14 septembre 2020 | International, C4ISR
WASHINGTON — 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.
This year, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center kicked off its joint war-fighting initiative, under which it is developing algorithms to provide armed services and combatant commands with AI tools to accelerate decision-making.
Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the JAIC, said the center, for example, is “heavily” involved in the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System, the service's primary lever to enable the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept. The system underwent a major test last week.
The center is “specifically focused” on working to harness AI to link together systems involved in the intelligence-gathering phase to the operations and effects piece of all-domain operations, Mulchandani added.
“It's how do we actually connect these platforms together end to end to build sort of a system that allows a commander to actually have that level of both visibility on the intel side but able to action it on the other side,” Mulchandani said on a call with reporters Thursday.
The JAIC is also working on an operations cognitive assistant tool to support commanders and “drive faster and more efficient decision-making through AI-enabled predictive analytics,” Department of Defense Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said Thursday at the DoD AI Symposium.
“Our goal is to nest these capabilities under the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept ... to provide a more cohesive and synchronized operational framework for the joint force,” Deasy said.
Earlier in the summer, a JAIC official said the war-fighting team was trying to aim a laser on an enemy vehicle to inflict damage.
But to enable all these tools, one thing is paramount: data.
The DoD CIO's office is set to release its data strategy later this year, with the department's new chief data officer, Dave Spirk, saying at the symposium that the he worked to reorient a draft of the strategy to ensure the use of data to enable joint war fighting is the top priority.
“We're in a place now where we want to put joint war fighting at the top of the pile of things we're working on,” Spirk said at the symposium Sept. 9.
Deasy also emphasized the importance of data in war fighting during a session at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference that same day.
“When we do the exercises, the experiments and things maybe don't go right — I can guarantee you what they're going to write down on the whiteboard at the end of that is ‘data.' Did we have the right data today? Why couldn't we connect those data across our weapons systems, our various assets?” Deasy said.
Critical to the development of artificial intelligence are adequate data storage and development platforms. The JAIC recently awarded a contract worth more than $100 million to Deloitte for the development of the Joint Common Foundation platform, an enterprisewide, cloud-based platform that the center will use to develop AI tools.
Meanwhile, DoD components such as the JAIC are also awaiting the deployment of the DoD's embattled enterprise cloud, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. Department officials have continuously pointed to the JEDI cloud as a critical piece of the JAIC's ability to develop artificial intelligence, as the new technology it is expected to store 80 percent of DoD systems across classification levels and provide massive amounts of data.
Deasy said Sept. 9 that JADC2 will require the services to collect and share data with each other in a way that they have never done before, and that may require changes to how they operate. But in order to enable JADC2, he added, a cultural shift in how the services treat their data is needed; if the services want to link sensors to shooters, interoperability of services' systems and data is imperative.
“Historically, each service could gather up their data, send it up their command to focus on. But in this new world ... the services are going to have to come together, which means the data's going to have to come together in a very different way,” Deasy said at the Billington Cybersecurity Conference.
The DoD is in the "early days of how we're going to do that,” he added.
23 février 2023 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
Green UAS builds on a DIU program called Blue UAS, which established a streamlined process for DoD to certify U.S.-made drones for military use.
18 décembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial
El Segundo, Calif., December 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/ - Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) will support and sustain the sensor and processor for the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar System 2-A under a $217M U.S. Air Force IDIQ. Work will be performed through 2024. ASARS-2A provides the U-2 aircraft with long-range, high-resolution intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities over large areas, from as high as 70,000 feet above Earth. "With ASARS-2A, the Air Force can detect ground targets day or night, no matter the weather condition," said Chad Pillsbury, director at Raytheon Secure Sensor Solutions. "And, it's reliable. The Air Force just completed ASARS-2A's 9,000th tactical mission in Korea this year." The ASARS-2A sensor locates moving and stationary targets using its ground moving-target indicator and search and spot modes. Its on-board processing system delivers near-real time, precise target location data. This allows decision makers to respond quickly, rather than relying on ground stations to process the targeting data. About Raytheon Raytheon Company, with 2018 sales of $27 billion and 67,000 employees, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, civil government and cybersecurity solutions. With a history of innovation spanning 97 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration, C5I® products and services, sensing, effects and mission support for customers in more than 80 countries. Raytheon is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts. Follow us on Twitter. Media Contact Lauren Radziminski +1.972.952.2190 saspr@raytheon.com SOURCE Raytheon Company View source version on Raytheon: http://raytheon.mediaroom.com/2019-12-16-Detecting-targets-from-70-000-feet-above-Earth
30 août 2018 | International, Naval
By: Megan Eckstein THE PENTAGON – The Navy's next large surface combatant will have all the space, weight and power margins the sea service could need now and into the future to accommodate new weapons in development – but the director of surface warfare said the Navy would not accelerate weapons development to get them ready in time to outfit the new ships. Rear Adm. Ron Boxall, OPNAV N96, spoke to USNI News on Aug. 28, in his first interview on the Future Surface Combatant program since its initial capabilities document was signed out by leadership. Noting that the next large surface combatant would pull from some of the advances made with the Zumwalt-class destroyers (DDG-1000) – including potentially its integrated power system that could easily support laser guns, an electromagnetic railgun, powerful radars and other power-hungry technologies – Boxall told USNI News that the new large surface combatant represented an opportunity to put these technologies into the surface fleet whereas the legacy Arleigh Burke-class destroyers simply do not have the power and cooling capacity to do so. “We're just excited that we think we do have something that is expandable, has SWaP-C (space, weight, power and cooling) for the future. I think all of us were kind of a little bit nervous about the DDG Flight III and whether we'll have long-term ability to put future energy weapons on there, or the power that we need for directed energy, lasers, things like that,” he said. But just because the new ship will be able to support energy weapons doesn't mean Boxall wants to accelerate energy weapons development to ensure they're ready to field on the first new ships. He said moving to the Future Surface Combatant in 2023 is an “aggressive timeline” and that at some point the Navy will have to “snap the chalk line and say, this is what you have that's good enough to go on there” – and if a technology isn't ready, it would wait for fielding in a later block buy of the ship. With the Navy already seeking a new hull to better support the Aegis Combat System and the AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense radar – collectively called the DDG-51 Flight III capability – Boxall said he didn't want to force too many changes all at once. “So I'm inclined to say, as long as we build it modularly, we're going to make those assessments in stride” in terms of inserting in new weapons as they come through the development process, he said. “But I don't want to get too crazy about trying to accelerate new technology in the first of the class as we change hulls, which will hopefully be a hull that will be with us for a very long time.” Full article: https://news.usni.org/2018/08/29/navy-making-room-railguns-next-warship-no-extra-investments