European Union awards grant to forge unmanned ground vehicle standard

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

  Interservice rivalries: A force for good

  By: Susanna V. Blume and Molly Parrish It's no secret that the military services fight hard to protect their shares of the defense budget. Just last week, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday made his case for a greater share of the defense budget. Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy quickly answered, making the same claim on behalf of his service. What if the Department of Defense were able to use these rivalries as a force for good? The secretary of defense should pit the services against each other in a healthy competition for solutions to real operational challenges. The reward? More funding in their budgets to implement the best solutions. It is by now old news that the 2018 National Defense Strategy solidified a shift in priorities from long-term counterinsurgency and stabilization operations in the Middle East to strategic competition with China and Russia. This shift represents a significant change in what the country will require of the joint force in the future. As a result, to fully embrace this shift in priorities, it follows that the services must accept additional risk in some areas in order to invest in the capabilities required to sustain U.S. military advantage over aspiring great powers. In other words, in order to implement the NDS, the DoD must shift resources. But shifting resource around with the defense budget is really hard. For the most part, defense budgets are built from the bottom up, with each program having strong institutional champions, regardless of how relevant that program is to the current strategy. In this environment, it's difficult to take money away from something to give it to something else. The result is budgets that largely reflect the status quo. While the DoD should of course avoid capricious and destabilizing swings in funding for defense programs, there are times when deliberate, strategy-driven shifts in resources are necessary. To make it a little easier to move money around the DoD in these cases, we recommend in our latest report that the secretary of defense harness interservice rivalry as a force for good. The secretary should give the services specific operational challenges to solve at the outset of the budget cycle, and reward the service or services with the best solutions at the end of the cycle with the funds to implement them. The DoD competition would start at the beginning of the budget cycle, with the operational challenge given alongside the usual strategic, planning and fiscal guidance. Over the course of the budget cycle, the services would each work to come up with solutions to the operational challenges posed by the secretary. During program review, the services would present their solutions to defense leadership. The service or services with the best solution to the secretary's challenges would then receive the funds to implement them. To fund this competition, the secretary would have to hold back some resources at the start of the process, effectively giving less to each of the services to begin with. This decision will be extremely unpopular with the services, but it will also ensure that the secretary has easily accessible funding available to him or her at the end of program review with which to ensure that the services are implementing his or her top priorities. The idea of spurring innovation through competition is not new. The DoD already uses competitions to drive innovative solutions to a wide variety of technical challenges. Take the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Launch Challenge, which aims to improve resiliency in space by tasking participants to “launch payloads to orbit on extremely short notice.” DARPA will give the team who is able to complete both launches a prize of $10 million to continue their work. In addition, this past September, the DoD's Joint Artificial intelligence Center, along with the National Security Innovation Network, hosted a Hackathon at the University of Michigan. Participants came from both academia and the commercial industry to find artificial intelligence-enabled solutions. The hackers were given a specific problem and then tasked with finding a solution. The winners of the Hackathon are rewarded with — surprise — money! The services like money just as much as the average citizen, and the Department of Defense needs to take this concept and use these persistent and unavoidable interservice rivalries as a force for good. A healthy competition between the services, incentivized by funding, could be the next step toward implementing and addressing the challenges inherent in implementing the National Defense Strategy. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/01/21/interservice-rivalries-a-force-for-good/

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  28 mai 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Joint AI Center Turns To Air Force cloudONE As JEDI Stalls

  The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center needs three things: new acquisition authorities, more staff, and the cloud. With JEDI delayed ‘potentially many more months,' director Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan said, he's turning to an Air Force alternative. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on May 27, 2020 at 2:25 PM WASHINGTON: The legal battle over the JEDI cloud-computing contract has slowed down the Pentagon's AI program, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center acknowledges. In the meantime, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan told an AFCEA webcast last week, JAIC will turn to a new Air Force program our longtime readers are already familiar with: cloudONE. Cloud computing matters for AI because machine-learning algorithms need lots of data and lots of processing power. A shared cloud can offer both with far greater efficiencies of scale than any single organization's in-house network. JEDI was meant to provide a single “general purpose” cloud to all users across the Defense Department, including Shanahan's Joint AI Center. But it has been mired for months in legal battles over which company should have won the contract, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. “It slowed us down, no question about it,” Shanahan told the AFCEA audience. “Azure, AWS, I will never get into a company discussion. I'm agnostic,” he said. “[But] if we want to make worldwide updates to all these algorithms in the space of minutes, not in the space of months running around gold disks, we've got to have an enterprise cloud solution.” JEDI can't be that solution today, Shanahan acknowledged, but “we now have a good plan to account for the fact that it will be delayed potentially many more months.” For instance, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, the Joint AI Center urgently stood up what they call Project Salus – named for the Roman goddess of health and safety – to pull data from 70 different sources, find patterns, and predict trends for US Northern Command and the National Guard. Salus went from a sketch on a “bar napkin” to a functional bare-bones system (what's called a Minimum Viable Product) in 29 days, Shanahan said. With JEDI unavailable, he turned to an existing Air Force cloud run out of Hanscom Air Force Base, which he'd previously used as head of Project Maven. But the Hanscom-based cloud is “an interim solution that will end ... here later in the fall,” Shanahan said. “Because of that, we are pivoting to the cloudONE environment.” CloudONE & Beyond So what's cloudONE? Like JEDI, it's a new cloud-computing capability that the Air Force hopes will be available to a wide range of users from across the Department of Defense. Unlike JEDI, it's not a joint program run by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but a service program, run by the Air Force. In fact, cloudOne is part of a whole package of computing initiatives – deviceONE, dataONE, et al – that the Air Force acquisition chief, Will Roper, began pushing (and branding) aggressively last year. Further, while JEDI is meant as the Defense Department's “general purpose” cloud, Roper's many ONEs are all intended to serve a single purpose, albeit a broad one: military command and control. Together, Roper's projects will make up what the Air Force is calling its Advanced Battle Management System. ABMS, in turn, will be an Air Force component of the future Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) meta-network to share battle data between all the armed services across all five “domains” of warfare: land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Artificial intelligence is essential for JADC2, since human analysts can't pull together that much data from that many sources fast enough to make a difference in combat. The JAIC is far too small to build the whole JADC2 network – that's up to the far better-resourced services – but it can help. “We're not here to build JADC2,” he said. “We're here to find AI-enabled solutions that stitch seams together from all the services, who're [each] developing some version of JADC2.” The objective is to automate and accelerate the often-laborious process of bringing American firepower to bear. That “kill chain” includes everything from spotting a potential target with some kind of sensor, confirming what it is with other sensors, deciding to strike it, picking an aircraft, warship, or artillery battery to execute the strike, and then giving that shooter precise targeting data. Currently most of that requires human beings relaying coordinates and orders over the radio, typing them into terminals by hand, or even scrawling them on sticky notes because one network can't transfer data to another. “Accelerated sensor-to-shooter timelines are so important – to me, this is what the next couple of years will be about, and each of the services has a really strong programs in sensor-to-shooter,” Shanahan said. “What we're trying to bring is the AI/ML solutions.” To do that job, however, the JAIC needs more people and more legal authorities to conduct acquisitions on its own – although it will never be the size of the services' acquisition bureaucracies. For example, while Shanahan initially focused on lower-risk, non-combat applications of AI like maintenance, on May 18 the JAIC awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a landmark contract worth up to $800 million for AI “to support warfighting operations [and] decision-making and analysis at all tiers of DoD operations.” But JAIC did so in partnership with the civilian General Services Administration (using GSA's Alliant 2 contract vehicle), just as it's done past contracts through the Defense Information Systems Agency and other established organizations, because it doesn't have the necessary authorities and personnel in-house – yet. “I couldn't ask for better support,” Shanahan said, “but it's not going to be fast enough as we start putting more and more money into this capability development. We need our own acquisition authority.” In particular, he sees JAIC as a potential early adopter of the new streamlined process for software development and acquisition recently rolled out by the Pentagon's acquisition chief, Ellen Lord. The JAIC also needs to get bigger. Founded in summer 2018 with just four staff, JAIC has now grown to 175 personnel (counting contractors) and must keep growing, Shanahan said. But that larger staff won't include Shanahan: JAIC's founding director retires from the Air Force next month. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/joint-ai-center-turns-to-air-force-cloudone-as-jedi-stalls/

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  26 octobre 2017 | International, Aérospatial, Sécurité

  Le Symposium OACI sur l’identification des voyageurs souligne le rôle clé de l’aviation dans la lutte contre le terrorisme et la criminalité transfrontalière

  ​Mme Liu, Secrétaire générale de l'OACI, a prononcé l'allocution d'ouverture du 13e Symposium sur la stratégie du Programme d'identification des voyageurs (TRIP) de l'OACI, qui se tient au siège de l'institution onusienne à Montréal. Rendez-vous mondial portant sur la gestion des documents de voyage et de l'identité, ce tout dernier Symposium TRIP est considéré comme une étape importante pour maintenir l'élan mondial à l'égard des priorités de lutte anti-terroriste qu'a récemment suscité le Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies. Montréal, le 26 octobre 2017 – La lutte contre les mouvements terroristes et criminels internationaux a franchi une étape cette semaine, alors que des experts et des hauts fonctionnaires se sont réunis à l'occasion du 13eSymposium sur la stratégie du Programme d'identification des voyageurs (TRIP) de l'OACI. « La stratégie TRIP de l'OACI renforce la ligne de défense mondiale contre les mouvements terroristes internationaux, la criminalité transfrontalière et les nombreuses autres menaces qui pèsent sur la sécurité et la sûreté de la société civile et de l'aviation internationale », a fait valoir Mme Liu, Secrétaire générale de l'OACI, dans son allocution d'ouverture. « La majorité de nos travaux dans ce domaine sont principalement réalisés conformément à l'Annexe 9 à la Convention de Chicago – Facilitation. Les activités de facilitation appuient résolument les Objectifs de développement durable (ODD) des Nations Unies et la Stratégie TRIP de l'OACI contribue de manière importante aux Résolutions 2178 et 2309 du Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies. » Rendez-vous mondial portant sur la gestion des documents de voyage et de l'identité, ce tout dernier Symposium TRIP est considéré comme une étape importante pour maintenir l'élan mondial à l'égard des priorités de lutte anti-terroriste qu'a récemment suscité le Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies. Mme Liu avait présenté un exposé général de la sûreté de l'aviation au Conseil de sécurité des Nations Unies en septembre, après avoir été invitée à la réunion du Comité contre le terrorisme (CTC) en juillet 2017. Outre le renforcement des inspections/filtrages et des contrôles de sûreté, le CTC a souligné l'importance du rôle des compagnies aériennes dans le suivi des déplacements dans le monde des passagers présentant un risque plus élevé. « Le CTC a expressément reconnu l'importance du partage des renseignements préalables concernant les voyageurs (RPCV) par les autorités nationales », a noté Mme Liu. « Bien que de nombreux États n'aient toujours pas mis en place des programmes relatifs aux RPCV, je tiens à leur rappeler que le partage des RPCV est obligatoire depuis le 23 octobre dernier, en vertu de l'Annexe 9 de l'OACI ». Les séances tenues dans le cadre du Symposium TRIP 2017 ont permis aux participants de s'informer sur les dernières mesures d'inspection/filtrage et de sûreté fondées sur les risques, tout en soulignant l'importance des partenariats et du renforcement des capacités alors que les États œuvrent à renforcer leurs lignes de défense respectives. « La mise en œuvre par les États de la stratégie TRIP nécessite une action coordonnée entre de nombreux États et entités de l'industrie, mais nous sommes aussi conscients que les divers gouvernements ne disposent pas des mêmes capacités à mettre en œuvre le Programme TRIP. L'OACI et les États s'emploient à résorber cet écart en favorisant la coopération entre les États et l'industrie, en renforçant la coordination régionale et locale, et en obtenant la contribution de donateurs », a indiqué Mme Liu. La question des orientations approfondies dont ont besoin les États pour la planification et la mise en œuvre du programme TRIP a été abordée plus en détail dans le cadre du lancement du Recueil TRIP de l'OACI. Ce nouveau document de référence exhaustif présente les initiatives connexes de partenaires tels que l'Office des Nations Unies contre la drogue et le crime (ONUDC), INTERPOL, l'Union européenne, l'Organisation pour la sécurité et la coopération en Europe (OSCE) et l'Organisation mondiale pour les migrations (OIM), et rassemble divers éléments indicatifs de l'OACI supplémentaires. Le Symposium TRIP 2017 a coïncidé avec deux ateliers OACI importants sur le Répertoire de clés publiques (RCP) et l'adoption de nouvelles approches en matière de RPCV, tenus en parallèle et en partenariat avec la Direction exécutive du Comité contre le terrorisme (DECT) des Nations Unies et d'autres organisations internationales. Si le Panama est récemment devenu le 59e État à tirer profit de la validation encryptée du RCP, qui maximise les avantages de la sûreté des passeports électroniques, Mme Liu a souligné que l'OACI s'attend à ce que davantage d'États adhèrent au RCP dans les mois à venir. « S'il est vrai que plus de 80 % des passeports électroniques en circulation dans le monde sont délivrés par des États qui participent déjà au RCP, de nombreux États ne s'en prévalent toujours pas pour authentifier les données contenues dans la puce », a-t-elle réitéré. Le Symposium TRIP 2017 était centré sur le thème « Renforcer la sûreté et l'efficacité du transport aérien », pour refléter le fait que des technologies de sûreté bien conçues contribuent aussi à l'amélioration de l'expérience des passagers et, de manière plus générale, de l'efficacité des processus de facilitation. « C'est uniquement en nous assurant d'équilibrer ces deux priorités que les solutions que nous proposons seront véritablement durables », a conclu Mme Liu. Outre le Symposium et ses ateliers, les participants à l'édition 2017 ont pu visiter une exposition éclectique présentant les dernières innovations de l'industrie en matière de technologies et de processus. Le Symposium a rassemblé près de 600 fonctionnaires venant de 82 États et de 14 organisations internationales et prendra fin aujourd'hui à l'OACI. https://www.icao.int/Newsroom/Pages/FR/ICAO-traveller-identification-event-highlights-key-aviation-role-in-combatting-terrorism-and-cross-border-crime.aspx