Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - July 18, 2019

Sur le même sujet

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  19 août 2020 | International, Terrestre

  USAF Errantly Reveals Research On ICBM-Range Hypersonic Glide Vehicle

  Steve Trimble The U.S. Air Force agency that manages the service's nuclear arsenal has started researching enabling technology for an intercontinental-range, hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), according to a document that was published briefly in error on a public website. Although the document shows a U.S. nuclear weapons agency is researching HGV technology, senior Pentagon officials say there has been no change to a policy that “strictly” limits the emerging class of hypersonic gliders and cruise missiles to non-nuclear warheads. A request for information (RFI) published on Aug. 12 by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center asks companies to submit ideas across seven categories of potential upgrades for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) designed with a “modular open architecture.” The Air Force often describes the future Ground Based Strategic Deterrent ICBM as featuring a “modular systems architecture,” in contrast with the aging Minuteman III, which does not. Among the seven items on the upgrade list, the Air Force called for a new “thermal protection system that can support [a] hypersonic glide to ICBM ranges,” according to the RFI, which is no longer publicly available on the government's procurement website. The RFI appears to have disclosed information that was not meant by the Air Force's nuclear weapons buyers to be made public. Each of the seven items listed in the RFI's “scope of effort” for ICBM upgrades included a prefix designation of “U/FOUO,” a military marking for information that is unclassified, but for official-use only. Although not technically a classified secret, information marked as “FOUO” usually is withheld from the public. The RFI was removed from beta.sam.gov on Aug. 17 after Aviation Week inquired about the document with the Air Force and the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The Defense Department (DOD) has three different operational prototypes for HGVs in development now: the Air Force's AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon, the Army's Long Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Navy's Intermediate Range Conventional Prompt Strike. Once fired from an aircraft, ground-launcher or submarine, all three are designed to strike targets with conventional warheads at intermediate range, which is defined as 1,500-3,000 nm by the official DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. But the Pentagon has no acknowledged plan to develop an HGV with a range beyond 3,000 nm and maintains a policy that “strictly” prohibits arming any such weapon—regardless of range—with nuclear warheads. The two-most senior staffers leading the hypersonic weapons portfolio reiterated that policy during a press conference on March 2. “Our entire hypersonic portfolio is based on delivering conventional warheads,” said Mike White, assistant director of defense research and engineering for hypersonic weapons. “Right,” agreed Mark Lewis, the director of defense research and engineering for modernization programs. “Strictly conventional.” The Pentagon has not changed the policy since March 2, said Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a spokesman for Lewis' office. “DOD is not developing nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons,” Carver said in an email. “There are common technology needs between the nuclear enterprise and hypersonic systems. Particularly in the area of high-temperature materials, we typically collaborate on the development of advanced dual-use materials technology. I will reiterate that our entire hypersonic program portfolio continues to be based on delivering conventional effects only.” Although the DOD upholds the conventional-only policy for hypersonic gliders and scramjet-powered cruise missiles, the source of the RFI raises questions, said James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The fact that [this RFI] is coming from the nuclear weapons center, it makes it sound an awful lot like this would at least be nuclear-armed or conceivably dual-capable,” Acton said. Although the RFI confirms research is underway, the DOD still has no acknowledged plan to proceed from basic research into the acquisition phase of an ICBM-range hypersonic glider, whether carrying a conventional or nuclear warhead. If the thermal-protection system technology is limited to research only, the RFI by the Air Force's nuclear weapons organization may not violate the DOD policy, which may apply only to fielded weapons. “DOD does a lot of research on a lot of different things and the vast majority of these programs never turn into an acquisition,” Acton said. “It could turn into something, but sophisticated observers recognize that it may not.” The DOD's conventional-only policy for maneuvering hypersonic weapons stands apart from other countries in the field. Russia, for example, has deployed the nuclear-armed Avangard HGV on the SS-19 ICBM. In February, the head of U.S. Northern Command, Gen. Terrence O'Shaughnessy, said in written testimony submitted to Congress that “China is testing a [nuclear-armed] intercontinental-range hypersonic glide vehicle, which is designed to fly at high speeds and low altitudes, complicating our ability to provide precise warning.” The DOD never has had an announced weapons development program for a conventional- or nuclear-armed, intercontinental-range HGV, but has experimented with air-launched gliders. The Hypersonic Test Vehicle-2 program by the DARPA attempted to demonstrate a range of 4,170 nm, but each experimental glider in two tests staged in 2010 and 2011 failed about 9 min. into a planned 30-min. hypersonic glide. The leading edges of an intercontinental-range HGV could be exposed to temperatures as high as 7,000K (6,726C) on reentry, then endure a prolonged glide phase compared to an intermediate-range system, said Christopher Combs, who researches hypersonic aerodynamics as an assistant professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio. “The bottom line is it's just crazy temperatures,” Combs said. “They're still not dealing with space shuttle or Apollo [capsule] temperatures, but it's still really hot.” The rescinded RFI, meanwhile, also may provide a rare glimpse into the Air Force's plans for the new ICBM developed under the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program. Apart from the thermal-protection system for a hypersonic glider, the scope of effort in the RFI sought industry input on a variety of topics, including: • Fusing data from lower-fidelity, onboard sensors to improve guidance, navigation and control. • New navigation aids to correct inertial measurement unit drift on long-time-of-flight missions. • A lighter, smaller and more efficient “future fuze,” which also could “accept inputs from external subsystems.” • Radiation-hardening techniques for advanced microelectronics, such as a system on a chip or system in a package. • Improved computer hardware and software, including artificial intelligence algorithms. • A more secure architecture and better security sensors for ICBM ground facilities. The Air Force plans to award the contract to Northrop Grumman by the end of the month to launch the engineering and manufacturing development contract for the GBSD program. Northrop remained the sole bidder for the program to deliver more than 600 new ICBMs to the Air Force after a Boeing-led team withdrew from the competition last year. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/missile-defense-weapons/usaf-errantly-reveals-research-icbm-range-hypersonic-glide

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  5 décembre 2022 | International, Aérospatial

  Panel of three-star generals to lead military training modernization

  “Gone are the days when we could hand-wave training away. Warfare is obviously way too complicated for that now,” said Caroline Baxter.

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  11 juin 2020 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Roper Pushes Moving Project Maven To Air Force

  Roper expects GBSD, B-21 and F-35 to migrate parts of their development to cloudONE as he pushes the Air Force to embrace advanced software practices. By THERESA HITCHENSon June 11, 2020 at 4:01 AM WASHINGTON: Air Force acquisition czar Will Roper says he is considering taking over DoD's artificial intelligence (AI) experiment, Project Maven, to make it operational while the service pushes its own AI capabilities into the field. “I was just speaking with USDI today about the potential of transitioning Maven over to the Air Force and making it an operational reality day-to-day,” Roper said. Project Maven begun in 2017, was designed to put machine-learning to work to sort through the masses of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data generated by DoD and Intelligence Community (IC) platforms. It has been a bit controversial, with Google pulling out of the effort in 2018; and the head of Air Combat Command head Gen. Mike Holmes saying he didn't believe it was ready for prime time. Roper explained that the Air Force was best positioned to take on Project Maven because of its progress in standing up capabilities under its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) family of systems, each dubbed with the prefix ONE. This includes the cloudONE for remote data storage, processing and access; platformONE for securely building software; the dataONE library; and the deviceONE that allows secure remote access to classified data. Via the ABMS effort, which is the Air Force's flagship for enabling Joint All Domain Command and Control, the Air Force has been able to build the “AI infrastructure” that allows an AI system to actually do analysis, Roper stressed. “That boring part, the AI infrastructure, is what has been critically absent in the Department, and we are finally doing it in the Air Force,” Roper said. “So cloudONE, platformONE, dataONE — this family of ONE systems — builds a tech stack that really is about getting data in proper custody so that analytics can be built on top of it and we can finally go do AI at scale.” The key, he said, is “data curation and custody, so that that data is discoverable by analytics algorithms that are able to assess its import to different missions, and then push it to the machine, without having to have people be inside the loop.” And that, of course, is what Project Maven focused on, the algorithms. Roper said the Air Force already has an “AI at scale operational today with the Distributed Common Ground System” as well as one being used for “predictive maintenance” that the service hopes have in use for 16 different assets within the next 18 months. The DCGS family of systems, an effort that began way back in 1998, is DoD's flagship capability for providing daily processing, exploitation and production of analysis from DoD to ISR platforms. Predictive maintenance is using AI to figure out what parts of a weapon system or platform are likely to break next, to ease and speed logistics planning. In both these instances, he explained, the environment is benign. That won't be so on the battlefield, where adversaries will be attempting to hack and spoof US AI systems — something that he says is all too easily done today. “It's harder than meets the eye to try to teach an algorithm to know that something is messing with them,” he said. “They inherently trust their data.” “I think there is this belief that that AI will just churn through it — throw enough data at it and everything will be okay — and that's not the case,” he elaborated. “We need another generation of this technology.” Thus, for the moment, the best solution is for humans and machines to work in tandem — as the Air Force is looking to do with the Skyborg project and the development of an AI co-pilot Roper has nicknamed R2D2. “We need to be pairing our AI with people,” Roper stressed. Still, Roper is enthusiastic about the progress made by the ABMS effort toward AI, including working with Northern Command on its response to COVID-19 — helping predict where pandemic hot spots might arise. “We're excited that we have that first taste of AI changing operations,” he enthused. “That AI flag has now been planted for the department. We have seen a future that only silicon was able to see; the human brain was not. If we can get that out onto the battlefield and use the ABMS event in September as our stepping stone, then what a wonderful step towards getting our department and our military away from thinking of itself primarily in terms of the platforms that produce data, and rather instead of the insights that are created by that data, many of them being created by AI,” he said. (The Air Force is planning the second “ABMS OnRamp,” to follow the debut field demonstration in December, for the first week of September. As Breaking D readers know, that second exercise will feature a scenario centered on Space Command operations.) Roper also waxed enthusiastic about the recent decision by the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) to move its development operations to cloudONE. They are not alone, he said. “I believe that portions of the Aegis Weapon System, and the F-18 are also using cloudONE for development,” he said. The Air Force has “put a ton of effort into getting it certified at the various security levels, classified to critical unclassified information,” he added. CloudONE now can be used with secret-level and Top Secret/Special Access Program (TS/SAP) level data, and Roper said that by the end of June it will be certified for use with Secret/Special Access Program level data. This makes it available to software developers across security levels, and opens the door for use by more Air Force weapons development programs, he explained. For example, Roper said that the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent Program (GBSD) “will absolutely be using cloudONE and platformONE for its development.” And, he said, in talking with the F-35 program office he expects “they will do some portion of their development” using cloudONE. Further, he said the highly classified B-21 bomber program will be “moving in at the right point for them.” He noted that prime contractor Northrop Grumman has just demonstrated the use of Kubernetes — a software development technique that helps manage multiple “containerized applications” (i.e. with its own operating system) across multiple machines in a secure manner — on flight-ready hardware. Indeed, he noted, the B-21 program involves an initiative called DevStar that is trying to establish an autonomous testing capability. An Air Force spokesperson said in a statement that DevStar is “an Air Force initiative to use modern software development paradigms to rapidly deliver software to weapon systems while continually meeting safety, security, airworthiness and other compliance requirements that traditionally are performed in serial.” The Air Force website on the initiative shows it is trying to go beyond DevSecOps that seeks to build IT security into software upfront — to include super-high security and safety measures that will allow use in developing highly classified nuclear weapons-related systems. “And you're gonna keep seeing more of the Air Force move into this,” Roper said. “You will hear people use terms like Agile Development and DevOps and DevSecOps — they are not all the same. The tech stack underneath that is producing the software matters.” PlatformONE, he said, is one critical tool in producing software for the Air Force. “It is what is automating all those things that we have people doing today and people doing them in serial,” he said. And, he added, the use of platformONE and cloudONE in combination is “magic” that allows the sharing of software code across weapon systems development programs. “One of my ambitions for this year is to have code that's been written for, say, B-21 run on F-16 and vice versa, and not have any humans check it in between.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/06/roper-pushes-moving-project-maven-to-air-force