Inside Operation Diplomatic Specter: Chinese APT Group's Stealthy Tactics Exposed

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  6 août 2019 | International, C4ISR

  Can a dragonfly teach a missile how to hunt?

  By: Jen Judson WASHINGTON — A computational neuroscientist is studying whether a dragonfly's excellent hunting skills can be replicated in a missile's ability to maneuver and destroy targets midair with better precision. Dragonflies are vicious little creatures with a hit-to-kill track record of 95 percent, meaning only 5 percent of its prey escapes. Sandia National Laboratories' Frances Chance is building algorithms that simulate how a dragonfly processes information when intercepting prey, and she's testing them in a virtual environment. So far, the results are promising. The laboratories are federally funded and focus on national security missions through scientific and engineering research. The project is a yearlong, high-risk, high-gain effort that will wrap up in September, and it is funded by Sandia's Autonomy for Hypersonics Mission Campaign, Chance said. “I think what is really interesting about insects, in general, is they do something really fast and really well, but they are not particularly smart in the way you or I would think of ourselves as being smart,” Chance told Defense News in a recent interview. While insects may not be the right fit for studying cognitive capabilities to develop complex artificial intelligence, they are ideal for developing efficient computations for intercept capability. A dragonfly can react to a particular prey's maneuvers in 50 milliseconds, Chance explained. That amount of time accounts for information to cross three neurons in a dragonfly's brain. This indicates the dragonfly doesn't learn how to hunt, but rather the skill is inherent and part of its brain's hard-wiring. “The challenge then is: Is there anything that we can learn from how dragonflies do this that we can then bring to the next generation of missiles, or maybe even the next-next generation of missiles?” Chance said. By developing an artificial neural network that mimics a dragonfly's ability to hunt and then applying it to missile capabilities that rely on computation-heavy systems, one could reduce the size, weight and power needed for a missile's onboard computers; improve intercept techniques for targets such as hypersonic weapons; and home in on targets using simpler sensors. If the model of a dragonfly's neural circuit developed through Chance's research shows enough promise, she would then pass the information to scientists, who would try to directly apply it to weapons systems. One of the greatest leaps involves adapting an algorithm to handle the speed at which a missile flies. While a dragonfly is fast, it's not nearly as fast as a missile. Animal brains process information significantly slower than a computer, so it's possible computations can be sped up to better align with the speed at which a missile approaches targets. “The hope is that even if the algorithm isn't wildly successful, you might be able to say something about what you can get away with in terms of what types of capabilities you give the next generation of weapons,” Chance said. The model she's building is several steps removed from implementation onto a weapon. “I would consider the project complete when we have a viable model — ‘viable' meaning it does interception — and a bonus if it's neurobiologically plausible. There is no reason to force that for this type of research, but only because it doesn't necessarily matter; so something biologically inspired that works I would consider a success.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/land/2019/08/05/can-a-dragonfly-teach-a-missile-how-to-hunt/

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  6 septembre 2018 | International, Naval

  US Navy must be able to compete in ‘gray zone’ conflict, says top service officer

  By: David B. Larter WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy has to be able to confront great powers in areas short of open warfare, the service's top officer said Wednesday at the second annual Defense News Conference. China and Russia have employed tactics to harass neighbors and challenge the U.S. Navy, from the former's island building projects in the South China Sea to the latter's harassment of U.S. forces at sea, which it has used to score political points with its population. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told the crowd that competition with other great powers has to be seen on a spectrum and that the Navy must compete in all realms to stay ahead. “This competition is [defined] by a spectrum,” Richardson said. “You've heard terms like ‘gray war,' ‘competition below the level of conflict': All of these sorts of phrases try to grasp at this very smooth spectrum, from competition all the way to conflict. Our response to that going forward is going to be key to ensure that we are not only competitive but ahead. It's not sufficient to be competitive, we want to be winning.” The Navy has to be competitive in all its warfare domains to achieve the objectives laid out in the recent National Defense Strategy, spearheaded by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, that moves the military away from low-end counterterror operations and refocuses on high-end conflict. Full article: https://www.defensenews.com/smr/defense-news-conference/2018/09/05/us-navy-must-be-able-to-compete-in-gray-zone-conflict-says-top-service-officer

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  11 décembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR

  This is who Congress wants in charge of new hypersonic-tracking sensors

  By: Nathan Strout Congress wants the Missile Defense Agency to take the lead on developing a space-based sensor layer capable of tracking hypersonic weapons, despite a number of objections made by the Trump administration earlier this year. The administration claimed in a Sept. 4 letter that selecting a lead agency for the sensor layer this early “would limit DoD's ability to establish the most cost-effective missile defense architecture for the nation,” but the conference committee apparently brushed those concerns aside to place the project squarely in the hands of the MDA in their report on the annual National Defense Authorization Act, released Dec. 9. The Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor would be a new addition to the nation's missile defense architecture, supplementing the current Space-based Infrared System and the future Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared system in detecting and tracking ballistic weapons from space. Unlike those two systems, however, HBTSS is specifically designed to detect and track hypersonic weapons as well. Compared to traditional ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons are faster, maneuverable and dimmer when viewed from space. Both SBIRS and Next Gen OPIR were designed for ballistic missile threats and are ill suited for tracking the dimmer, faster targets presented by hypersonics. HBTSS meets that challenge in two main ways. First, unlike the two previous systems operating in geosynchronous orbit, HBTSS will be located in low-Earth orbit — far closer to the action. Being that much closer allows them to overcome the dimness of hypersonic threats in order to effectively track them. Secondly, the HBTSS sensors are meant to pass information from satellite to satellite, allowing uninterrupted tracking even as the hypersonic weapons move quickly out of view of any one satellite. The fate of the sensor layer has been up in the air for much of the year. The MDA didn't include the effort in its fiscal year 2020 budget, but listed it among their unfunded priorities in a report to Congress, asking for $108 million for the project. Authorization for that funding was included in both the House and Senate versions of the legislation, and unsurprisingly has been included in the conference report. To date, HBTSS has been a combined effort split between multiple organizations — primarily the MDA, the Space Development Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. While the MDA is in charge of the actual payload, DARPA's Project Blackjack has served as a prototype effort for the design of the new sensor layer. Meanwhile, the SDA was established earlier this year to build a new multilayered space architecture in low-Earth orbit, of which HBTSS would comprise one layer. The dividing issue between the two legislative bodies was whether to put the MDA firmly in charge of the operation or continue to let it develop between the MDA and the Space Development Agency, an organization stood up earlier this year to create a new space architecture comprised of hundreds of small satellites providing a variety of capabilities in low-Earth orbit. While the Senate wanted to have the MDA take the lead on development and deployment of HBTSS, the House supported a coordinated approach with responsibility shared between the MDA, the SDA and the Air Force. “This is one of the interesting boundary cases that is going to keep coming up between what do you give to the space service and what do you keep in the other agencies and services,” said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In this case, the MDA had already been working on the payload, and so I think there was a lot of angst in taking the MDA's work on that and giving it to another organization where it might lose some momentum.” The conference report comes down on the Senate side of the equation, directing the secretary of defense to assign primary responsibility for the development and deployment of HBTSS with the MDA. The legislation would also require the secretary to submit a plan for how the agency will work with the SDA and the Air Force to develop and integrate the payload. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2019/12/10/this-is-who-congress-wants-in-charge-of-new-hypersonic-tracking-sensors