As foreshadowed by countless works of cyberpunk fiction, these “human swarm tacticians” interfaced with both the real world and a virtual representation of that world at once. Commanding robots to move in real space by manipulating objects in a virtual environment, itself generated by robots exploring and scouting the real space, blurs the distinction between artificial and real environments. That these moves were guided by gesture and haptic feedback only further underscores how deeply linked commanding robots can be to augmented reality. The gesture and haptic feedback command systems were built through sprinter contracts by Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University, with an emphasis on novel interaction for human-swarm teaming. Another development, which would be as at home in the real-time strategy game series Starcraft as it is in a DARPA OFFSET exercise, is the operational management of swarm tactics from Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology. Their developments allowed the swarm to search and map a building on its own, and to automate resource allocation in the process of accomplishing tasks. For now, the heart of the swarm is as a scouting organism built to provide information to human operators. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2020/02/11/darpa-wants-commanding-robots-to-work-like-a-video-game
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25 septembre 2018 | International, Naval
L3 again goes to sea with another unmanned deal
By Ross Wilkers L3 Technologies has made yet another acquisition to further build its unmanned maritime business, this time in a deal for surface vessel and related control systems provider ASV Global. Terms of the transaction were undisclosed. The deal also brings additional anti-submarine warfare and future surface combatant unmanned off-board sensor offerings, L3 said Monday. Unmanned sea vehicles and associated systems have been a focal point in New York City-based L3's overall push to become what CEO Chris Kubasik has called a “nontraditional sixth prime.” That translates to being a more focused, high-end builder and integrator of technologies and other platforms called out in the 2017 National Security Strategy. L3 went on an unmanned maritime buying spree last year that saw it make deals for undersea drone maker OceanServer, battery and energy technology company Open Water Power and autonomy and sensor system provider Adaptive Methods. Headquartered in Louisiana and the U.K., ASV Global builds unmanned surface vessels sized between 10 and 42 feet that have software, control systems and other autonomy architectures. The company now operates as L3 ASV. Sea is not the only domain where L3 has a buyer with respect to unmanned platforms. In June, the company quietly paid $15 million to buy hybrid quadrotor unmanned aircraft maker Latitude Engineering. L3 has also been busy this year in acquiring companies in information security and space as part of its ongoing sixth prime transformation effort. https://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2018/09/24/l3-unmanned-asv-acquisition.aspx