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  2 juin 2024 | International, Terrestre

  Europe needs to invest more in defence production, Airbus CEO says

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  26 octobre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Defense Digital Service, Army Cyber Command expand partnership with workspace ‘Tatooine’

  by Samantha Ehlinger The Defense Digital Service and Army Cyber Command's growing partnership is getting its own workspace in downtown Augusta, Georgia, DDS announced Thursday. Dubbed Tatooine, the new workspace located at the state-owned Georgia Cyber Center is the expansion of the Jyn Erso pilot project launched last year to join DDS staff and Cyber Command soldiers to solve hard problems. The new space officially opened Thursday with a day-long hackathon “for cyber soldiers and the local tech community,” according to a press release. “Tatooine will be a beacon for technical talent across the military — a place to write code and solve problems of impact,” DDS Director Chris Lynch said in an announcement. “Through this partnership, we are setting our best technical warfighters against our toughest problems with support and training from our DDS software engineers and experts. Together, men and women in uniform and tech nerds are finding new ways to rapidly solve high-impact challenges.” The Army is gradually relocating its Cyber Command headquarters to nearby Fort Gordon. The state's CIO Calvin Rhodes said this week that the center will play host to the unclassified training sessions for personnel who are waiting for their security clearances to be completed, a process that can often take at least six months, sister publication StateScoop reported. The National Security Agency, which has an outpost at Fort Gordon, will also have a presence at the Georgia Cyber Center. Officials said the $100 million development is the single-largest investment by a state in a cybersecurity facility. Tatooine will join Army officers and soldiers with DDS technologists to tackle hard problems in unclassified “startup-like spaces” using private sector tools and methodologies, according to the Pentagon. “For instance, project teams are using concepts of continuous software iteration and user-centered design, which are common in the tech sector, but not in the military,” the department said. Tatooine is a way for DDS and Army Cyber Command to create more pilot teams without having to relocate Cyber Command personnel to Washington D.C. Other planned uses for Tatooine include supporting initiatives like the Hack the Army bug bounty program. Army's Cyber Command and Cyber Center of Excellence are providing the technical soldiers to staff teams and Professional Military Education credit for time spent in the program, according to the announcement. Senior Army officers from the center and the Army Cyber Institute will oversee day-to-day operations in the workspace and report to DDS. “To help the Army resolve its toughest talent management and technical challenges, DDS and U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) have partnered to bring technically-gifted soldiers together with private sector civilian talent to rapidly develop immediate-need cyber capabilities,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, head of the command, said in a statement. “This innovative partnership will solve tough problems and serve as a powerful retention and recruitment tool.” Through the Jyn Erso program, project teams have already tackled a few projects, such as a program to develop, produce and deploy a capability to combat commercial drones. “The team developed a low-cost software system that is flexible enough to adapt to newly identified targets and easy for operators to use and transport in austere conditions,” the announcement said. DDS and the Cyber Center of Excellence also launched a training pilot earlier this year as part of Jyn Erso to streamline cyber training courses. In its first iteration, DDS cut down the training time for a subset of Army soldiers from six months to just 12 weeks. We know what you're wondering, and yes, the names of the workspace and the pilot are Star Wars references. DDS, since its inception, has referred to itself as the Rebel Alliance ( a shoutout to the good guys in Star Wars), even naming the Pentagon's landmark $10 billion commercial cloud contract the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. https://www.fedscoop.com/defense-digital-service-army-cyber-command-expand-partnership-workspace-tatooine/

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  17 septembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Who is Secretly Building the USAF’s New Fighter?

  MARCUS WEISGERBER Officials are mum, so here's a roundup of clues. Among the big questions surrounding the secret U.S. Air Force fighter-jet demonstrator revealed this week is: who built it? Will Roper, the head of Air Force acquisition, declined to say much about the new plane, other than it has actually flown, that some of the plane's systems have been flight-tested, and that it was designed and built using digital engineering. So let's look at some clues, starting with a likely predecessor to the Next Generation Air Dominance project that produced the new demonstrator. In January 2015, Frank Kendall, then defense undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, told the House Armed Services Committee about a DARPA-led project that was developing new planes and engine technology for the Air Force and Navy. “The intent is to develop prototypes for the next generation of air-dominance platforms — X-plane programs, if you will," Kendall said. Dubbed the Aerospace Innovation Initiative, the project aimed to “develop the technologies and address the risks associated with the air dominance platforms that will follow the F-35, as well as other advanced aeronautical challenges.” Roper wouldn't say whether the NGAD and AII projects are linked, but they sound quite similar. He instead said that he disclosed the plane's existence, in part, to encourage companies to invest more in digital engineering. "The obvious candidates for the NGAD prototype are Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, though General Atomics might be a possible designer—but that's a long-shot," Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, wrote in a Tuesday note to clients. "Textron's Scorpion program had recently proven that in one year's time, it could take a new clean sheet design to flight, but we doubt it's been able to elevate this skill to combat aircraft." The plane's engine, Callan wrote, was built by either GE or Raytheon Technologies' Pratt & Whitney. Here's the case for why each of the following companies could have built the new NGAD fighter. Boeing The Chicago-based aerospace giant already knows a lot about digital engineering, having partnered with Sweden's Saab to design and build their T-7A training jet in less than a year, near-lightspeed by U.S. military standards. Air Force officials have gushed about the T-7A, which beat out two other planes, the Lockheed Martin T-50 and Leonardo T-100, that were already being used by foreign air forces. The Boeing plane has a mission computer that can run third-party software and apps, allowing for easy updates. It is also designed for quick assembly: it takes just 15 minutes to assemble the forward and aft fuselages, compared with some 24 hours to assemble a F/A-18 Super Hornet fuselage, according to Leanne Caret, the CEO of Boeing Defense. Northrop Grumman It often gets overlooked that Northrop owns Scaled Composites — the Burt Rutan-founded, XPrize-winning design shop behind SpaceShipOne, the first aircraft to carry private citizens into space. Like Boeing, Northrop's Scaled built a plane from scratch for the Air Force's pilot training jet contest, but in the end didn't submit a bid. Northrop has seen an uptick in classified Pentagon work in recent years. It's been presumed that a sizable portion of that cash has gone to build B-21 stealth bombers, whose existence has been disclosed but are being built in secret. It's conceivable that some of the classified cash flowing into the company's Aeronautical Systems business is for the NGAD test aircraft. Northrop is also building the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, the new intercontinental ballistic missiles that will replace the Cold War Minuteman III, using the same digital design technology often touted by Roper. Lockheed Martin The company's Advanced Development Programs division — far better known as the Skunk Works — has long developed super-advanced, super-secret planes for the U.S. military, including the famed U-2 and SR-71 spy planes and the F-117 ground-attack jet. They also built the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. “ADP seems pretty busy across a number of fronts, but also...looking at the Digital Century Series and also looking at where the services are going to go in terms of sixth-gen and next-gen aircraft,” said Michele Evans, who leads Lockheed Martin Aeronautics and its Skunk Works operation, last week. Evans also touted Stardrive, a Lockheed effort to incorporate more commercial technology and practices into its manufacturing. “Think of model-based systems engineering, think about factory of the future, software development in terms of containerization technologies like Kubernetes, and agile [software] and then even into sustainment in terms of how we use data analytics and AI,” she said. “I think the technologies are just going to provide tremendous opportunities to speed up the development in the delivery of platforms going forward.” Someone else The most intriguing possibility is that the new jet may not be the product of one of the defense giants at all. There is evidence that the digital-design tools that Roper touted are allowing smaller upstarts to enter markets once reserved for only a few established contractors. In July, for example, an Air Force solicitation for proposals for drones to accompany manned jets drew 18 entries. “It shows there's a lot of interest from very large [companies], which you would expect, to very small,” Gen. Arnold Bunch, the head of Air Force Materiel Command, said in a Wednesday videoconference call with reporters. “I actually believe as we do the digital campaign and we look at doing digital engineering, it will actually open the door to more people to be able to participate that may not have before.” https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/09/who-secretly-building-usafs-new-fighter/168541/