Bridging the ­Procurement Divide

Sur le même sujet

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  17 septembre 2020 | Information, Aérospatial

  The Air Force’s new information warfare command still has work before full integration

  Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — While the Air Force's new information warfare command has reached its full operational capability less than a year after it was created, leaders still have work to do to fully integrate its combined capabilities in a mature fashion. That assessment comes from Brig. Gen. Bradley Pyburn, deputy commander of 16th Air Force, who on Tuesday laid out a three-pronged criteria — deconfliction, synchronization and integration — for assessing the command's maturity during a virtual event hosted by AFCEA's Alamo chapter. The command combines what was previously known as 24th and 25th Air Force, placing cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare and weather capabilities under a single commander. The first category Pyburn coined is deconfliction, which essentially means “do no harm.” Pyburn described the need to have situational awareness of the battlespace and understand what friendly and enemy forces are where, what authorities exist, what targets forces are looking at and what capabilities they have. The second phase of maturity is synchronization, which involves aligning all the capabilities and actions in the battlespace. Pyburn said if the command adds activity A to activity B and C, it will end up with a greater result, because it can change the timing and tempo of how the effects are delivered for maximum impact. Lastly, Pyburn described integration as the most mature aspect of where 16th Air Force currently is. This involves baking in planning, assessment, command and control, all the desperate effects and operations from the beginning. This is where the command really begins to break down all the stovepipes that previously existed with all these capabilities, a key reason for integrating and creating the new organization. “From a maturity perspective, where do I think 16th Air Force is? We're probably somewhere between deconfliction and synchronization. We've got some examples of where we approach integration but I think it's healthy we understand where we're at today and where we want to go forward in the future,” Pyburn explained. The command has created what Pyburn called a J9 to help with assessing maturity. The J9 would be plugged into real world events and exercises to help with those self assessments. In a generic example, Pyburn outlined what full maturity integration would look like. A mission partner requests support, which could be in the form of air domain awareness, finding particular targets or threats or ISR assistance. 16th Air Force, in turn, would be able to link that request with other needs, either in the same geographic area or in other areas of operations, pioneering what its top officials describe as a “problem-centric approach,” which aims to look at the specific problems the commands they support are looking to solve and starting from there. “[In] our problem centric approach, as we look to generate insights across all of our 16th Air Force capabilities, what we may find is that particular problem set is linked to other problem sets and we're able to focus on the root cause of the problem,” Pyburn said. Based on a raft of authorities from cyberspace to intelligence collection as well as the relationships built through other communities and organizations, 16th Air Force can look at the root cause of a problem and build from there. “We can build a community of interest, we can start to put mission partners together into [an] operational planning team and we can not only generate better insights against that root cause, we can start to look at how we can layer in effects at speed and at scale across all domains of warfare and give the options to the combatant commander and the mission partner as the authorities to go after that adversary,” Pyburn said. Pyburn also offered insight into the command structure of 16th Air Force, which has his deputy commander job along with a vice commander role. That latter job, held by Brig. Gen. David Gaedecke — who previously served as the lead for the Air Force's year long electronic warfare study — does more of the traditional operational, test and evaluation functions. In the deputy commander role, Pyburn said his job is similar to the director of operations. He comes up with the requirements in support of combatant commanders. “Part of it is, I may think I know what I want, but if I don't see what the art of the possible is, it's really hard to know what I want, if that makes sense. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg,” he said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2020/09/16/the-air-forces-new-information-warfare-command-still-has-work-to-go-to-fully-integrate/

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  14 novembre 2019 | Information, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  The real obstacle for reforming military spending isn’t in the defence ministry. It’s the Treasury Board

  KEN HANSEN Ken Hansen is an independent defence and security analyst and owner of Hansen Maritime Horizons. Retired from the Royal Canadian Navy in 2009 in the rank of commander, he is also a contributor to the security affairs committee for the Royal United Services Institute of Nova Scotia. For people inside the Department of National Defence, a minority Parliament – coupled with election promises for increased social spending and tax cuts – represents an uneasy calculus. Defence spending is always on the chopping block because it represents the largest pool of discretionary spending in the federal budget, and every party spent the recent federal election campaign being vague about military policy – offering some kind of oversight-body reform or scrutiny over the billions of dollars that have been earmarked, even as they lent their support to ensuring the military has the equipment it needs. In particular, the single largest program in Canadian defence history – the Canadian Combat Ship plan for 15 warships – will be a tantalizing target for politicians looking to get rid of perceived fat. Such cuts to shipbuilding programs have even already become normalized: The order for Halifax-class frigates were trimmed to 12 from 18 in 1983 and the Iroquois-class destroyers to four from six in 1964, to name just two. The political leaders weren't wrong when they said the military procurement system is broken. But regardless of which party had won this past election, and no matter what tweaks at the edges that the Liberal minority government and its potential supporters pursue, the reality is that the core issue remains unaddressed: Treasury Board's bulk approach to purchasing the country's military kit. Treasury Board policy states that bulk buys are how military procurement should be done, to ensure the lowest per-unit cost. But this forces tough decisions about what to buy, since the larger the order, the longer it will take to produce them all – not to mention the problems involved with trying to predict the future of warfare. Information systems become outdated in five years; weapons and sensors in 10. With a planned operating life of 25 years, any ships ordered today will be out-of-date by the time the first are delivered, and fully obsolete by the time the last one arrives. Block purchasing leads to block obsolescence. Traditionally, when technological change threatens to render military systems obsolete, the best way to hedge was to order in batches of the smallest number acceptable. In the years before the world wars, for instance, countries working to build competent naval forces put less emphasis on fleet numbers and more on technology and industrial capacity until the last moments before conflict. Technological competence was as important as numbers for fleet commanders. Another outcome of bulk buys is that the volume means that they happen only every two to three decades (or longer, in the worst cases). With such lengthy dry spells between purchases, it is impossible to retain corporate knowledge in either the defence or civilian branches of government. More frequent purchasing keeps the process alive in both practice and concept, with lessons learned that can be implemented by the same people who made the mistakes in the first place. Such irregularly timed purchases have created desperation among defence planners whose vision of the future consists of short golden days of competence and pride, followed by long years of rust-out and irrelevance. Unwittingly, the dark decades were in large part of the military's own making because of its desperate desire to acquire the absolute best model available – a practice known as “gold-plating” – instead of working steadily to build capacity and skill that would address long-range fleet needs. This is a collision of interests. The Treasury Board looks only at capital-acquisition decisions from the perspective of the buyer. It's left to the military to worry about how long they may have to operate obsolescent or obsolete equipment and systems, and to do the necessary mid-life upgrading, which is partly why costs balloon spectacularly. Life-cycle cost data is actually far more important that the initial sticker shock of the newest and shiniest model advocated by the military's leadership. The mindset needs to change. Politicians who implement bureaucratic change will probably see some improvements in decision-making. But the biggest obstacle to defence procurement is that bulk purchasing is our lone approach, and that it happens only every few decades. Regular, planned capital acquisition is the best path forward, but all paths to the future must first run through the Treasury Board. No amount of political policy adjustment can change that. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-real-obstacle-for-reforming-military-spending-isnt-in-the-defence/

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  12 février 2023 | Information, Autre défense

  Trousse d’information pour les fournisseurs : Comment obtenir une attestation de sécurité

  Cette trousse d’information fournit un accès rapide et facile aux ressources et aux outils conçus pour aider votre organisation à obtenir une attestation de sécurité avec le Programme de sécurité des contrats (PSC) de Services publics et Approvisionnement Canada. La trousse passe en revue les étapes que votre organisation et vos employés doivent suivre avant de soumissionner ou d’exécuter des travaux dans le cadre d’un contrat du gouvernement fédéral comportant des exigences de sécurité. Sous chaque étape, vous trouverez des liens vers des ressources, des guides, des vidéos et du matériel de formation en ligne. Ces ressources et outils donneront à votre organisation et à vos employés des conseils pratiques sur la manière de réaliser les activités d’enquête de sécurité, remplir les formulaires connexes, et se conformer aux exigences du PSC. Sections Étape 1 : Exigences de sécurité et types d’attestation de sécurité Comprenez quelles sont les exigences de sécurité et quel type d’attestation de sécurité votre organisation pourrait avoir besoin pour soumissionner ou exécuter des travaux dans le cadre d’un contrat du gouvernement fédéral. Étape 2 : Parrainage Découvrez comment votre organisation doit être parrainée pour faire l’objet d’une enquête de sécurité auprès du PSC. Étape 3 : Enquête de sécurité sur l’organisation Découvrez les principales étapes que votre organisation devra franchir et les principaux formulaires qu’elle devra remplir pour faire l’objet d’une enquête auprès du PSC. Étape 4 : Enquête de sécurité sur le personnel Une fois que le PSC a effectué l’enquête, apprenez comment votre organisation peut demander le niveau approprié d’enquête de sécurité sur le personnel pour les employés admissibles. Étape 5 : Sous-traitance Découvrez comment demander une enquête de sécurité pour les sous-traitants afin de vous assurer qu’ils satisfont aux exigences de sécurité d’un contrat du gouvernement fédéral. Étape 6 : Maintenir la conformité Comprenez ce que votre organisation et vos employés devront faire pour rester conformes aux exigences de sécurité d’un contrat du gouvernement fédéral. Renseignements supplémentaires Si vous avez des questions ou si vous avez besoin d’une aide personnalisée, n’hésitez pas à communiquer avec le centre de service à la clientèle du Programme de sécurité des contrats. Pour savoir où envoyer vos documents remplis, consultez comment soumettre les demandes, formulaires et autres documents pour la sécurité des contrats.   https://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/esc-src/ressources-resources/tif-its-fra.html