Lockheed Martin Canada lays off 20 employees in Ottawa, 11 in Dartmouth, Montreal

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  25 février 2020 | Local, C4ISR

  Pentagon Briefs Industry On 5G Experiments

  By PAUL MCLEARY PENTAGON: Close to 300 companies logged on to a “virtual industry day” with Pentagon leadership last week as the military scrambles to build its own 5G networks. The challenge: moving fast enough to keep up with commercial innovation — but cautiously enough to keep China out. The event, led by DoD's technical director for 5G, Dr. Joe Evans, marked a starting point for shaping a forthcoming Request for Prototype Proposals planned in the coming weeks. The companies selected will then start work later this year on a series of 5G experiments at four bases across the United States. Those experiments are intended to help the individual armed services to refine what it is they need, and what they need to ask from industry, as the Pentagon pumps hundreds of millions of new funding into 5G programs across the department. The experiments run the gamut from logistics to sharing information between radar systems, and each service will play a role in testing out what industry offers. Hill Air Force Base in Utah will develop 5G dynamic spectrum sharing capabilities between airborne radar systems and 5G cellular systems. The Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Georgia and Naval Base San Diego will test out a smart warehouse concept, while virtual reality training systems will be tested at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. The RPP will be issued through the National Spectrum Consortium, an industry group established under a five-year, $1.25 billion Other Transaction Authority contract with the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Emerging Capabilities and Prototyping. Only vetted companies who belong to the consortium will be considered for the work. The effort is part of a wider push within the government to develop homegrown tech, and quickly. President Trump's top economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, told reporters Friday the White House is planning a 5G meeting in April with top technology companies in an effort to ensure Huawei does not cornere the global market on the technology. “We're going to have a lot of them in the White House to have a discussion,” Kudlow said, though the event hasn't been officially announced. The Pentagon fiscal year 2021 budget requests $449 million in research and development for the 5G next generation information communications technology program, $249 million more than provided by Congress last year. While the Pentagon is paying to run these initial tests, the individual services will ultimately be responsible for paying to 5G technologies once they're matured, adding another budget line at a time when no one expects defense accounts to rise for the foreseeable future. When that happens, 5G will compete “with all other infrastructure upgrades that the services already have planned for their installations and for the systems that operate on them,” said Morgan Dwyer, a former Pentagon official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So, how quickly DoD can deploy 5G is really a function of how much utility the technology provides to the services and how willing they are to trade-off other capabilities in order to prioritize 5G instead.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/02/pentagon-briefs-industry-on-5g-experiments

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  23 mars 2022 | Local, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  What the Liberal-NDP deal could mean for 'aggressive options' on defence spending

  The prospects for a significant increase in Canadian defence spending in the coming federal budget looked a little less likely as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was set to head to Europe after announcing a stunning political deal with the New Democrats.

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  10 décembre 2019 | Local, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Canada is rich - and cheap

  EUGENE LANG Eugene Lang is an adjunct professor at the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, and a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. “It's Canada, they have money,” Donald Trump said at last week's NATO summit. Most of what the U.S. President says is either exaggerated or false, but occasionally he sums up in a sentence what everyone knows to be true. After admonishing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the summit for Canada's failure to meet, or strive toward, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's defence-spending target of 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Mr. Trump pointed out an inconvenient truth. The President was saying Canada is rich and cheap. But just how rich is Canada? Among the Group of Seven -- a group of the richest countries in the world -- Canada enjoys the third-highest per-capita income and, since 2016, has led the G7 in economic growth. Canada also has the lowest net-debt-to-GDP ratio among those same seven countries, and the second-lowest national-government-deficit-to-GDP ratio. Which means, in essence, that Canada is the third-richest country in the G7 and the best in class with government finances. Successive governments in Ottawa have spent 20 years boasting about this strong national balance sheet to Canadians at every turn, and telling anyone abroad who would listen. This is why Mr. Trump knows that Canada does indeed have money. We are rich, at least compared with most other countries. But are we cheap? Canada spends about 1.3 per cent of GDP on national defence, tying us for fourth with Italy within the G7. Yet, Ottawa has never fully accepted the validity of the defence-spending-to-GDP measure. Both the Harper government – which signed the Wales Declaration, enshrining the 2-per-cent NATO target – and the Trudeau government have claimed input measures such as the GDP ratio don't tell the full story, and that output indicators are more meaningful. The defence output measure that is best understood is the extent to which a country's military is engaged in operations internationally. On that score, Canada looks terrible. We have fewer troops deployed abroad today on NATO, United Nations and other multilateral missions than in decades. To be sure, having influence internationally and carrying your fair share of global responsibility entails much more than the size or engagement of your military. Official Development Assistance (ODA), or foreign aid, is another important measure in this connection. Canada also ranks fourth among G7 countries in ODA as a percentage of gross national income (GNI). However, Ottawa is spending only 0.28 per cent, up slightly from 0.26 per cent last year, the lowest level this century. Fifty years ago, a World Bank Commission report, titled Partners in Development, recommended developed countries spend 0.7 per cent of GNI on aid. That Commission was chaired by Lester Pearson, former prime minister of Canada, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and a Canadian icon. Over the years, various Canadian governments have paid homage to Mr. Pearson's vision. Yet in the five decades since his report was published, Canada has rarely reached half of the Pearson target in any given year. Whether Ottawa likes or doesn't like input or output measures, or GDP or GNI ratios, doesn't really matter in the world of international politics. For better or worse, these are the indicators that are used to compare and assess the degree to which countries are living up to their obligations and responsibilities internationally. Imperfect as they are, these are measures of burden sharing. They are the statistics countries look at when considering whether Canada or any other country is pulling its weight globally. And on these measures, Canada looks middling at best, and bad at worst, by both international comparative standards. At the same time, we are among the world leaders in economic growth among developed countries, and we have held the gold medal in public finances for years. Rich and cheap, as it were. That was the essence of Mr. Trump's criticism of Canada this week at the NATO Summit. And foreign governments the world over know it to be true. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-is-rich-and-cheap/