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  26 juin 2020 | International, Terrestre

  Japan confirms it’s scrapping US missile defense system

  By: Mari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press TOKYO — Japan's National Security Council has endorsed plans to cancel the deployment of two costly land-based U.S. missile defense systems aimed at bolstering the country's capability against threats from North Korea, the country's defense minister said Thursday. Taro Kono said the country will now revise its missile defense program and scale up its entire defense posture. The council made its decision Wednesday, and now the government will need to enter negotiations with the U.S. about what to do with payments and the purchase contract already made for the Aegis Ashore systems. Kono announced the plan to scrap the systems earlier this month after it was found that the safety of one of the two planned host communities could not be ensured without a hardware redesign that would be too time consuming and costly. “We couldn't move forward with this project, but still there are threats from North Korea,” Kono said at a news conference Thursday. Japan will discuss ways to better protect the country and the people from the North's missiles and other threats, he said. The Japanese government in 2017 approved adding the two Aegis Ashore systems to enhance the country's current defenses consisting of Aegis-equipped destroyers at sea and Patriot missiles on land. Defense officials have said the two Aegis Ashore units could cover Japan entirely from one station at Yamaguchi in the south and another at Akita in the north. The plan to deploy the two systems already had faced a series of setbacks, including questions about the selection of one of the sites, repeated cost estimate hikes that climbed to 450 billion yen (U.S. $4.1 billion) for their 30-year operation and maintenance, and safety concerns that led to local opposition. Kono said Japan has signed contract worth nearly half the total cost and paid part of it to the U.S. He said Japan is trying to get the most out of what it has already paid, though he did not elaborate. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has steadily pushed to step up Japan's defense capability, said last week that in light of the scrapping the government would need to reconsider Japan's missile defense program and do more under the country's security alliance with the U.S. Abe said the government would consider the possibility of acquiring preemptive strike capability, a controversial plan that critics say would violate Japan's war-renouncing Constitution. Kono on Thursday also raised concern about China's increasingly assertive activity in regional seas and skies. He said Chinese coast guard vessels are repeatedly in and out of Japanese waters around disputed East China Sea islands, and a Chinese submarine recently passed just off Japan's southern coast. “China is trying to change the status quo unilaterally in East China Sea, South China Sea and with Indian border and Hong Kong as well,” Kono said. “It is easy to make connections about those issues.” https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/06/25/japan-confirms-its-scrapping-us-missile-defense-system/

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  19 juin 2018 | International, Terrestre, C4ISR

  Pentagon Grounds Marines’ ‘Eyes in the Sky’ Drones Over Cyber Security Concerns

  Gidget Fuentes The Marine Corps has shelved several new, small drones – at least temporarily – amid a Pentagon ban and assessment on the cybersecurity of commercial, off-the-shelf, unmanned aerial systems, a service spokesman told USNI News on Monday. The Department of Defense issued a ban last month on the purchase and use of all commercial off-the-shelf drones until the Pentagon develops a plan to mitigate security risks. The online site sUAS News obtained a copy of the May 23 memo written by Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan ordering the temporary ban due to “unmanned aerial vehicle systems cybersecurity vulnerabilities.” Military.com reported on the memo's effect on the Marines last week. The Marine Corps officials are asking defense officials to exempt eight systems so Marines can continue to use and train with the drones, Capt. Joshua Pena, a Marine Corps Combat Development Command spokesman, told USNI News Monday. Pena said exemption requests were being drafted and reviewed by senior leaders and for submission to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for these systems: Black Hornet 2 and Black Hornet 3, manufactured by FLIR Systems, Inc.; SkyRanger (Aeryon Labs); InstantEye Mk-2 Gen-3 and InstantEye Mk2 Gen-5 (Physical Sciences Inc.); Indago (Lockheed Martin); and DJI Phantom 3 Pro and DJI Phantom 4 Pro (DJI). InstantEye is a centerpiece of the “Quads for Squads” initiative driven by the commandant, Gen. Robert Neller, to equip infantry units with innovative, high-tech capabilities to make Marines more lethal and effective in a cyber battle space, including micro and small drones. The small quadcopter, manufactured by InstantEye Robotics, a division of Andover, Mass.,-based Physical Sciences, Inc., is getting fielded to squads across the Marine Corps' three infantry divisions. Neller, speaking June 12 at the 69th Current Strategy Forum held at the Naval War College, touted the service's push to bolster its cyber capabilities to include using the small quadcopter, according to the Fifth Domain newsletter. But the Pentagon's decision has forced Marines to stop using InstantEye until it can get the green light from the Pentagon. It's considered a COTS product, Pena said, and “the system has been grounded.” The ban “also applies to all UAS ground command and control elements including smartphones or tablets with associated software and hardware,” he added. So far, the first battalions have received 600 of the Marine Corps' initial buy of 800 Mk-2 Gen-3 drones for the “Quads for Squads,” and the remaining 200 are pending shipment, he said. “The policy has not affected that schedule,” he added. In suspending all COTS unmanned aerial systems, Shanahan cited a May 14 DoD inspector general finding that “the DoD has not implemented an adequate process to assess cybersecurity risks associated with using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS).” “Effective immediately, you must suspend purchases of COTS UAS for operational use until the DoD develops a strategy to adequately assess and mitigate the risks associated with their use. In addition, you must suspend the use of COTS UASs until the DoD identifies and fields a solution to mitigate known cybersecurity risks,” he wrote in the memo. Shanahan noted his authority to approve any “requests for exemptions, on a case by case basis, to support urgent needs.” He directed military officials and agencies to report to him within 30 days “to identify and account for all COTS UAS.” The memo doesn't indicate what prompted the suspension of the military's use of drones, which include some popular commercially-available drones sold to consumers and manufactured by U.S. or foreign companies. However, last month, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., wrote to Defense Secretary James Mattis about “a potential national security threat” in products manufactured by DJI, or Da-Jiang Innovations, a technology company based in China. In his letter, dated May 7, Murphy cited an Army decision last year to halt the use of DJI commercial UAS and an “intelligence bulletin” issued by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement “asserting that DJI was using its products to provide critical infrastructure and law enforcement data to the Chinese government.” “These vulnerabilities pose a tremendous national security risk, as the information obtained by the Chinese government could be used to conduct physical or cyber-attacks against U.S. civilian and military targets,” wrote Murphy, whose Senate committee assignments include appropriations and foreign relations. DJI, or SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd., as noted on the company's website, is based in Shenzhen, China, and manufactures drones, including several popular with consumers and drones hobbyists and used by military and federal agencies, and interest remains in recent UAS solicitations including by the Army. Murphy didn't cite any specific example of a security breach or hacking by DJI but raised concerns about vulnerabilities particularly with foreign-made systems. “I encourage you to, at a minimum, consider a DoD-wide directive banning the use of UAS owned or manufactured in a foreign nation until further threat-assessments can be completed,” he wrote. He noted the “deluge of foreign-made military equipment” the military has bought and opined that “if the hundreds of DJI drones purchased by the U.S. government in the last several years had been American-made, we would not have subjected ourselves to this massive potential intrusion and exploitation of sensitive U.S. sites.” Two years ago, security concerns about DJI products prompted the company to issue a statement that “DJI does not routinely share customer information or drone video with Chinese authorities' and cited its privacy policy. https://news.usni.org/2018/06/18/pentagon-grounds-marines-eyes-sky-drones-cyber-security-concerns

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  10 juillet 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité

  Pentagon AI center shifts focus to joint war-fighting operations

  Nathan Strout The Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub is shifting its focus to enabling joint war-fighting operations, developing artificial intelligence tools that will be integrated into the Department of Defense's Joint All-Domain Command and Control efforts. “As we have matured, we are now devoting special focus on our joint war-fighting operation and its mission initiative, which is focused on the priorities of the National Defense Strategy and its goal of preserving America's military and technological advantages over our strategic competitors,” Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, told reporters July 8. “The AI capabilities JAIC is developing as part of the joint war-fighting operations mission initiative will use mature AI technology to create a decisive advantage for the American war fighter.” That marks a significant change from where JAIC stood more than a year ago, when the organization was still being stood up with a focus on using AI for efforts like predictive maintenance. That transformation appears to be driven by the DoD's focus on developing JADC2, a system of systems approach that will connect sensors to shooters in near-real time. “JADC2 is not a single product. It is a collection of platforms that get stitched together — woven together ― into effectively a platform. And JAIC is spending a lot of time and resources focused on building the AI component on top of JADC2,” said the acting director. According to Mulchandani, the fiscal 2020 spending on the joint war-fighting operations initiative is greater than JAIC spending on all other mission initiatives combined. In May, the organization awarded Booz Allen Hamilton a five-year, $800 million task order to support the joint war-fighting operations initiative. As Mulchandani acknowledged to reporters, that task order exceeds JAIC's budget for the next few years and it will not be spending all of that money. One example of the organization's joint war-fighting work is the fire support cognitive system, an effort JAIC was pursuing in partnership with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab and the U.S. Army's Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical. That system, Mulchandani said, will manage and triage all incoming communications in support of JADC2. Mulchandani added that JAIC was about to begin testing its new flagship joint war-fighting project, which he did not identify by name. “We do have a project going on under joint war fighting which we are going to be actually go into testing,” he said. “They are very tactical edge AI is the way I'd describe it. That work is going to be tested. It's actually promising work — we're very excited about it.” “As I talked about the pivot from predictive maintenance and others to joint war fighting, that is probably the flagship project that we're sort of thinking about and talking about that will go out there,” he added. While left unnamed, the acting director assured reporters that the project would involve human operators and full human control. “We believe that the current crop of AI systems today [...] are going to be cognitive assistance,” he said. “Those types of information overload cleanup are the types of products that we're actually going to be investing in.” “Cognitive assistance, JADC2, command and control—these are all pieces,” he added. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/07/08/pentagon-ai-center-shifts-focus-to-joint-warfighting-operations/