17 septembre 2020 | Information, Autre défense

Coronavirus has kept us close to home. It’s a helpful lesson for strengthening national defense.

Justin P. Oberman

Despite being warned, with impressive precision, about the dangers of so-called black swan events, America tends to ignore or downplay them because they seem remote, or the perceived financial, societal and political costs are too great. In the aftermath of 9/11, of Hurricane Katrina and other major domestic tragedies, we too often learn that our relevant capabilities have atrophied.

Now, following perhaps the most devastating such event — the COVID-19 pandemic — the defense industrial base is actively seeking billions of dollars to prop it up without necessarily committing to making step-function leaps forward in a highly complex threat environment.

And while keeping the thousands of small companies that support the defense primes alive is important, the Pentagon — flush with cash and a mandate to act quickly to react to the pandemic — should use this opportunity to refine its technology acquisition approach, in part by doing more to engage nontraditional defense firms.

The reasons for bringing in new ideas for defense are clear. Just last week, the Department of Defense released its annual report to Congress on China, which states that “China has already achieved parity with — or even exceeded — the United States in several military modernization areas.”

Even more concerning, DoD analysts describe China's military-civil fusion development strategy as “a nationwide endeavor that seeks to ‘fuse' its economic and social development strategies with its security strategies to build an integrated national strategic system and capabilities in support of China's national rejuvenation goals.”

The United States doesn't need and shouldn't pursue a “fusion” strategy; rather, we need a better approach to strengthening the defense industrial base and engaging with innovators.

The United States is at risk of losing its ability to manufacture critical national security technology thanks to a combination of byzantine domestic procurement processes, offshoring and overseas competitors. To counter these and other negative trends, the DoD needs a sustainable, continuous innovation model.

In Silicon Valley, everyone from the biggest players to the youngest startups view working against or around slow, tired establishment organizations as almost a prerequisite to success (Uber vs. taxis, Tesla vs. legacy automakers, Amazon vs. everybody). Despite the Pentagon's attractive budget and important missions, many innovators are repelled by restrictive requirements, lengthy sales cycles, high costs of bidding and a deck often stacked in favor of large prime contractors.

The DoD must throw open its doors to innovators and free itself to make bets; if it does, it will get more world-class tools for its mission owners. The department should:

Make requirements less prescriptive, easier to understand and run two ways. Develop an outreach program for innovators that uses channels they're already occupying, in language they understand, with requirements that are compelling. Encourage two-way communication that surfaces non-obvious solutions to critical defense missions. At the Transportation Security Administration, we worked with an In-Q-Tel-backed company that was founded in Las Vegas to catch casino cheats; the Pentagon should look for similar outside-the-box opportunities.

Engage substantively with private sector innovation experts. The best investors and executives back successful entrepreneurs, mentor them as they refine their offerings and support world-changing scale. The DoD needs these skill sets and should set up (unpaid) innovation mentoring boards.

Insert flexibility into contracting and financing. To remove barriers to entry without sacrificing quality, the DoD should:

Create “off-campus” labs to mitigate procurement and security clearance delays.
Build on the work of Dr. Will Roper, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics. to ensure innovators don't run out of funding.
In what would be a great advancement and threshold change, work with Congress to arrange for private sector investment in key technologies to bolster programs of record.

Lift government price and margin controls. Cost, often controlled through the anti-innovation technique of lowest-price, technically acceptable contracts, is not the key metric, particularly in emerging, dynamic technologies. What matters are outcomes and value. Restricting profit to a bureaucrat-calculated rate of 15 percent will drive innovative and nimble companies away from the DoD. Cost does not effectively incorporate other important metrics, including risk, prior investment and return on investment. Order quantities and frequency are also critical in determining reasonable costs, as these factors underpin business cases.

It's not a coincidence that the world's largest, most innovative economy belongs to the same country that has the world's largest, most lethal military and is the world's most attractive target for emerging threats.

The threat environment (intensified by the pandemic) makes clear that we need to change our approach; the state of our economy means that we need to start now.

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/09/16/coronavirus-has-kept-us-close-to-home-its-a-helpful-lesson-for-strengthening-national-defense/

Sur le même sujet

30 juillet 2019 | Information, C4ISR

Global Military Sensors Market to Reach $33.2 Billion by 2025, Growing from $24.7 Billion in 2019 at a CAGR of 5.1% During 2019-2025
The military sensors market is projected to grow from USD 24.7 billion in 2019 to USD 33.2 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 5.1% between 2019 and 2025. This market study covers the military sensors market across various segments and sub-segments. It aims at estimating the size and growth potential of this market across different segments based on platform, application, component, and region. This study also includes an in-depth competitive analysis of the key players in the market, along with their company profiles, key observations related to their product and business offerings, recent developments undertaken by them, and key market strategies adopted by them. Major players operating in the military sensors market are Honeywell International Inc. (US), TE Connectivity Ltd. (US), Thales Group (France), Curtiss-Wright Corporation (US), Raytheon Company (US), Esterline Technologies Corporation (US), Kongsberg Gruppen ASA (Norway), and BAE Systems plc (UK), among others. Increasing demand for unmanned vehicles and ongoing military modernization programs are expected to fuel the growth of the military sensors market across the globe Some of the factors that are expected to fuel the growth of the military sensors market are increased defense spending of different countries to strengthen their defense capabilities. However, the formulation and implementation of various rules and regulations related to the transfer of weapons and associated technologies are expected to act as restraints for the growth of the market. The electronic warfare segment of the market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR from 2019 to 2025 Based on application, the electronic warfare segment of the market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The growth of this segment can be attributed to the increased procurement of fighter jets. For instance, in June 2019, the US Government and Lockheed Martin entered into an agreement worth USD 34.0 billion for the procurement of 470 F-35 fighter jets. The software segment of the military sensors market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period Based on component, the software segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR from 2019 to 2025. Increasing demand for real-time processing and analyzing of data through artificial intelligence and machine learning is expected to drive the growth of the software segment of the military sensors market during the forecast period. With the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the software used in military sensors can distinguish between two objects. The North American region is estimated to account for the largest share of the military sensors market in 2019 The North American region is expected to lead the military sensors market in 2019. The market in the region is highly competitive, owing to the presence of a large number of Original Component Manufacturers (OCMs) and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) such as Raytheon Company (US), Curtiss-Wright Corporation (US), and TE Connectivity Ltd. (US) in the region. Increasing the procurement of guided munition and military aircraft is expected to fuel the growth of the military sensors market in North America. Market Dynamics Drivers Increasing Demand for Battlespace Awareness Among Defense Forces Ongoing Advancements in MEMS Technology Increasing Use of UAVs in Modern Warfare Restraints Lack of Accuracy & Operational Complexities in MEMS Inertial Navigation Sensors Rules & Regulations Related to the Transfer of Weapons and Their Associated Technologies Declining Defense Budgets of Several Countries of North America & Europe Opportunities Demand for New Generation Air and Missile Defense Systems Integration of Anti-Jamming Capabilities With Navigation Systems Challenges Cybersecurity Risks Complexity in the Designs of Military Sensors Companies Profiled BAE Systems PLC Esterline Technologies Corporation Honeywell International Inc. Imperx Kongsberg Gruppen Lockheed Martin Microflown Avisa B.V. Raytheon Rockwest Solutions TE Connectivity Ltd. Thales Ultra Electronics Vectornav Technologies, LLC Viooa Imaging Technology For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/a91ey1 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190729005354/en
30 août 2018 | Information, Sécurité

Irresistible Forces: Long-Term Tectonic Influences on Canada’s National Security
This Vimy Paper examines three long-term tectonic influences on Canada's national security: geography, demographics, and science. These macro-level factors tend not to be understood well or receive much serious consideration in the public discourse, but in many cases can have powerful and sustained impacts on events. They can also reveal previously unrecognized threats. The discussion is structured in four parts. Part 1 focuses on geography and its impact on regions of strategic interest to Canada. Part 2 looks at world mortality and demographic trends, and the closely related subject of economics, and considers the cases of selected nations. Part 3 considers science at the macro-level – that is, humanity's collective adaptation to it. Part 4 then draws conclusions about how these issues impact Canada's national security. Click here to read / Cliquez-ici pour lire
17 septembre 2020 | Information, Aérospatial

The Air Force’s new information warfare command still has work before full integration
Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — While the Air Force's new information warfare command has reached its full operational capability less than a year after it was created, leaders still have work to do to fully integrate its combined capabilities in a mature fashion. That assessment comes from Brig. Gen. Bradley Pyburn, deputy commander of 16th Air Force, who on Tuesday laid out a three-pronged criteria — deconfliction, synchronization and integration — for assessing the command's maturity during a virtual event hosted by AFCEA's Alamo chapter. The command combines what was previously known as 24th and 25th Air Force, placing cyber, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic warfare and weather capabilities under a single commander. The first category Pyburn coined is deconfliction, which essentially means “do no harm.” Pyburn described the need to have situational awareness of the battlespace and understand what friendly and enemy forces are where, what authorities exist, what targets forces are looking at and what capabilities they have. The second phase of maturity is synchronization, which involves aligning all the capabilities and actions in the battlespace. Pyburn said if the command adds activity A to activity B and C, it will end up with a greater result, because it can change the timing and tempo of how the effects are delivered for maximum impact. Lastly, Pyburn described integration as the most mature aspect of where 16th Air Force currently is. This involves baking in planning, assessment, command and control, all the desperate effects and operations from the beginning. This is where the command really begins to break down all the stovepipes that previously existed with all these capabilities, a key reason for integrating and creating the new organization. “From a maturity perspective, where do I think 16th Air Force is? We're probably somewhere between deconfliction and synchronization. We've got some examples of where we approach integration but I think it's healthy we understand where we're at today and where we want to go forward in the future,” Pyburn explained. The command has created what Pyburn called a J9 to help with assessing maturity. The J9 would be plugged into real world events and exercises to help with those self assessments. In a generic example, Pyburn outlined what full maturity integration would look like. A mission partner requests support, which could be in the form of air domain awareness, finding particular targets or threats or ISR assistance. 16th Air Force, in turn, would be able to link that request with other needs, either in the same geographic area or in other areas of operations, pioneering what its top officials describe as a “problem-centric approach,” which aims to look at the specific problems the commands they support are looking to solve and starting from there. “[In] our problem centric approach, as we look to generate insights across all of our 16th Air Force capabilities, what we may find is that particular problem set is linked to other problem sets and we're able to focus on the root cause of the problem,” Pyburn said. Based on a raft of authorities from cyberspace to intelligence collection as well as the relationships built through other communities and organizations, 16th Air Force can look at the root cause of a problem and build from there. “We can build a community of interest, we can start to put mission partners together into [an] operational planning team and we can not only generate better insights against that root cause, we can start to look at how we can layer in effects at speed and at scale across all domains of warfare and give the options to the combatant commander and the mission partner as the authorities to go after that adversary,” Pyburn said. Pyburn also offered insight into the command structure of 16th Air Force, which has his deputy commander job along with a vice commander role. That latter job, held by Brig. Gen. David Gaedecke — who previously served as the lead for the Air Force's year long electronic warfare study — does more of the traditional operational, test and evaluation functions. In the deputy commander role, Pyburn said his job is similar to the director of operations. He comes up with the requirements in support of combatant commanders. “Part of it is, I may think I know what I want, but if I don't see what the art of the possible is, it's really hard to know what I want, if that makes sense. It's a little bit of a chicken and egg,” he said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/information-warfare/2020/09/16/the-air-forces-new-information-warfare-command-still-has-work-to-go-to-fully-integrate/

Toutes les nouvelles