Defense innovation stymied as gridlock in Congress bars emerging tech

Sur le même sujet

• 

  22 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  How new prototyping dollars will help Army network modernization

  Andrew Eversden ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. — The U.S. Army is moving forward on a number of projects to bolster its tactical network, thanks to a new pool of money dedicated to prototyping and maturing emerging technology. Additions to the Army's tactical network will come every two years as part of modernization efforts called capability sets. Previously, prototypes of emerging technology would fall into the “valley of death,” where technology projects that didn't have enough funding to transition into programs of record would die, said Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, director of the Army's Network Cross-Functional Team. The CFT received nearly $30 million to support prototyping efforts for science and technology efforts as well as industry work in fiscal 2020, according to Justine Ruggio, communications director for the CFT. According to a May news release from Army Program Executive Office Command, Control, Communications-Tactical, the Army network modernization team has identified eight “promising,” Army-led science and technology efforts as well as six industry-led prototyping projects. The Army is particularly interested in low-Earth orbit satellite constellations to improve bandwidth and reduce latency for Capability Set '23 and Capability Set '25, said Michael Breckenridge, acting associate director for the Office of Science and Technology. His office falls under the purview of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR (Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) Center. The S&T team is researching how the service can move and secure traffic through these constellations. “While those are very much in their infancy as far as the commercial LEO constellations coming together, we're already working with those vendors to try and get satellite time to be able to do experimentation to understand the capability and how do we shape, then, future investments in that space,” Breckenridge said. The Network CFT is also excited about the survivability and mobility of the Army's command posts, said Donald Coulter, senior S&T adviser for the CFT. It's also focused on spectrum obfuscation capabilities as well as an identity management project that explores new ways of verifying users' identities (for example, through wearables) to ensure the security of Army systems if equipment falls into enemy hands, he added. The S&T community and the CFT are also working on a secure communications link between manned and unmanned fighting vehicles, something that may be used for other parts of the network, Breckenridge said. For example, the C5ISR Center is also experimenting with that link for distributed command post nodes and between command post links, he noted. Previously, a lack of funds made it difficult to create an “entire road map to field” prototypes, he added, and teamwork between the network team and S&T community suffered. But with the newly allocated funds, the S&T community and the Network CFT are able to work more closely. The dollars have been “the key to have the groups from across all those different communities come together focusing on what specifically we need to take viable concepts and promising concepts from idea to demonstration to real ... tangible and robust thing[s] that we can acquire and field,” said Coulter. With the prototyping dollars now in place, the CFT is expected to have an easier time developing technologies for the service's network modernization plan, driven by capability sets. Capability Set '21, which completed critical design review in April, is focused on addressing immediate gaps in the Army's network with currently available technologies. The Army has begun buying those new network tools, which focus on smaller, lighter, faster communication systems for soldiers, and will begin fielding the technology in fiscal 2021. Meanwhile, Capability Set '23, which has preliminary design review scheduled for April next year, is focused on high-capacity, low-latency communications that aren't mature enough today, Gallagher said at the C4ISRNET Conference in May. Future capability sets will include emerging technologies that improve network resiliency. For example, after Capability Set '23, soldiers will have more bandwidth at the tactical edge, allowing for the increased adoption of machine learning and other emerging technologies. The Army is also in the planning stages of Capability Set '25. Even as the Army identifies key technologies for future capability sets, it must work within the constraints of budgets, meaning that the Network CFT and the C5ISR Center have to work together to identify S&T priorities. Coulter said the “key thing” that the CFT does is prioritize its portfolio and provide guidance on critical capability gaps. Breckenridge said the S&T community brings an understanding of adversarial threats to the network and what investments can be made to mitigate those threats to inform the CFT's prioritization. “One of the key things that S&T community does is ... identify those opportunities,” Coulter said. “So we're threat-informed and -aware, but we also are looking from a technology perspective of where can we get the leap-ahead opportunities that can impose challenges to our adversaries and take our network to the next level. So we have to rely on them heavily, not only for some threat information, but also ... those unique potential opportunities from a technology perspective as well.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/07/20/how-new-prototyping-dollars-will-help-army-network-modernization/

• 

  11 mars 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Poll: Germans, Americans far apart on use of military, defense spending

  By: Sebastian Sprenger COLOGNE, Germany — Germans and Americans remain far apart on defense issues, ranging from when to use the military, how much to spend on defense and which country poses a bigger challenge — Russia or China — according to a new study unveiled Monday. “Three years into a turbulent period of American-German relations, with Donald Trump at the helm of American foreign policy and Angela Merkel leading Germany, there continues to be a wide divergence in views of bilateral relations and security policy between the publics of both countries,” said a Pew Research Center study published in cooperation with Koerber Stiftung, a German think tank. The two organizations each polled about 1,000 adults in September 2019 in the United States and Germany. Also included in the data are results from Pew's “global attitudes” survey conducted in both countries during the spring and summer of 2019. The results are unlikely to surprise anyone following trans-Atlantic relations, but they put into perspective why deep-seated differences persist in crafting a more coherent political show of force between the two nations. While roughly 80 percent Americans believe that using military might is sometimes necessary to maintain order in the world, Germans were almost split evenly on the same question, with a slight majority disagreeing. On the question of defending a fellow NATO ally against Russia in the event of a conflict, 6 in 10 Americans said the United States should help, whereas 6 in 10 German respondents said their country should not get involved. At the same time, Germans saw the United States high up in the list of key foreign policy allies, much higher than Americans viewed Germany. Asked to name their most or second-most important partner, 42 percent of Germans mentioned the United Sates, surpassed only by the their top choice of France, at 60 percent. For Americans, the British ranked highest on the same question, at 36 percent, followed by China (23 percent), Canada (20 percent) and Israel (15 percent). “One area of convergence is the broad support in both the U.S. and Germany for more cooperation with France and Japan. And similar majorities in the U.S. and Germany want to cooperate more with China,” the study read. As for cooperation with Russia, “Germans are almost twice as likely as Americans to want greater collaboration,” it added. When it comes to defense spending, 35 percent of Americans felt that Europeans should up their military budget, with 50 percent saying it should stay the same and 9 percent saying it should decrease. In 2017, the share of Americans wanting an increase was 45 percent. In Germany, the acceptance for defense budget increases has grown since 2017, when only 32 percent of those polled voiced support and 50 percent wanted it to remain the same. In 2018, 43 percent of respondents supported an increase. At the mid-February Munich Security Conference, much was made about the European Union's need to “learn to use the language of power,” as Josep Borrell, the bloc's defense and foreign policy chief, put it. That, of course, would cost money. Germans have traditionally frowned upon that kind of talk, though there is an increasing awareness of geopolitical perils in the wake of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Jeffrey Rathke, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said in an interview last month. “Germany has been able to get by with its rhetorical response to the deteriorating security environment,” he said. “Now it's increasingly obvious that that is no longer enough.” While the country has significantly upped its defense spending, sensitizing the public for operational contributions to Europe's security will be a crucial next step for this government and the next, Rathke argued. The Pew and Koerber figures point to a generational change in the general attitudes of Germans and Americans about one another. “Despite these divergences in opinion, young people in both countries have more positive views of the U.S.-German relationship,” the study read. “In the U.S., for example, 82 percent of people ages 18 to 29 say the relationship is good, compared with 73 percent of those ages 65 and older. Similarly, in Germany, four-in-ten young people say relations with the U.S. are good, compared with only 31 percent of those 65 and older.” Notably, the two countries' militaries enjoy a much closer level of cooperation than the political discourse suggests, especially during the Trump administration, a fact that officials in both countries keep stressing when the tone between Berlin and Washington turns particularly icy. “There is an instinctive perception in the German public to defense matters anchored in Europe and the trans-Atlantic alliance,” Rathke said. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/03/09/poll-germans-americans-far-apart-on-use-of-military-defense-spending/

• 

  21 octobre 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Are software-defined ground stations the next big leap? Kratos is betting on it.

  Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — Software-defined payloads have revolutionized how industry and the government approach satellites. So why not software-defined ground stations? That's the question Kratos is asking. On Oct. 20, the longtime Pentagon contractor with experience building satellite support systems unveiled its new OpenSpace platform — a family of virtual products that applies the software-defined approach to the ground station. OpenSpace uses an open standards, cloud-based system that can be continuously adjusted to mission needs without having to install new hardware. Pentagon officials often complain that the nation's current satellite ground architecture is stymied by stovepiped, custom-built proprietary ground systems. The department has said it plans to move to an enterprise ground system, but it's not there yet. Kratos hopes that OpenSpace can at least be part of the solution. Because the platform is software-based, satellite operators no longer need to use custom-built hardware to connect to and control their on-orbit systems. Instead, OpenSpace virtualizes the ground system in software, effectively allowing it to be linked up to any antenna with a digital converter. “It's a big announcement from our perspective in that it's going to address a lot of the key issues that are challenging the space industry across the board, and especially some of the issues that the defense and government world is going through,” Neil Oatley, Kratos' vice president for marketing, told C4ISRNET. Software-defined payloads have opened up new possibilities in the space industry. Previously, satellites were designed to be rather static tools — once placed in orbit, it becomes all but impossible to physically replace the payload hardware or refigure the software. That means that the system you launch is the system you've got, regardless of whether your mission needs change or you want to do something new with your orbital tech. The Defense Department is investing in capabilities that could eventually allow physical access to operational satellites via robotic space vehicles, but that's still in development. All that is just to say, when the military builds a satellite, it builds it with the expectation that the space-bound payload will be largely static over the lifetime of the spacecraft. In other words, it will do the mission it was meant to do, and not much else. “When you look at the ground today, it's the one area where we're really stuck back in 2G-type technology,” said Phil Carrai, president of Kratos' Space, Training and Cyber division. “Systems are stovepiped. They're static. They're built with custom hardware. They have software-specific technologies that are dedicated to specific satellites. And that's really making them unable to play in the coming new world.” Building a new, custom ground system for each new satellite or constellation is not only costly, but it limits flexibility. The satellite-specific nature of existing ground systems makes it difficult to build third-party applications that can easily be installed across systems. Moreover, it limits the ability of operators to simultaneously connect to multiple constellations using the same ground system. However, industry has created a workaround. Satellites may not be physically inaccessible, but they frequently communicate with operators over radio frequency signals. If a given payload's functions are largely virtualized — meaning they are software-defined and not hardware-defined — then operators can alter a given satellite's capabilities and mission by simply installing new software. Hence, the growing interest in building software-defined payloads. In fact, the next GPS payload will feature an entirely digital payload. With OpenSpace, Kratos is applying the basic principles of software-defined payloads to satellite ground systems — the technology used to command and control the spacecraft once it's on orbit. The ground system is what operators use to cue, download data from, and monitor their satellites. According to Kratos, its OpenSpace platform is the first dynamic, software-defined ground system that will apply those lessons learned from the space layer to the ground layer. “What we did with OpenSpace is we actually started from scratch with an entirely new platform that is based on the fundamentals of network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN),” said Greg Quiggle, vice president of product management at Kratos, comparing the platform to the architecture underlying new 5G networks. “We took that same basic premise and we applied it to the way a ground system should be built to interconnect software-defined satellites, multi-constellation networks and a terrestrial network.” A key feature that enables OpenSpace is the digitization of the radio frequency signal as close to the antenna as possible, transforming that flow of data into what is effectively a large ethernet network. “Once you've done that — you move from [radio frequency] to digital — you now can process those subchannels, that bandwidth, in software through something called virtualized network functions,” Quiggle explained. The platform takes typical purpose-built ground station hardware — splitters, channelizers, matrix switches, modulators, demodulators and much more — and recreates them in a virtual environment. Once the radio frequency data is digitized, it can be processed through all of these virtual tools. One consequence of that is the software can be run anywhere — it does not have to be located at the antenna. Operators can run this solution in the cloud or in a classified data center, said Quiggle. That also means any ground station using OpenSpace can be quickly adjusted for different uses. For instance, take an operator who needs to interact with satellites. By using an OpenSource-enabled ground station, that individual can load his or her own software-defined solution into the system, connect with the satellite, download any data and cue the spacecraft for its next tasks. Once that satellite passes out of view, a second operator can take over the ground station, load an entirely different software-defined solution and interact with the satellite as it passes over. In this scenario, both users were able to use a single ground station to communicate with their own unique satellites. In another example, the first user is ready to use one ground station to interact with a satellite as it passes overhead, but inclement weather disrupts the process. Instead of waiting for the satellite to pass overhead again, the user simply needs to find the next available ground station on the satellite's course, virtually load software and then access the satellite from there. Military applications OpenSpace is clearly set to have commercial implications. In fact, Microsoft announced Oct. 20 that it will use OpenSpace as part of its Azure Orbital ground-station-as-a-service. Azure Orbital is Microsoft's answer to Amazon Web Services' Ground Station model, which allows customers to access their satellites by renting time on Amazon's ground stations and the AWS platform. It's a business model that could be attractive to small companies looking to field small satellites without building massive, cost-prohibitive ground systems to support them. But a product like OpenSpace could make an even bigger splash in the military space community, especially when it comes to satellite communications. In a statement released earlier this year, the Space Force laid out its concept of “fighting SATCOM.” The service envisions enabling war fighters to roam among satellite communications providers to ensure forces remain connected even if one provider is jammed or unavailable. That level of fluidity requires some major changes to how the military has traditionally approached satellite communications. “One of the things that the government is looking for very specifically is the ability to create an open enterprise-wide architecture for their protected communications systems,” said Frank Backes, senior vice president for federal space-related business at Kratos. “And as they move forward with proliferated LEO [low-Earth orbit] and MEO [medium-Earth orbit] constellations to add communication options, resiliency and capability to their current geosynchronous space communications environment ... this ground architecture is very critical to the defense goals and what they're trying to achieve,” he added. Currently, the ability to roam between constellations to avoid jamming is hampered by stovepiped systems, which are designed to work with a single satellite or a set of satellites. Because OpenSpace can leverage any radio frequency antenna, digitizes that signal and process that data in software, the operator can use the same ground station for multiple constellations. Kratos certainly hopes that its system could be the ground solution for the “fight SATCOM” concept. “Today, the U.S. government on the defense side is very dependent on their own antennas and their own hardware that is deployed for their communications infrastructure and their satellite command-and-control environment. And one of the reasons for that is the hardware that is out in the field today is protected hardware: It may have specialized waveforms, it may have specialized components, it may even have specialized encryption infrastructure,” Backes said. “That limits the military to only using certain apertures for communications. As soon as you move to this dynamic environment — this OpenSpace environment that Kratos is talking about — now you have the ability to use any commercial or military antenna infrastructure for your system and dynamically configure that as needed. “Combined with the ability to move protected hardware out of the field and putting that into a controlled cloud environment, now all of a sudden I have the ability to create the resilient environment that the Department of Defense is looking for.” Kratos told C4ISRNET in a statement that the company “is providing satellite ground system engineering support on several DoD pLEO space segment teams.” In addition, the company noted it “will be bidding our OpenSpace and [Eterprise Ground Services] capabilities on pLEO systems as those opportunities mature.” “When you look at ... the new LEO and MEO constellations — just from a pure imaging/sensing perspective — we don't see how you make those happen without an element of a dynamic software-defined ground,” Carrai said. “The timing has to be second or milliseconds. That we think is going to be essential for us to really get what we're paying for and we need from a U.S. constellation perspective.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2020/10/20/are-software-defined-ground-stations-the-next-big-leap-kratos-is-betting-on-it/