Italy signs nearly $1 billion deal to upgrade Ariete tanks

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  31 août 2023 | International, Naval

  USS Zumwalt to receive hypersonic missile upgrades at HII

  The destroyer's modernization period includes installation of the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike hypersonic missile system.

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  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/

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  31 décembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Six things on the Pentagon’s 2019 acquisition reform checklist

  By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — Under the purview of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, reform has become a buzzword inside the Department of Defense, with every office trying to find ways to be more efficient, whether through cost savings or changes to bureaucracy. The department's Acquisition and Sustainment office, headed by Ellen Lord, manages billions of dollars in materiel; and by Lord's own belief, it is ripe for changes that could net the department big savings. On Dec. 17, Lord sat down with reporters and outlined a series of goals for 2019 that she hopes will help transform how the Pentagon buys equipment. Here, then, are six key items to watch for in the coming year. 1. Rework the department's key acquisition rules: The DoD Instruction 5000.02 is a key bedrock that forms the basis of how the defense acquisition system works, guiding acquisition professionals in their day-to-day program execution. And if Lord gets her way, she'll largely rip it up and start over. “In 2019, one of my key objectives is to rewrite 5000.02. We have, right now, this huge, complicated acquisition process that we encourage our acquisition professionals to tailor to their needs,” Lord said. “We are going to invert that approach and take a clean sheet of paper and write the absolute bare minimum to be compliant in 5000.02, and encourage program managers and contracting officers to add to that as they need for specific programs.” Lord envisions taking the massive, unwieldy 5000.02 guidance and getting it down to “a couple page outline of what you need to do,” with “simple” contract language and an easy-to-follow checklist “so that this isn't an onerous process.” “I'm encouraging what I call creative compliance. I want everyone to be compliant, but I want people to be very thoughtful and only use what they need,” she said. “This is literally starting with a clean sheet of paper, looking at the law and the intent, and working to vastly simplify this.” Andrew Hunter, a former Pentagon acquisition official now with the Center for International and Strategic Studies, notes that the instruction is supposed to be rewritten every five years to keep it fresh, and now is probably the right time to start looking into that. But, he added, “a lot of what she says she wants to do are things that sound very similar to my ear to what [Lord's predecessor] Frank Kendall was trying to do in the last rewrite. He tossed stuff out left and right, worked very hard to create the different models, put in extended discussions of different potential models of programs so that it would be obvious to people there's not one single way to do a program.” Hunter is cautious when it comes to a massive shift in the 5000.02 system. “If you literally tell the system, ‘All the rules are repealed, go do everything you want,' the reaction won't be a sudden flood of creativity that astounds you with the amazing talent at the department, even though there is a lot of talent there," he said. “What's more likely to happen is you have total paralysis because everyone is sitting around going: ‘Oh no, the rules are gone. How do we know what we can do? What do we do now?' But over time that might shake out.” If Congress needs to get involved, Lord said, she's prepared to go to Capitol Hill “because I know they are partnering with us and they want to make sure we do things in a simpler, most cost-effective manner.” 2. Intellectual property rules: A long-standing fight between the department and industry is over who should own the intellectual property used by the American military. Before fully taking on 5000.02, Lord hopes to write a departmentwide intellectual property policy. Lord pointed to the “very good job” done by the Army on creating an IP policy and said her goal is to build on that to create a standard across the DoD. “From an industry perspective, we are trying to be consistent across all the services and agencies, so that we don't have different requirements for similar needs,” Lord said. “So intellectual property is a good example. We'd like to have the same kind of contract language that can be tailored to individual needs, but basically have consistent language.” David Berteau, a former Pentagon official who is now the president and CEO of the Professional Services Council, noted it is hard to read the tea leaves for what Lord may be planning based on her public comments. But he pointed out the long-standing challenge for the Pentagon — that nearly 70 percent of all program costs are life-cycle sustainment and maintenance costs — as a sign that something needs to change so the department can avoid major issues in the future. Depending on how new rules are implemented, the use of IP might drive down costs — or, he warned, it might lead to companies unable to compete, forcing the Pentagon to pay more or be less prepared for challenges. Put plainly, Berteau said, “it's complicated.” He hopes Lord will begin interacting with industry on this issue in ways similar to the current “listening tour” on changes to progress payments. 3. Better software development: It's become almost cliché that the department needs to do better at developing software, but in this case it's a cliché that experts, including Lord, agree with. The Defense Innovation Board, a group of tech experts from outside the department, is working on a series of studies on software, including one focused on how to drive agile development techniques inside the building. Lord said to expect that report before the end of March, adding: “I think that will be important in terms of capturing a road map forward on how to do this correctly.” 4. Increase use of OTAs: In 2018, Lord's office released a handbook on when and how to use other transaction authorities — legal standards designed to speed acquisition that critics say are underutilized by the department. Lord called it “sort of a warmup” for creating more useful handbooks for the acquisition community, but said that the goal for 2019 is to get people to correctly employ OTAs. “Usually they should be used when you don't have a clear requirement. So, true prototyping when you don't know what you're going to get,” Lord said. “Prototyping early on, probably before you get to the middle-tier acquisition.” 5. Greater use of prototyping: Speaking of which, Lord said the department has about 10 projects underway for rapid prototyping at the mid-tier level, with the goal of growing to about 50 in the next year. The goal is to take the systems into the field, test them out and then grow the next iteration of the capability based on what is learned. “We're taking systems that are commercially available and perhaps need a little modification, or defense systems that need a modicum of modification to make them appropriate for the war fighter,” Lord said. “That's one of the authorities we are very appreciative for, and we will continue to refine the policy. I signed out very broad policy on that this year. We'll write the detailed policy coming up early next year.” 6. Making the Selected Acquisition Reports public again: Until recently, the department publicly released annual Selected Acquisition Reports for each of the major defense programs. Those reports can inform the public of where programs stand and the costs associated. However, under the Trump administration, those reports have been largely classified as “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, a higher level of security. Critics, including incoming House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, D-Wash., have argued there is no need for those once-public reports to be listed as FOUO. It appears Lord is working to open those back up. “We're going to try to minimize the FOUO on that,” Lord said in response to a question about it. “There are certain information [issues] that we have to protect, but [we] understand the need, the requirement, and I will put our guidance to make everything open to the public to the degree we can.” https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2018/12/27/six-things-on-the-pentagons-2019-acquisition-reform-checklist/