Eying military gains, France goes big on national quantum technology

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  21 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  The Pentagon can now buy US-made small drones from these five companies

  Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — Beginning in September, entities across the U.S. Department of Defense will be able to buy small, American-manufactured drones from five select companies, allowing users in the field to quickly and easily gain a bird's eye view of their environment. A spin-off of U.S. Army efforts to develop a rucksack-packable quadcopter with the Short Range Reconnaissance (SRR) program of record, the Defense Innovation Unit's Blue sUAS effort let's U.S. government customers purchase trusted small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) that can take off and land vertically. The new drones were developed to comply with Section 848 of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which prohibits the procurement of UAS built in China. Drone configurations will be available from five manufacturers: Altavian, Parrot, Skydio, Teal, and Vantage Robotics. “I think the fact that we started a program with a single requirement around an Army effort and were able to scale it across not only all of the services in DoD to include (U.S. Special Operations Command) and the combatant commands as well as the inter-agency federal government partners ― at least to me ― is super exciting,” Chris Bonzagni, a program manager within DIU's autonomy portfolio and an sUAS subject matter expert, told C4ISRNET. “As a former infantryman, having this capability when I was deployed to Iraq would have been a dream come true.” While Blue sUAS uses the same aerial vehicles as SRR, it offers a vendor-provided ground control system and radio configurations that can be used by customers across DoD and the federal government more broadly. Blue sUAS drones will be available on the GSA schedule starting in September 2020, though DoD entities can also pursue a production contract via Other Transaction Authority, DIU noted in their announcement. “Blue sUAS represents a tremendous first step toward building a robust and trusted UAS domestic industrial base that ensures sustained delivery of highly-capable, secure UAS to the warfighters that depend on it,” said Michael Kratsios, Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. “Blue sUAS showcases how we can both work with small, nontraditional companies and our allies and partners to quickly pilot cutting-edge technologies that support our mutual defense.” The path to Blue sUAS started about two years ago, according to Bonzagni. The Army approached DIU for help adopting commercial quadcopters for use by every platoon. DIU staff walked the Army through their Commercial Solutions Opening process, distilling about 60 pages of requirements to just a page and a half, making them more accessible to commercial companies looking to work with DoD. Those specifications were posted in November 2018, drawing 34 responses from industry. DIU accepted pitches from half of those companies, and ultimately downselected to just six companies five months later in April 2019. Of those six companies, four had never even worked with DoD before. “Blue sUAS is a great example of DoD acquisition reform by lowering the barrier to entry for non-traditional companies to rapidly iterate shoulder to shoulder with warfighters to deliver highly capable sUAS tailored to mission needs,” said Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Ellen Lord in a statement. Under those contracts, DIU worked with those six companies to modify their mature commercial products for broader DoD needs. Among other things, the companies had to incorporate a thermal camera, add a DoD data link, cyber test the drones and ruggedize them for field use. Midway through development, Congress passed a new requirement in the annual defense policy legislation, prohibiting the operation or procurement of UAS manufactured in China. That effort grounded significant numbers of government drones, said Bonzagni, and there were no suitable U.S.-manufactured alternatives available. While the Army continued to focus on developing a solution specifically for its soldiers through SRR, the new requirement opened up a much broader need across the federal government for U.S.-manufactured sUAS. DIU was able to leverage the Army's investment in SRR and make the technology available for all federal government customers — including organizations that use drones every day like the Bureau of Land Management or the U.S. Geological Survey — as Blue sUAS. Drones available through Blue sUAS can be assembled in two minutes or less and will have an operational range of over 3 kilometers, flight endurance greater than 30 minutes, and can fly through dust and rain. All products are three pounds or greater. According to Bonzagni, DIU is looking for a pricing range between $7,000 and $15,000 per unit, although the end price point will vary based on configuration. “While all these offerings were derived from essentially consumer-based [products] ― in some cases toys and some cases fun cameras in the sky — these are sUAS built for work,” explained Matthew Borowski, program manager within DIU's sUAS portfolio and an sUAS subject matter expert. “There really is no consumer offering that has the type of payload package that these drones have on them, including higher resolution thermal cameras [and cameras with seamless zoom].” https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2020/08/20/department-of-defense-can-now-buy-us-manufactured-small-drones-from-these-five-companies/

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  7 décembre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Is near-instant satellite imagery almost here?

  By: Mike Gruss Intelligence analysts and soldiers on the battlefield could have access to near real-time imagery from commercial satellites as soon as 2021 thanks to new industry partnerships. Amazon Web Services unveiled Nov. 28 a new product named AWS Ground Station, which includes parabolic antennas at 12 locations across the globe. Those ground stations can download imagery data as satellites pass overhead and then push that information to the cloud at faster speeds than traditional ground stations. Meanwhile, leaders from satellite imagery company DigitalGlobe said in tests they were able to move imagery data from the ground station to the cloud in less than a minute. Using today's technology, that task takes about an hour. Combined, the speed of the new ground stations and the expected launch of DigitalGlobe's constellation of next-generation imagery satellites in 2021 would offer a new level of immediacy to customers. “When firefighters are attacking a wildfire, they need the most up-to-date information to save lives and homes,” Jeff Carr, director of mission operations engineering support at DigitalGlobe, wrote in a Nov. 27 blog post. “When first responders are tracking down refugees fleeing danger in flimsy rubber boats, they need real-time information about where those rubber boats are located before they sink. The uses for current and accurate space-based data is growing — and the end-users need it quickly.” DigitalGlobe provides imagery to the National Reconnaissance Office under the Enhanced View contract and to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency with the Global EGD contract. Several companies that already provide imagery and data to the Department of Defense and intelligence community — including BlackSky, Spire and HawkEye 360 — are also using the ground stations. Traditionally, ground stations download information from satellites on a rigid schedule, meaning users must wait several hours until the next pass when new information is available and can be processed. The company's new Legion satellites will double the number of times the satellites contact ground stations. In addition, an imagery satellite could revisit the same target as many as 15 times a day. All of that means defense and intelligence agencies could have access to imagery that is a few minutes old, not several hours old. Turner Brinton, a DigitalGlobe spokesman, declined to comment on the technical aspects of how the company would support the U.S. government. “Satellite data is incredibly useful for building a wide range of important applications, but it is super complex and expensive to build and operate the infrastructure needed to do so,” Charlie Bell, senior vice president of AWS, said in a press release. “Today, we are giving satellite customers the ability to dynamically scale their ground station antenna use based on actual need. And, they will be able to ingest data straight into AWS, where they can securely store, analyze and transmit products to their customers without needing to worry about building all of the infrastructure themselves.” In addition, Lockheed Martin and Amazon Web Services announced a new partnership Nov. 27 that would allow customers to download satellite data faster, more often and from multiple satellites at the same time. That technology is a shoebox-sized antenna and satellite receiver known as Verge. Each antenna would cost about $20,000 and replace larger parabolic antennas, which are often priced at more than $1 million. While Pentagon officials have worried that larger ground stations for military satellite could make easy targets, the relatively small size of Verge could be an attractive feature to defense officials focused on resiliency. It's unlikely the Defense Department would rely on the new technology for its satellite downlinks, but Lockheed Martin leaders said they could envision the military would use the ground stations for experimental satellites, particularly those in low-Earth orbit. Or the technology could be used to create a backup ground station for some of the Pentagon's more sophisticated satellites. Already, Lockheed Martin has tested a network of 10 S-band antennas in the Denver area that downlinked from a small satellite from the Air Force Research Laboratory, said Rick Ambrose, Lockheed Martin's executive vice president for space. In addition, the company has also downlinked data from another, unspecified government satellite and sent that data to the agency's cloud. https://www.c4isrnet.com/intel-geoint/2018/12/03/is-near-instant-satellite-imagery-in-the-near-future

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  25 janvier 2021 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Cyberdéfense des Armées : forte augmentation des effectifs à Rennes

  Selon une étude publiée jeudi 21 janvier par l'INSEE Bretagne, les effectifs des Armées en cyberdéfense seront en forte augmentation sur le territoire de Rennes Métropole jusqu'en 2025. Le développement des activités de cyberdéfense du ministère des Armées dans l'agglomération rennaise devrait se traduire par la création de 1 800 postes entre 2018 et 2025, et par des recrutements, précise La Tribune. Le quartier de La Courrouze abrite la Cyberdéfense Factory, un incubateur civil et militaire, ainsi que plusieurs groupes industriels de plus de 100 salariés et impliqués dans cet écosystème. Airbus Cybersecurity (protection des gouvernements et des activités vitales), Thales Services, Altran et la CyberSoC d'Orange Cyberdéfense concentrent à eux seuls 70% de l'emploi privé. « La présence du pôle d'excellence cyber permet le développement de synergies entre la recherche, la formation et les acteurs économiques », précise l'INSEE. La Tribune du 25 janvier