Contract Awards by US Department of Defense - June 09, 2020

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  6 octobre 2021 | International, Aérospatial

  L3Harris selected to improve B-52 self-defense via $947M contract - Skies Mag

  L3Harris Technologies will modernize the U.S. Air Force B-52 aircraft to protect aircrew from enemy radar threats under a new 10-year, sole-source US$947 million IDIQ contract.

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  22 mai 2019 | International, Terrestre

  US Army’s jumping to the next level in virtual training

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has been building a virtual world in which to train soldiers for war, and it's expected to award contracts in June for reconfigurable virtual air and ground trainers and for a common synthetic environment that includes complex and real-life terrain. Maj. Gen. Maria Gervais, who leads the Synthetic Training Environment Cross-Functional Team, which is part of Army Futures Command, told reporters during a recent media roundtable that she's “encouraged” to see what her team accomplished since it formed roughly 18 months ago. While the service, at a time, led the charge when it came to developing virtual environments, it has clung to relics of the '80s and '90s — stove-piped training systems lacking in realism. As the Army shifts its focus to fighting in a multidomain environment, the service wants a new system that enables collective training across air, ground, sea, cyber and space with greater fidelity that can be used not only as a trainer but also as a mission-planning tool. Before the synthetic training environment, or STE, was prioritized through the establishment of Army Futures Command, it wasn't going to be ready until 2030, but Gervais shrunk that timeline through new approaches in development and acquisition by involving industry and soldiers in a collaborative and agile manner. What is the STE? Over the last 18 months, the components of the STE have taken shape and will consist of One World Terrain — which compiles realistic and accurate virtual maps of territory — training simulation software, a training management tool and virtual collective trainers. All of this will make up the soldier/squad virtual trainer and the reconfigurable virtual collective trainer. The idea is to be able to click on any place on a virtual globe and go there. Soldiers can then train virtually in an exact environment in which they can expect to operate in reality. Just a few years ago, building One World Terrain was painstaking, tedious and expensive, but through new technology applications, what used to take nine months to build can now take eight hours. The training simulation software will support training simultaneously across many locations and training platforms. The training management tool allows users to build training scenarios through simulation databases. The virtual trainers are being designed for dismounted, air and ground formations to train from a squad level through battalion, and ultimately at higher echelons. The trainer for the soldier and squad will support individual and collective task at the smallest formation. The reconfigurable virtual collective trainers, or RVCT, will represent Army and Marine Corps air and ground systems for training at the unit level and will be used for mission rehearsals at every echelon. Ready player one The Army plans to award contracts next month to build both an RVCT for aircraft and an RVCT for ground vehicles that are reconfigurable based on changes to platform inventories. The STE conducted an initial user assessment of what had been developed in March 2018, Gervais said. Since then, the Army has conducted more than 20 “touch points” with industry partners, which led to a user assessment in Orlando, Florida — where the STE cross-functional team is based — of One World Terrain, the training management tool as well as the training simulation software. Meanwhile, Gervais said, the team is in the middle of a user assessment of an RVCT—Air prototype at Fort Carson, Colorado, which began in April and is supported by soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division. The service completed its assessment of a ground simulation platform that went to Fort Riley, Kansas. Crew members for Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker combat vehicles of the 1st Infantry Division supported that effort. One World Terrain is already in use and under evaluation by a Marine battalion as well as three divisions in the Army and Naval Special Warfare Command. It's also used at the National Training Center and by the 3rd and 7th special forces groups. All of the users are providing feedback, according to Gervais. A contract was awarded in September 2018 to build the squad advanced marksmanship trainer, which is a product of the Close Combat Lethality Task Force initiative to improve soldier lethality and survivability, and the capability is already fielded to the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York. The new trainer takes what was a tethered system and — while it still uses projectors and screens — allows users to move around a base with more flexibility, which is more operationally realistic. Ultimately, the projectors and screens could be replaced by a headset, which is in keeping with the service's requirement to bring trainers to an operational unit in the field or at home station. This means the system must be easy to set up and transport. “We will continue to field that out to the Army the rest of this [fiscal year],” Gervais said. Taking it to the next level The Army plans to use the other transaction authority, or OTA, contracting mechanism to award contracts next month to move quicker and more agile than the standard and often lengthy acquisition process. The service previously used OTAs for STE development. “What the existing OTAs have done for us is they have actually allowed us to get a quick look from industry on where they were with the capabilities,” Col. Marcus Varnadore, the project manager for the STE CFT, said during the media roundtable. “It was very important for us right up front to identify where industry really was with respect to the technology, which allowed us to then make some decisions about what path to go forward with, and it also allowed us, with that first OTA, to kind of get an idea of how we needed to structure our follow-on OTAs,” he added. With the upcoming OTA contract awards, “we are kind of taking that and moving it to the next level using OTAs to bridge our gap here to get to the [initial operational capability] ... before we transition ultimately into a production [full-operational capability] environment,” said Brian Serra, the branch chief of Army Contracting Command—Orlando. “We are using the flexibility of OTAs,” he added, “to adjust as we go so we are not married to a 100-page specification.” That translates to the CFT taking a two-year process and shrinking it to six months max. The incremental process has also allowed the STE CFT to track industry's progress in this arena. Gervais noted that in some cases, companies might have overstated a specific technology's capabilities, and in turn the serve may need to bolster funding for internal science and technology efforts to improve that specific tech. Alternatively, the Army might notice it's been developing technology that is already well-developed in the commercial world. “I'm very confident and comfortable that our efforts to date are going to keep us on track to meet an initial operational capability of fourth-quarter FY21,” Gervais said. To reach initial operational capability, Gervais expects to field a battalion set of the RVCT—Air and RVCT—Ground — running on the common synthetic environment made up of One World Terrain, the training management tools and the training simulation software — to at least four installations. Over the next two years following initial operational capability, the Army will expand that fielding to include all installations where the capability is required in order to reach full operational capability by FY23. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/05/17/us-armys-jumping-to-next-level-in-virtual-training-world/

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  27 mai 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Five burn-in’ questions on ‘the real robotic revolution’

  Chiara Vercellone A future where artificial intelligence controls Washington D.C. may not be far off, according to a new book from Peter Singer and August Cole: “Burn-In, a Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution.” Like the authors' previous book, “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War,” “Burn-In” is a blend of fiction and facts that explore how technology will shape the future. The science fiction thriller showcases over 300 technological trends that the authors believe will push the United States into a new industrial revolution. The story revolves around an FBI agent and its robot partner working to stop a cyber-terrorist who has taken control over the nation's capital. Singer, a strategist and senior fellow at the non-partisan think tank New America, spoke with Chiara Vercellone about what inspired the book, the response from officials how the duo researched it. This interview has been edited for brevity. C4ISRNET: This novel blends fictional characters with extensive research on what technology might be like in the future. You show how AI might have an effect on everything, from politics and economy to our society. Why is this realistic in such a short amount of time? SINGER: We conducted research on everything from compiling the reports on which jobs will be automated, to Amazon patent applications, to interviews with AI scientists, but also people who worked on the water system of Washington D.C. We even did site visits to inside the White House. We used that to essentially project forward not just how AI and robotics are going to be used in your city, your business and your home, but also some of the, frankly, scary new vulnerabilities and trends that they are going to introduce. What are some of the security threats that we're going to be wrestling with, whether it's in your home or how you think about it for an entire city? C4ISRNET: The book is set 20 years from now. Is that the right time frame for the development of all encompassing AI ? SINGER: We had a “no vaporware” rule. Every single technology, every single trend, every single scene in the book had to be pulled from a technology project that is already in motion right now: A technology that already exists or a research project that is already happening, a cyberattack that may not have happened in the U.S. but has happened somewhere else, or has been something that researchers have proved is possible. And, honestly, that kind of grounding, frankly, makes it even more compelling and scarier. C4ISRNET: As artificial intelligence can be used for good to help defend against cyberattacks, it can also be used to carry out these attacks. As the book shows, the FBI uses AI to solve cases more efficiently but D.C. has been taken hostage by a cyberterrorist using the same technology. Are there any risks that officials are taking today in funding the development of this technology? SINGER: I think of when we got computers and they've move to a point where we don't even kind of notice them around us anymore. When you go into your kitchen, there are tons of little red lights of different things that are computerized, but we don't think of them as computers anymore. Relative to AI, so much of the attention has been on this revolt of the robots. But one of the things that we play with in the book is that we're seeing all these applications, but we're also not preparing our economy and our society for these changes that will come. Industrial revolutions are really traumatic: We're going to see everything from job displacement to new political ideologies, even extremist ones, and we're not preparing for that. Even more directly related to the development of AI, we're recreating almost all the mistakes that we made with the regular Internet a generation ago. Even if the internet brought a lot of incredible things, we didn't think about security and the development of it, and that created a lot of consequences. And we're doing the very same thing right now, as we wire up our cities, our homes, into what is now an Internet of Things and an increasingly AI-fueled Internet of Things. C4ISRNET: You and August Cole have been invited to brief the book's lessons to officials at the White House, Congress, CIA and at the Pentagon. What were those conversations like? SINGER: For our past book, “Ghost Fleet,” we got to do everything from White House briefings to go to the Joint Chiefs conference room inside the Pentagon, and the Navy now has a $3 billion shipbuilding program that's called Ghost Fleet. And the same thing has happened with “Burn-In.” Even before it was published, we were able to brief some of its lessons to groups like the Joint Special Operations Command to the NSA and Cyber Command and as you and I are speaking right now, there's a new government report called the Cyber Solarium Commission. It's a bipartisan commission, and they issued a major report of ways to reset U.S. cybersecurity strategy for the future. And it actually begins with a scene written by August Cole and I. So, in many ways, Congress has taken the world of “Burn-In” and moved it into official government reports. They wanted a way to share real cyberthreats, and what they didn't want to happen is what happened to the various reports before 9/11 that warned about the attack but that nobody listened to until after the fact. So, they asked us to help with visualizing that world with the idea that it might emotionally compel them to not make the same mistake. C4ISRNET: What was the process of deciding which technology was developed enough to think it could become a threat in the future? SINGER: We would first build up a baseline of understanding and try and draw upon the wisdom of the crowd. For example, when we were looking at the question of which jobs are likely to be automated, we actually built, as far as I'm aware, the first data set that brought together every job prediction report, around 13 different predictions in total. It included everything from what the World Bank says to what consulting companies say. That gives you that factual grounding, and then you have to put your fiction hat on and you say, “okay, of all of these, which ones are not just the most important to talk about, but are the most interesting and compelling to talk about.” So the husband of the main character is a way that we use to illustrate that many people when they think about automation, they think about a factory worker or losing their job or maybe a truck driver, something blue collar but the data shows that it cuts across not just blue collar, but also white collar. So, we chose to make the character, a contract lawyer who's been automated, and that's not just to show that white collar jobs are at risk here, but it allows you to have that character hit some more compelling human themes. t's really interesting what happens when you read the reports and plans but also talk to not just the Silicon Valley engineers, but all the way up to the billionaires, is there's this incredible and rightful excitement at the world that they're creating. But there's also sometimes a failure to appreciate that their Utopian visions can sometimes seem very dystopian to other parts of society. And you can see this for example, with facial recognition, where they'll talk excitingly about how you're going to use it in a restaurant and use it in a train station, and all the money that's going to be made. And then you pull back and think through everything, from how will the government use this? How do people with a different point of view that the police think about mass scale of face recognition? How does this change on our personal relationships? You think it's great that the greeter to the store will have automated face recognition, and that they'll be able to call me by name as I enter. But how am I going to think about that person? Am I going to think of them as friendlier or is it just the fact that I know the computer gave them my name? The visions of the future can be Utopian, but it can also feel really creepy in other ways. C4ISRNET: How long has this book been in the works? SINGER: The timeline from when you provide the final version of the book to the publisher, and then when it actually comes out in the stores is about nine months. So, we turned in “Burn-In” in fall of 2019 and it's coming out in summer 2020, and that's just the way the book business works. The challenge of this blend is that there are so many things that that were happening, that are actually a scene or a moment from the book. We would start tweeting them out, calling him a #BurnInbookmoment. And sometimes they were something that was cool and exciting maybe a robot that we write about in the book actually being deployed. But sometimes it was something rather scary, a certain kind of attack that had been researched now actually starting to happen. In the longer term, there might be a problem with the technology in the book. I'll give you a an example: In one of the scenes, there is a drone, and it's pretty clear it's an Amazon drone that flies overhead but we don't name if by company, but we describe it and it has a footnote it's Amazon's patent for the drone. We didn't dream up that it had this number of rotors, but this is Amazon's literal plan for it. Now, five to ten years from now, Amazon might change that plan, and they may plan for it to be a six-rotor trial and it turns out it's a four-rotor trial or something. That's where the technology could be thrown off in time, but we were pretty careful. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/05/25/five-burn-in-questions-on-the-real-robotic-revolution/