5 mai 2024 | International, Sécurité
NSA, FBI Alert on N. Korean Hackers Spoofing Emails from Trusted Sources
U.S. government warns of North Korean hackers sending spoofed emails to gather intelligence.
18 novembre 2019 | International, Terrestre
Here’s who will build the US Army’s heavy common robot
By: Jen Judson
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has chosen FLIR's Kobra robot to serve as its heavy version of the Common Robotic System that will be used for explosive ordnance disposal and other heavy-duty jobs.
The production contract will run for a period of five years and could be worth up to $109 million.
The Army wanted its Common Robotic System-Heavy, or CRS-H, to weigh up to 700 pounds and to carry a variety of sensors and payloads to support missions.
“The Kobra [unmanned ground vehicle] delivers unmatched strength, power and payload support in an easy-to-operate robot package,” according to a FLIR statement sent to Defense News.
Kobra has a lift capacity of 330 pounds and can stretch up to eleven-and-a-half feet to get at difficult-to-reach places, but it is also still nimble enough to climb jersey barriers and fit into the back of a standard utility vehicle, according to FLIR.
FLIR's legacy business, Endeavor Robotics, won a contract in 2017 to provide the Army with a medium-sized UGV — the Man Transportable Robotic System Increment II. FLIR is delivering the Centaur UGV for the program.
FLIR bought Endeavor Robotics in February, an acquisition that made sense because FLIR's camera and sensors — its bread and butter — have been used on countless manned and unmanned vehicles like those developed by the Massachusetts-based robotics company. FLIR also acquired Prox Dynamics in 2016, the Norwegian maker of the tiny micro-drone — the Black Hornet — that is now used as the Army's soldier borne sensor.
Endeavor also competed for the CRS-Individual system — a man-packable robot that is less than 25 pounds — but lost to fellow Massachusetts-based robotics company QinetiQ North America in March.
For the CRS-H program, FLIR beat out QinetiQ.
Kobra is also participating in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency effort to build a system-of-systems solution that can operate in subterranean environments.
The company's solution consists of the Kobra robot that will enter subterranean environments carrying radio repeaters —based on the company's small, throwable FirstLook robots — and drop them off along the way to continue connectivity as it travels deeper underground. The system will also carry a four-legged robot supplied from Ghost Robotics to explore more rugged and difficult terrain as well as a quadcopter that will investigate vertical shafts and other hard to reach places. The winner of the challenge is expected to receive $2 million in 2021.
The CRS-I and CRS-H programs are part of a larger Army program to streamline its robotics inventory.
By necessity, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army clamored to buy UGVs that could help provide a level of standoff between soldiers and the dangers faced on the battlefield, mostly improvised explosive devices.
The Army procured roughly 7,000 UGVs and ended up with a petting zoo of robots from Talons to PacBots to Dragon Runners, to name a few. The service had roughly nine variants of robots used for explosive ordnance disposal, two robots for engineering battalions to conduct route clearance, two for Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) tasks and three for contingency and global response forces.
The Army's way forward uses just a few common platforms where systems and sensors can be swapped out easily for different missions and which are all controlled using one universal controller.
It's been the season for major headway in Army robotics programs across the board.
The service is also underway with development of robotic combat vehicles in light, medium and heavy categories.
The Army invited four teams to compete to build prototypes for its future light RCV last month: A Textron and Howe & Howe team, a team of QinetiQ and Pratt & Miller, HDT Global and Oshkosh Defense.
And three teams were picked earlier this month to move on in the Army's competition for a medium-sized RCV: General Dynamics Land Systems, QinetiQ and the Textron and Howe & Howe team.
The Army also awarded, at the end of last month, a contract to GDLS to provide the Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport (SMET) unmanned vehicle. GDLS offered up its Multi-Utility Tactical Transport — or MUTT — in that competition.
Sur le même sujet
-
-
26 mai 2022 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
Le conflit en Ukraine pousse l’Europe à muscler sa stratégie cyber
Déclenchée une heure avant l'offensive terrestre russe, l'attaque destinée à couper les communications ukrainiennes utilisant le réseau de satellites KA-SAT, exploité par Viasat, avait, par ricochet, privé d'internet des milliers d'utilisateurs en Allemagne, en France, en Hongrie, en Grèce, en Italie et en Pologne. « Nous pouvons attribuer au gouvernement russe la cyberactivité malveillante menée contre l'Ukraine » déclarait le 10 mai dernier le chef de la diplomatie de l'Union européenne, Josep Borrell. C'est la première fois que les vingt-sept États membres de l'Union s'accordent sur une réponse conjointe face à une cyberattaque, en dégainant un outil pourtant à sa disposition depuis 2017. La France avait déjà fait du renforcement de la cybersécurité dans l'Union une de ses priorités. « Le conflit en Ukraine est le genre de choc systémique qui fait tout accélérer et prendre conscience qu'il faut faire encore davantage. Cela a donné un nouvel élan aux discussions sur le besoin de coopération renforcée, y compris dans le domaine cyber », explique Miguel Gonzalez-Sancho, chef de l'unité pour la cybersécurité à la direction générale des réseaux de communication et des technologies de la Commission européenne. Selon plusieurs spécialistes, le niveau d'échange d'informations sur les menaces n'a jamais été aussi élevé, à la fois entre États mais aussi entre agences publiques et de grandes entreprises privées. « La plupart des capacités de protection des systèmes d'information sont entre les mains du secteur privé », souligne Dan Cimpean, directeur de l'agence de cybersécurité roumaine. Les États réfléchissent à certifier à l'échelle européenne un réseau de prestataires privés qui permettrait d'aider entreprises et collectivités à faire face aux nombreuses attaques. Le conflit a aussi permis de conclure plus rapidement certaines négociations sur des textes pour renforcer le niveau global de sécurité au sein de tous les États membres de l'Union européenne, que ce soit au niveau des entreprises sensibles, des administrations ou des institutions européennes. « Il y a une volonté politique d'aller plus loin car la question cyber est devenue difficile à traiter au niveau national », ajoute Miguel Gonzalez-Sancho. Le Figaro du 21 mai
-
15 août 2019 | International, Terrestre
Download, Disconnect, Fire! Why Grunts Need JEDI Cloud
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. ARLINGTON: To see through the fog of war on future battlefields, ground troops will need near-real-time access to huge amounts of information from a host of sensors — from satellites to F-35s to mini-drones to targeting goggles, all sharing data through a joint combat cloud. But to evade the enemy's own swarms of sensors, soldiers will also need to know when to disconnect from the network and go dark. Switching quickly from being hyperconnected to being cut off — whether as a tactical choice or as the result of enemy jamming and hacking — will put a new kind of strain on future frontline commanders. The capability to cope is central both to the Army's evolving combat concept, Multi-Domain Operations, the Pentagon's controversial Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative, the JEDI cloud computing program. The Case For Cloud “Why do we want to go to the cloud? Because you get better synthesized data,” said the Army's senior futurist, Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, in a recent conversation with reporters. “Sensors are going to be ubiquitous on the battlefield,” he said. They'll provide such masses of data that unaided human brains and traditional staff processes can't collect it all in one place, let alone make sense of it: “It's got to be synchronized by tools such as artificial intelligence and cloud-based computing.” “If I am a warfighter, I want as much data as you could possibly give me,” said the head of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Air Force Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, at a separate roundtable. “Let me use my algorithms to sort through it ... at machine speeds...It's really hard for me to do that without an enterprise cloud.” While disconnected, troops will have to make do with whatever data they've already downloaded, perhaps to a backpack mini-server with built-in AI. Then, Wesley continued, “when you're back up on the net, you might need to do a download, adjust your algorithms, adjust your data. “But you won't necessarily have access to that all the time,” Wesley warned. “You can imagine where a given [unit] will be off the net for a period — maybe go dark, not unlike the way submarines operate now. ” While disconnected, troops will have to make do with whatever data they've already downloaded, perhaps to a backpack mini-server with built-in AI. Then, Wesley continued, “when you're back up on the net, you might need to do a download, adjust your algorithms, adjust your data.” “You're going to have balance both cloud computing and computing at the edge,” Wesley said. “It's absolutely a form of maneuver.” Transmitting and going silent, uploading and downloading, will need to be as well-practiced and intuitive as digging in a hasty defense or laying an ambush. Wesley, who works for Army Futures Command, didn't mention the all-service JEDI program by name. But Shanahan, who reports to the Pentagon CIO, made the link explicit. “JEDI will include cloud capabilities that are able to operate out of standalone, portable hardware even in the absence of communications links,” Shanahan said. “It will re-synch with the rest of the JEDI cloud as soon as communications are restored.” “You have the central JEDI cloud, then you have, maybe, portable data centers that are downrange,” Shanahan explained. “The beauty of that is not only are you getting access to all the benefits of the cloud down to the very edge of the battlefield: As you're collecting data, that data can then go back into [the central cloud], so everybody is benefiting from that.” “If you get disconnected, as is going to happen in combat, especially in a high-end fight, you still have what you had at the point it was disconnected,” Shanahan said. Your latest downloads will be saved at the closest local server, which might be in a CONEX shipping container carried by truck to a forward command post or in a pair of soldiers' backpacks, accessible even when long-range communications fail. Then, he continued, “when it suddenly comes back, you have all of this ... connected across the entire enterprise.” Multi-Domain Command & Control While JEDI plays a central role in this vision of future warfare, it's just one part of a much larger push, an Air Force system for communicating and combining all this information, the Multi Domain Command and Control System (MDC2). The goal is to move data from any part of the force, anywhere in the world, in any of the five recognized domains — land, sea, air, space and cyberspace — to any other part, quickly and in useful form. In essence, the Air Force and JEDI are attacking the multi-domain problem from the top down, starting with central servers, higher headquarters, and satellites, while the Army is coming from the ground up, grunt-first. “Imagine a scout on the reverse side of a tactical slope,” Wesley said. “Imagine an F-35 may have just flown over that slope, that space, in the previous 60 minutes. Those aircraft are going to be taking in all sorts of data. How is the scout going to get access to that data without waiting for a direct point-to-point communication with that aircraft?” The solution, he said, is for all sensors to share their data in a common “combat cloud,” a term which he noted comes from in the Air Force. It's not just intelligence, Wesley went on: It's targeting data. The ultimate goal is some AI algorithm — carefully monitored and directed by human commanders — that can match a target with the weapon best suited to destroy it, whether that weapon is a strike fighter, a land-based missile launcher, or a warship. A future commander could call for fire support the way today's urbanites call an Uber To experiment with how this might work in real life, the Army has already created a brigade-sized Multi-Domain Task Force, whose collective eyes are a battalion-sized Intelligence, Information, Cyber, Electronic Warfare, & Space (I2CEWS) detachment. The original MDTF has been holding wargames and field exercises in the Pacific with the other services and with allies like Australia; a second task force is planned for Europe, and a third will join the first in Asia. After that, Wesley said, the Army plans to develop new organizations like a Theater Fires Command to coordinate long-range strikes by its new thousand-mile missiles. But this cannot be only an Army effort, Wesley emphasized, and it isn't. “The Air Force and Army are well aligned in that this future design is going to have to be increasingly joint,” he said. “Headquarters are going to be increasingly purple in the future.” “We must have a joint concept going forward,” Wesley said. “The former acting secretary of defense, [Patrick] Shanahan, directed joint wargames that will ensue this fall. I think that's the next big moment where you're going to see the services come together.“ https://breakingdefense.com/2019/08/download-disconnect-fire-why-grunts-need-jedi-cloud/