Intevac Receives Record $40 Million Digital Night Vision Contract Award

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  5 avril 2023 | International, Aérospatial

  Lockheed Martin and F-35 Joint Program Office sign ?147 million contract for F-35 Lightning II fleet support

  The aircraft support contract is valued at approximately ?147M and will ensure and enhance the UK F-35 fleet?s availability and capability to conduct combat missions worldwide

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  11 février 2021 | International, C4ISR

  Urgently needed: Tech-savvy defense leaders

  By: Nate Ashton Defense priorities are shifting toward emerging technologies at an unprecedented pace, but still not fast enough to keep America ahead of potential adversaries. We need to hit the accelerator by drastically increasing the tech savviness of defense leaders. The defense establishment is better at this than it used to be. We've seen a rapid expansion of new authorities and programs to drive tech innovation since Pentagon leaders started talking about the “third offset” in 2014. The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act continues that trend, establishing a national cyber director position, elevating the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, and calling for open-systems architecture and API usage in some key programs. But we will not keep our current military superiority through these kinds of incremental changes alone. We need a radical shift in how the Department of Defense does business. Any organizational transformation starts with the right leadership. This is doubly true in government, where the bureaucracy is built to maintain the status quo and avoid risk to guarantee continuity of operations and effective stewardship of taxpayer dollars. But understanding where risk and opportunity lies — in areas from cybersecurity to agile procurement — is now much more important than knowing how to manage a major, multibillion-dollar weapons system procurement. The Biden administration and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin should start by filling key acquisitions and management roles with leaders who have experience in the tech or venture sector, or have a record of disruptive innovation within the DoD itself. These people must bring both an understanding of the current tech landscape and a willingness to back the innovators under them. Without a clear, top-down mandate to disrupt the status quo, nothing will change. The new administration should also make it a priority to heed the advice of defense and technology advisory boards. Oftentimes leaders who have spent their careers in tech, venture, and private research and development may be unsuited for full-time government positions, yet bring invaluable perspective and expertise. The Biden administration should continue and accelerate the work already being done to implement the Defense Innovation Board's recommendations for training and software acquisition and the Cyberspace Solarium Commission's recommendations for security. More than identifying useful, new technologies, defense leaders must transform culture and skills at all levels of the DoD to operationalize tech innovation. The hardest part of driving change in a big organization is not recognizing the end goal nor setting policies to get there, but rather operationalizing it at all levels across the millions of active-duty, civilian and contractor personnel doing the day-to-day work. This will take massive investments in training the existing workforce, strengthening the pathways between defense and the national tech and venture ecosystems, and changing processes to enable and incentivize new ways of doing business. The DoD needs to make aggressive investments in the near term. In the near term, defense leaders should: Train all DoD personnel on emerging technology. The need for these types of knowledge across the DoD simply can't be met by existing resources, which is why Dcode has worked with the Defense Acquisition University, AFWERX and others to equip defense leaders to innovate like a startup, evaluate tech like an investor and understand the emerging tech landscape. Provide advanced training and specialization on commercial tech procurement and software procurement for contracting and information security personnel. Today's purchases are best-value decisions that require true subject matter expertise to scope problem sets, assess the best solutions and bring those solutions in. In contracting, the practice of rating bids based on meeting rigid requirements and competing on price alone simply does not work. In security, moving from compliance-based to risk-based approaches will require a massive influx of technical talent and training. Expand, promote and incentivize industry exchange programs both ways: pulling in private sector talent, and sending the DoD's talent on loan to the tech and venture industry. Fund and empower tech innovation hubs. Some of the biggest successes in recent years have come from newer innovation hubs and centers of excellence that are proliferating across agencies and programs. Efforts like these should be encouraged to both replicate best practices from existing hubs that have seen success, seeded with funding to try new things, and matured into programs of record as their business model proves out. One need only look at the significant measurable outcomes that the Defense Innovation Unit and AFWERX have driven in recent years, with a relatively minimal amount of resources, to see that they are only just beginning to scratch the surface. Driving internal disruption at scale will take an exponential increase in the number of people and amount of funding. The future of defense innovation is bright, and the community of passionate leaders inside and outside of the government working to move things forward is incredibly inspiring. I'm hopeful the Biden administration and new Congress will see 2021 as the year to make ambitious investments for the future. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/02/10/urgently-needed-tech-savvy-defense-leaders/

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  21 juin 2018 | International, Sécurité

  Synthetic biology raises risk of new bioweapons, US report warns

  Ian Sample Report warns that swift progress in our ability to manufacture viruses is making us vulnerable to biological attacks The rapid rise of synthetic biology, a futuristic field of science that seeks to master the machinery of life, has raised the risk of a new generation of bioweapons, according a major US report into the state of the art. Advances in the area mean that scientists now have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. The three scenarios are picked out as threats of highest concern in a review of the field published on Tuesday by the US National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Department of Defense. The report was commissioned to flag up ways in which the powerful technology might be abused, and to focus minds on how best to prepare. Michael Imperiale, chair of the report committee, and professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Michigan, said the review used only unclassified information and so has no assessment of which groups, if any, might be pursuing novel biological weapons. “We can't say how likely any of these scenarios are,” he said. “But we can talk about how feasible they are.” In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, “enhances and expands” opportunities to create bioweapons. “As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinise where harms could come from,” said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. More than 20 years ago, Eckard Wimmer, a geneticist at Stony Brook University in New York, highlighted the potential dangers of synthetic biology in dramatic style when he recreated poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horsepox virus. The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century. Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesised. “The technology to do this is available now,” said Imperiale. “It requires some expertise, but it's something that's relatively easy to do, and that is why it tops the list.” Other fairly simple procedures can be used to tweak the genes of dangerous bacteria and make them resistant to antibiotics, so that people infected with them would be untreatable. A more exotic bioweapon might come in the form of a genetically-altered microbe that colonises the gut and churns out poisons. “While that is technically more difficult, it is a concern because it may not look like anything you normally watch out for in public health,” Imperiale said. The report calls on the US government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defences, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. One bioweapon that is not considered an immediate threat is a so-called gene drive that spreads through a population, rewriting human DNA as it goes. “It's important to recognise that it's easy to come up with a scary-sounding idea, but it's far more difficult to do something practical with it,” said Carr. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jun/19/urgent-need-to-prepare-for-manmade-virus-attacks-says-us-government-report