DoD Announces DESI Awards for University-Industry Collaborations

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  15 octobre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Army to conduct thorough review of aviation fleet in FY23

  Jen Judson WASHINGTON — As the Army looks to bring on two future helicopters by 2030, the service is planning to review its entire aviation fleet in fiscal 2023, Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the Army G-8, told Defense News in an Oct. 8 interview. Over the past several years, the Army has said it is at “an inflection point” when it comes to prioritizing modernization in order to ensure soldiers can fight in a multidomain environment against near-peer adversaries. Part of that is ensuring the Army is balanced properly when it comes to making sure the current fleet is ready while funding the ambitious development of two new aircraft along with a number of other enablers like a digital backbone, air-launched effects and a new engine, to name a few. In FY20, the Army took controversial steps to shift funding from the current fleet to the future one when it decided it would not buy Block II CH-47F Chinook cargo helicopters for the active force, opting to procure the variant just for special operations. Congress has pushed back on that decision in both its FY20 and FY21 defense bills, injecting funding into the program to keep the pump primed to build Block II Chinooks for the active component against the Army's wishes. So far the Army isn't planning on backing down on its decision to scale down and only buy the Block II variant for special operations. “The Army's position has not changed. I mean, our position is we don't have to make a decision,” Pasquarette said. “It's based on the age of the fleet and other factors,” Pasquarette said. “Our concern is that if Congress decides that we need to move down the Block II path here ... that starts to push out dollars against our modernization priorities that we're very concerned about.” The Army “must develop” both the Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) and the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), he stressed. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy also signaled during an Oct. 8 interview with Defense News that tough decisions on the aviation fleet would have to be made as the FLRAA and FARA aircraft begin to fly. The prototype aircraft for FARA are expected to start flying in the fourth quarter of FY22 and the engineering and manufacturing development phase is expected to begin in FY24. FLRAA prototypes will be delivered in roughly the summer of 2026. The last time the Army restructured its fleet was in 2013 to deal with impending budget cuts and reductions that would have been made through sequestration. The effort was a way to take control of what was cut rather than let every program across the board take salami-slice chops. As a result, the service decided to retire its OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters and use AH-64E Apache attack helicopters paired with Shadow unmanned aircraft systems to fill the armed scout role until future aircraft could come online. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/10/14/army-to-conduct-thorough-review-of-aviation-fleet-in-fy23/

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  5 décembre 2024 | International, Naval

  This Marine Corps unit now has a ship-killing missile in its toolkit

  The new tool gives Marines an offensive strike to clear the way for the Navy.

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  31 juillet 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Satellite Imagery + Social Media = A New Way to Spot Emerging Nuclear Threats

  BY PATRICK TUCKER A research team is training computers to find and fuse clues from wildly different rivers of digital data. Hiding illicit nuclear programs might be getting harder, thanks to new ways of gleaning and combining clues from various rivers of digital data. That's the conclusion of new research funded in part by the U.S. Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration. Satellites offer one kind of information; social media another — particularly inside countries that may be trying to flout inspections. But large volumes of satellite imagery and social media data aren't similar. You can have one analyst examine satellite pictures and another look at social media posts to see if they align, but the process is time-consuming and generally far from comprehensive. The study's authors developed a method for fusing different types of data in a machine-readable way to offer a much clearer picture. “In light of their ubiquitous emergence, social media increasingly promise to be of great value even though associated applications have thus far remained simple, and their fusion with other data has been largely ad hoc,” the team from North Carolina State University writes in “Fusing Heterogeneous Data: A Case for Remote Sensing and Social Media.” Only by creating a new statistical method for fusing the outputs of satellite data and social media data do you get something you can use to predict what might happen next within a given area of interest, such as a specific nation's nuclear enrichment or weapons development. The researchers looked at satellite and social media data from August 2013, when deadly floods killed eight people and caused widespread damage in Colorado. They sought to show that if you could algorithmically identify which imagery showed the flooding from space, and which geotagged tweets described it on the ground, you could could much more quickly verify one data set against another — that is, you could determine whether incoming social media data supports the conclusions you might be reaching from your satellite data, and vice versa. “Next steps for the project include evaluating nuclear facilities in the West to identify common characteristics that may also be applicable to facilities in more isolated societies, such as North Korea,” notes a press release on the paper. One of the authors, NCSU computer and electrical engineering professor Hamid Krim, said the team would try to “address the insufficient knowledge in general in areas of great interest (e.g. N. Korea and Iran). The goal is to come up with systematic methodologies to transport knowledge about nuclear environments available in other areas (e.g., in the West) to these domains where there is very little available. Creating such an environment in these places of interest will help them detect potential undesired activity.” Of course, there are limitations to media monitoring in Iran and North Korea. The former's social media environment is largely underground, thanks to bans on Twitter and many other social networks. The latter has virtually no social media environment at all. Krim noted that the “adversarial strategy” of social-media censorship makes his team's analysis harder. But even social posts from nearby countries can help illuminate their more secretive neighbors, he said — think tweets from Japan after earth tremors are felt. https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2018/07/satellite-imagery-social-media-new-way-spot-emerging-nuclear-threats/150146/