Britain Spent So Much On Two Giant Aircraft Carriers, It Can’t Afford Planes Or Escorts

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  3 décembre 2019 | International, Naval

  US Navy awards largest-ever shipbuilding contract to Electric Boat for new attack submarines

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON – The U.S. Navy on Monday awarded its largest-ever shipbuilding contract to General Dynamics Electric Boat for construction of nine Virginia-class attack submarines, eight of which will have 84-foot section that boosts the boat's strike missile capacity. The contract for the Block V Virginias, worth $22.2 billion, could grow by another $2 billion if the Navy exercises an option for a 10th boat. The contract is for two fewer boats than the 11 proposed by the fleet in this year's budget submission. “A lot of hard work across the whole team to structure the contract in such a was as to balance risk between the government and the shipbuilder,” said James Geurts, the Navy's top acquisition official, in a roundtable with members of the media to announce the contract signing. “If the shipbuilder delivers on target, the multi-year savings will be 16.5 percent, or $4.4 billion in savings. So, it's a pretty important day for us.” Guerts, the assistant Secretary of the Navy for research, acquisition and development, said that when you add government furnished equipment into the contract, the total swells to about $35 billion. The first boat in Block V, SSN 802, is currently under construction but does not have the Virginia Payload Module. The next boat, 803, will have VPM. All of the boats will have an upgraded acoustics suite. In the briefing, Navy officials said that six of the boats would be constructed at Electric Boat's partner yard, Huntington Ingalls Newport News, and three would be built at Electric Boat. The 10th boat would go to Electric Boat if the Navy exercised the option. The move to put most of the work in Newport News was done to balance the increased workload at Electric Boat with the start of the Columbia class, the next generation of ballistic missile submarines slated to begin construction this year. In a statement, Electric Boat President Kevin Graney said the contract provides stability for his shipyard. “This contract allows for our shipbuilding team, out suppliers and our employees to plan ahead so that we can continue to deliver submarines of unmatched quality, stealth and lethality,” Graney said. Dave Bolcar, Newport News' vice president of submarine construction, likewise hailed the contract as a means of stability in the submarine industrial base. "Today's contract maintains the Virginia-class build rate that provides continued stability to our workforce and to the 5,000 suppliers that will support submarines for the next decade,” he said. "This contract also continues the two per year construction cadence essential to sustaining production efficiencies, while ensuring our national security and the Navy's continued undersea superiority.” https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2019/12/02/navy-awards-largest-ever-shipbuilding-contract-to-electric-boat-for-new-attack-submarines

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  10 novembre 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Cyber’s uncertain future: These radical technologies and negative trends must be overcome

  James Van de Velde The fate of the world may literally hinge on which states develop and appropriately introduce the radical technologies that are likely to disrupt cyberspace and the world. What are they, and what disruption do they pose? Here are a few, split into two categories: Radical-leveling technologies have leapt from linear to exponential capabilities and will shape the future competition: Additive manufacturing (i.e., 3D printing): “Who can manufacture what” may no longer be decided by governments. Human-machine interfacing: Where will this lead intelligence collection, privacy and security? The Internet of Things' expanded attack surface: The IoT may invite a near-constant struggle between good and malicious cyberspace actors throughout our government, intelligence, defense and commercial lives. Chain algorithm (i.e., blockchain) and cryptocurrencies: We have yet to discern how blockchain technology will be integrated into both public and private networks, such as for protecting the national currency of states, and what such integration will mean for intelligence collection and effects operations. Algorithmic-driven operations: Relying on algorithms in operations may aid both our and our adversaries' operations. Data analytics: Successful application of data analytics will help reduce false positives and aid in forensics (by discerning trends better). But new ways to collect, manage and analyze data will have to be discerned. Data localization: States are likely to Balkanize cyberspace into defensive pockets to capture and protect data (rather than surrender control entirely to the cloud or to servers outside their states). Russia and China are already Balkanizing their networks; many states will follow Russia and China's lead. New forms of encryption, including decentralized, local and private encryption: Enabled by quantum computing, new forms of encryption will make cyber operations more difficult. Emerging technologies represent new tech — currently developed or developed within five to 10 years — that will shape the future competition: Artificial intelligence (i.e., machine learning): China has declared that it plans to be the world's leader in AI and integrate it as much as possible into its technology and military forces and strategy. How will AI assist or thwart cyber intelligence collection, or affect the development of offensive or defensive cyberspace operations? Setting norms for AI will present new intellectual, technical and legal challenges. Quantum computing: The integration of quantum computing will assist and thwart cyber intelligence collection, as well as affect the development of offensive and defensive cyberspace operations. China's announced 2030 goal to develop a high-performing quantum computer with decryption capability is an existential threat to Western society, as it would afford adversaries unprecedented leverage and advantage over U.S. society. Shifting to quantum-resistant algorithms and encryption present certain costs and technical challenges, and a likely long-term transition. Nanotechnology: How will life as well as state vs. state competition change if devices that can impact the environment, health care or energy efficiency are built on the scale of atoms and molecules? Neuroscience technologies — biology and cyber: We have yet to discern how biology and cyberspace will converge to afford biological levels of cybersecurity and cyber biosecurity. The United States will also face challenging technological, political, historical, numerical and policy trends that will complicate efforts to absorb these technologies; the United States may soon have to adopt asymmetric strategies to contend with its competitors: The United States is telling itself that it is a status quo power (and that attempting domain dominance in cyberspace is somehow dangerous, wrong or imperial). The country currently suffers from “cyberspace fatigue” — a sense that our daily loss via cyberspace to ransomware, financial and proprietary theft, privacy invasion, and political influence is inevitable and inescapable. China and Russia both enjoy “asymmetry in interest.” That is, both Russia and China believe they care more about their foreign policy, national security, and cyberspace interests and activities than the United States and Americans generally do. It will soon be impossible for the United States to compete with China via numbers — even in cyberspace. Chinese forces will soon outnumber U.S. forces in every sector, including cyberspace forces. As the private sector compiles and controls unprecedented amounts of data on U.S. and non-U.S. citizens around the world, new public-private sector relationships must be devised. The private sector will have many more times the quantity of data on individuals and commercial activity than the U.S. government could ever obtain. China is now “out-cycling” the United States. The Chinese can do acquisition faster now than the United States, which means they will be able to collect on technological countermeasures and adopt counter-countermeasures to our attempts to defeat Chinese technology. The United States has yet to acknowledge explicitly that we are not so much in a “great power” competition, but instead we are in an era of the rise of authoritarian, anti-liberal democratic states. This is a much more serious problem, as, if left unacknowledged, the United States will appear as morally equivalent. The U.S. government may no longer be the lead for all complex technologies, including those involved in national security, computing, sensing or data analytics. Sad fact. We have — to date — accepted policy inferiority in cyberspace. We defend against malicious cyberspace operations, but we have been reluctant to conduct the escalation necessary to restore the norms we seek to protect. https://www.c4isrnet.com/opinion/2020/11/09/cybers-uncertain-future-these-radical-technologies-and-negative-trends-must-be-overcome/

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  30 novembre 2018 | International,

  Reinventing Drug Discovery and Development for Military Needs

  Flying at 50,000 feet, diving deep in the ocean, or hiking for miles with gear through extreme climates, military service members face conditions that place unique burdens on their individual physiology. The potential exists to develop pharmacological interventions to help service members complete their toughest missions more safely and efficiently, and then recover more quickly and without adverse effects, but those interventions must work on complex physiological systems in the human body. They will not be realized under the prevailing system of drug discovery and development with its focus on engaging single molecular targets. DARPA created the Panacea program to pursue the means of rapidly discovering, designing, and validating new, multi-target drugs that work with the body's complexity to better support the physiological resilience and recovery of military service members. The premise of Panacea is that the physiological systems of the human body work in complex and highly integrated ways. Drugs exert effects on our bodies by physically interacting with and changing the functional state of biomolecules that govern the functions of cells and tissues. Most drugs target proteins, which are the principle cellular workhorses. Ideally, drugs would target multiple proteins simultaneously to exert precise, network-level effects. One major problem facing the drug development community is that the functional proteome — the complete collection of proteins and their roles in signaling networks — is largely dark to science. Despite being able to identify many of the proteins within a cell, researchers do not have a firm grasp on everything those proteins do and how they interact to affect physiology. Due to this sparsity of structural and functional knowledge, the state of the art in drug development — what Panacea seeks to transform — is to engage only a very small fraction of known protein targets to achieve an effect. In fact, today's approach to drug design singles out individual proteins in certain cells. That hyper-specificity is an attempt to minimize the risk of side effects and speed time to market, but it also yields a thin stream of drugs, many of which have similar mechanisms and relatively muted effectiveness compared to what might be achieved using a multi-target, systems-based approach. “The current roster of drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration only targets about 549 proteins, yet the body can produce more than six million different protein variants,” said Tristan McClure-Begley, the Panacea program manager. “The opportunity space for pharmacological intervention is vast and effectively untapped, but to access it we need new technology for understanding and targeting the human functional proteome.” Panacea will address the lack of functional knowledge about the proteome. DARPA's call to the research community is to consider complex physiological conditions relevant to military service members — for instance, metabolic stress during extreme endurance missions or pain and inflammation after injury; investigate the molecular mechanisms underlying those conditions; identify multiple, key molecular targets involved; and develop novel medicinal chemistry approaches to synthesize interventions that modulate those targets. DARPA believes that multi-target drugs will deliver safer and more efficacious solutions to military requirements for readiness and recovery over state-of-the-art interventions. “Many of the most successful drugs produced in the past were found rather than made, and we knew what they did long before we knew how they did it,” McClure-Begley said. “To deliver improved interventions, we need to get to a place where we can investigate all of the potential proteins at play for a given condition and then prioritize sets of protein targets and signaling networks to effectively modulate physiological systems, regardless of what prior knowledge exists about those targets.” The Panacea program aims to generate initial proof of concept for this new direction in drug discovery and development. Research will primarily involve animal models, human cell derived organoids, and high-throughput cell culture models. However, to support eventual transition to humans, DARPA will work with federal agencies to develop a regulatory pathway for future medical use. By the end of the five-year program, DARPA will require teams to submit novel drug candidates to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for review as an Investigational New Drug or for Compassionate Use. DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on December 14, 2018, in Arlington, Virginia, to provide more information about Panacea and answer questions from potential proposers. For details of the event, including registration requirements, visit https://go.usa.gov/xP6hD. A forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement will fully describe the program structure and objectives. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2018-11-28