France and Germany Are Arguing Over Their Shared Fighter Jet

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  13 août 2020 | International, Naval

  Shipyards Not At Risk, Despite DoD Warning It Needs $$ To Save Them

  A DoD paper for Congress suggests COVID could shut down shipyards, but Navy officials and analysts say there is little risk. By PAUL MCLEARYon August 12, 2020 at 4:04 PM WASHINGTON: A top Navy official today tried to clarify a Pentagon information paper leaked last week which warned that “at least one” of the seven shipyards that churns out ships for the Navy could close unless Congress handed over billions more to the service. As part of an $11 billion package the Pentagon is requesting from Congress to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on the defense industry, the Navy is requesting $4.7 billion in part to ward off the chances “at least one” of the big seven shipyards shutting down. The paper, which has been delivered to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, also warned of over 100,000 lost jobs across shipyards and factories that make aircraft and other weapons for the military. But the Navy's top acquisition executive told reporters today that the wording continued in the paper might leave too much out. “The words could be taken out of context,” James Geurts said. “There probably should be the word ‘temporarily' in there.” If a shipyard started to see a significant portion of its workforce test positive for COVID, “we might have to temporarily close down the shipyard for a period of time until we got it under control. Not that we would have to shut down a shipyard permanently.” The memo contains no such caveats, however. It flatly states a shipyard could close unless the Navy gets the funding boost. Asked where the paper came from, and who it was intended for, DoD spokesman Christopher Sherwood told me via email the department “provided informational material to our oversight committees when asked about the impacts COVID-19 has had on the Defense Industrial Base and our suppliers.” The Navy has gone to great lengths to help its shipyards weather the COVID storm, pumping $130 billion into its supplier base this year in upfront payments, spending that is 25% higher than at this point last year. But some yards have experienced pain keeping to schedule, with uncertain futures ahead as the Navy looks to change its fleet mix in the coming years to better compete with China and Russia. Mark Cancian, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, acknowledged that all Navy shipyards “have a backlog of work, including Bath Iron Works, which was the subject of speculation about closing.” Bath, already six months behind on building seven destroyers in dock, is stumbling to the conclusion of a six-week strike by 4,300 shipbuilders which will likely make those delays even longer. Likewise, the Mississippi-based Austal is looking at the end of the road for its contract to build dozens of aluminum Littoral Combat Ships in a few years, which would likely mark the end of the Navy's interest in buying aluminum hulls. That shipyard “would be at more risk” Cancian said. Neither shipyard is any worse off than the others due to COVID-related shutdowns, however, making the Pentagon's point that yards could shut and require COVID relief funds to keep going, an argument that finds few adherents. There's little doubt COVID is slowing down both ship construction and repair, “but that doesn't mean the Navy doesn't need the ships anymore,” said Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute. “It just means everything takes longer, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the shipyards are going to close.” Clark noted that while Bath is in a bad spot with delays to its destroyer work that will be compounded by the strike, the Navy still needs it to build destroyers in the future, since relying on Huntington Ingalls as the nation's only shipyard that can build the ships is too risky. Add to that the likelihood that the Navy will move toward buying more numerous small cruisers, unmanned ships, and smaller platforms for Marines and away from small numbers of large destroyers and amphibious ships in the future, means there will be more contracts, and work to go around later this decade. The service is still on track to deliver its much-delayed 30 year shipbuilding plan and force structure assessment this fall, in which several options like a new class of destroyers, a new class of smaller frigates, and smaller hospital ships will all likely find their way into the plans. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/08/shipyards-not-at-risk-despite-dod-warning-it-needs-money-to-save-them/

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  12 septembre 2022 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR

  Defense and Commerce departments partner on space traffic management

  A new agreement formalizes the partnership between both agencies and is a first step toward shifting space traffic management to the Commerce Department.

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  30 septembre 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  The DoD needs data-centric security, and here’s why

  Drew Schnabel The U.S. Department of Defense is set to adopt an initial zero-trust architecture by the end of the calendar year, transitioning from a network-centric to a data-centric modern security model. Zero trust means an organization does not inherently trust any user. Trust must be continually assessed and granted in a granular fashion. This allows defense agencies to create policies that provide secure access for users connecting from any device, in any location. “This paradigm shift from a network-centric to a data-centric security model will affect every arena of our cyber domain, focusing first on how to protect our data and critical resources and then secondarily on our networks,” Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency and commander of the Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network, said at a virtual conference in July. How does the Pentagon's AI center plan to give the military a battlefield advantage? The Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub is working on tools to help in joint, all-domain operations as department leaders seek to use data to gain an advantage on the battlefield. Andrew Eversden To understand how the DoD will benefit from this new zero-trust security model, it's important to understand the department's current Joint Information Environment, or JIE, architecture; the initial intent of this model; and why the JIE can't fully protect modern networks, mobile users and advanced threats. Evolving DoD information security The JIE framework was developed to address inefficiencies of siloed architectures. The goal of developing a single security architecture, or SSA, with JIE was to collapse network security boundaries, reduce the department's external attack surface and standardize management operations. This framework helped ensure that defense agencies and mission partners could share information securely while reducing required maintenance and continued infrastructure expenditures. Previously, there were more than 190 agency security stacks located at the base/post/camp/station around the globe. Now, with the JIE architecture, there are just 22 security stacks centrally managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency to provide consistent security for users, regardless of location. “This paradigm shift from a network-centric to a data-centric security model will affect every arena of our cyber domain, focusing first on how to protect our data and critical resources and then secondarily on our networks,” Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency and commander of the Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network, said at a virtual conference in July. To understand how the DoD will benefit from this new zero-trust security model, it's important to understand the department's current Joint Information Environment, or JIE, architecture; the initial intent of this model; and why the JIE can't fully protect modern networks, mobile users and advanced threats. Evolving DoD information security The JIE framework was developed to address inefficiencies of siloed architectures. The goal of developing a single security architecture, or SSA, with JIE was to collapse network security boundaries, reduce the department's external attack surface and standardize management operations. This framework helped ensure that defense agencies and mission partners could share information securely while reducing required maintenance and continued infrastructure expenditures. Previously, there were more than 190 agency security stacks located at the base/post/camp/station around the globe. Now, with the JIE architecture, there are just 22 security stacks centrally managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency to provide consistent security for users, regardless of location. Initially, the JIE was an innovative concept that took the DoD from a highly fragmented architecture, in which each agency managed its own cybersecurity strategy, to an architecture in which there is a unified SSA. However, one of the early challenges identified for the JIE was managing cloud cybersecurity as part of the SSA. The components in the JIE — the Joint Regional Security Stacks family's internet access points and cloud access points — have traditionally focused on securing the network, rather than the data or user. As more DoD employees and contractors work remotely and data volumes increase, hardware cannot scale to support them. This has created ongoing concerns with performance, reliability, latency and cost. A cloud-first approach In response, the DoD leverages authorized solutions from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, and it references the Secure Cloud Computing Architecture guidance for a standard approach for boundary and application-level security for impact Level 4 and 5 data hosted in commercial cloud environments. The purpose of the SCCA is to provide a barrier of protection between the DoD Information Services Network and the commercial cloud services that the DoD uses while optimizing the cost-performance trade in cybersecurity. Defense agencies are now exploring enterprise-IT-as-a-service options to move to cloud, and reduce the need for constant updates and management of hardware. Through enterprise-IT-as-a-service models, defense agencies will be able to scale easily, reduce management costs and achieve a more competitive edge over their adversaries. Before the pandemic hit, defense agencies were already moving to support a more mobile workforce, where employees can access data from anywhere on any device. However, a cyber-centric military requires security to be more deeply ingrained into employee culture rather than physical protection of the perimeter. The next evolution to secure DISA and DoD networks is to embrace a secure access edge model with zero-trust capabilities. The SASE model moves essential security functions — such as web gateway firewalls, zero-trust capabilities, data loss prevention and secure network connectivity — all to the cloud. Then, federal employees have direct access to the cloud, while security is pushed as close to the user/data/device as possible. SP 800-27, zero-trust guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, provides a road map to migrate and deploy zero trust across the enterprise environment. This guidance outlines the necessary tenants of zero trust, including securing all communication regardless of network location, and granting access on a per-session basis. This creates a least-privilege-access model to ensure the right person, device and service have access to the data they need while protecting high-value assets. As the DoD transforms the JIE architecture to an as-a-service model with zero-trust capabilities, defense agencies will experience cost savings, greater scalability, better performance for the end user and war fighter, improved visibility, and control across DoD networks — and ultimately a stronger and more holistic cybersecurity capability moving forward. https://www.c4isrnet.com/opinion/2020/09/29/the-dod-needs-data-centric-security-and-heres-why/