NASA wants Canadian boots on the moon

Sur le même sujet

• 

  5 octobre 2018 | International, Terrestre

  Army testing more effective ghillie suits

  By David Vergun, Army News Service FORT BELVOIR, Va. -- The Army is looking for an improved ghillie suit to replace the flame-resistant, camouflage suit now worn by snipers to keep them from being seen by the enemy. The current ghillie suits are bulky, somewhat uncomfortable and hot in warm weather, said Debbie Williams, a systems acquisition expert with Program Executive Office Soldier, Product Manager Soldier Clothing and Individual Equipment. The current suit is known as the Flame Resistant Ghillie System, or FRGS. The replacement the Army is looking for will be called the Improved Ghillie System, or IGS, Williams said. She added that although the term "flame resistant" is not in the new name, the IGS will still have flame-resistant properties. Soldiers will receive most of their protection from the base layer worn under the IGS, such as the Flame Resistant Combat Uniform, or FR ACU. The IGS will be a modular system, worn over the field uniform, she said. It will be modular in that it can be taken apart, with pieces added or subtracted as needed, such as sleeves, leggings, veil, cape and so on. Another change is that the IGS will not come with the accessory kit, like the one supplied with the FRGS, Williams said. It was found that Soldiers were not using a majority of the items in their accessory kit or preferred a different material. Williams said the cost of the IGS will be lower than the current $1,300 FRGS. Mary Armacost, a textile technologist with Product Manager Soldier Clothing and Individual Equipment, said the IGS will be made of lighter, more breathable material than the FRGS. Also, the material for the skeins that accompany the IGS will be stiffer than that of the FRGS, thereby making the IGS more effective at camouflaging the Soldier. A request for proposal for the IGS went out Aug. 28 and closed Sept. 24, she said. Vendors must each provide three samples. About 3,500 suits are expected to be produced under the contract for approximately 3,300 snipers in all three Army components, as well as Soldiers in U.S. Special Operations Command, Williams said. After the samples are obtained, lab and field testing will begin at various locations in November, she said. For example, the Army's Night Vision Laboratory will do full-spectrum testing. It will also use night vision goggles to see how well the suits remain hidden in darkened conditions. Daytime testing for visual camouflage effectiveness will take place as well, with sniper-qualified Soldiers at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, Williams said. Additionally, acoustic testing will be done by the Army Research Laboratory to determine how much noise the IGS produces in field conditions. ARL will also test the effectiveness of the fabric regarding tear resistance and fire retardant effectiveness, she added. Following all of this, a limited user evaluation should commence next spring using instructors from the Sniper School at Fort Benning, Georgia. https://www.army.mil/article/211933

• 

  3 septembre 2019 | International, C4ISR

  DoD ‘Office’ Functions Move To Cloud In Multi-Billion-Dollar Contract

  By BARRY ROSENBERG WASHINGTON: Overshadowed by the dispute with DoD's planned single-award JEDI cloud contract is another multi-billion-dollar single-award cloud contract awarded today that will actually determine the software that military personnel and civil servants use every day. Under the $7.6 billion 10-year Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) cloud contract, the Pentagon will use Microsoft productivity tools such as word processing, spreadsheets, email, collaboration, file sharing, and storage — Office 365. Those applications presently reside mostly on legacy desktop computers, and will transition to a cloud-based solution across all military services. The result should be improved cybersecurity, for one thing. “The notion is that if you have it professionally and centrally managed it should be better patched and configured than having hundreds of individually managed servers,” said David Mihelcic, former chief technology officer at the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and now a consultant with DMMI. “This seems reasonable, but I don't think there is any cyber magic in DEOS either.” The joint General Services Administration/Defense Department DEOS blanket purchase agreement was awarded to CSRA (acquired by General Dynamics in April 2018 for $9.7 billion) and its subcontractors Dell Marketing (a wholesale distributor of computers, peripherals, and software) and Minburn Technology (a value added reseller that specializes in Microsoft enterprise software agreements). The award includes a five-year base period with two two-year options and one one-year option. “DOD's cloud strategy includes both general purpose and fit-for-purpose clouds (and) DEOS is a great example of a fit-for-purpose cloud that supports our multi-cloud strategy,” said DOD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy in a statement. “DEOS will streamline our use of cloud email and collaborative tools while enhancing cybersecurity and information sharing based on standardized needs and market offerings. “The journey to the cloud has been, and will continue to be, an iterative learning process. All lessons learned from pilot programs and the department's early cloud adopters have been rolled into this solution. DEOS takes advantage of technical, security and contractual lessons from these ongoing pilots, while military services are leveraging them to assess the readiness of their infrastructure to support migration to DEOS.” DEOS includes voice, video, and text collaboration capabilities, which the DoD already has with capabilities under enterprise services like: Defense Collaboration Services (DCS), which provides secure web conferencing and instant messaging services on the Non-secure Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet) and Secure Internet Protocol Routing Network (SIPRNet), and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) chat. “Will it be an improvement over the current capabilities? I guess we will see,” said Mihalcic. “I can't say I found the collaborative capabilities of O365 better than what we had in DoD.” While DEOS on the surface appears to provide a back-office function, it can also be considered a weapon system given that it will provide common enterprise applications at local base, post, camp, and station levels — including deployed and afloat organizations — over the sensitive but unclassified NIPRNet and the secret SIPRNet, to include operations in Denied, Disconnected, Intermittent, and Limited Bandwidth (D-DIL) environments. “I would say almost certainly (DEOS is a warfighting capability), especially the SIPR instance,” said Mihelcic. “DoD uses email, chat, and DCS collaboration in support of warfighting today and this will now take on those needs. “As for DIL environments, DISA had threshold requirements for deployable instances in the draft RFP. The vendor most likely will satisfy with existing MS Exchange and Sharepoint software on deployable servers. To be honest, I think that most tactical units, including deployed Marines and Navy afloat, will stick with what they have.” https://breakingdefense.com/2019/08/dod-office-functions-move-to-cloud-in-multi-billion-dollar-contract/

• 

  28 janvier 2021 | International, Aérospatial

  Boeing’s cost overruns on KC-46 now exceed initial contract with US Air Force

  By: Valerie Insinna Edited on 1/27/21 at 1:44 p.m. to provide more details on the cost overrun. WASHINGTON — With the Jan. 27 announcement of a new $275 million charge on the KC-46, Boeing has now paid as much in cost overruns for the troubled program as the U.S. Air Force invested in the tanker's development. The new charge, which the company reported as part of fourth-quarter 2020 earnings, means Boeing has now paid more than $5.0 billion out of pocket to pay for the myriad technical problems and production issues that have cropped up since the company won the program in 2011. Under the firm, fixed-price contract signed then, Boeing is responsible for paying for any costs in excess of the contract's $4.9 billion ceiling. The latest KC-46 overrun occurred “primarily due to production inefficiencies including impacts of COVID-19 disruption,” the company said. Steve Trimble of Aviation Week put together a list of KC-46 charges by year, finding that the program documented its largest overrun in 2020 despite seeing charges decrease to only $148 million in 2019. The company previously attributed $494 million in charges to the ongoing pandemic during the first, second and third quarters of 2020. The KC-46 is a commercial-derivative plane based on the Boeing 767 airliner. Because it is manufactured on the 767 production line in Everett, Washington, before undergoing military-specific upgrades, any slowdown in commercial plane volume also makes it more expensive to produce the KC-46. Boeing President and CEO Dave Calhoun said in October he believed the KC-46 had moved past the technical problems that plagued the program over the past few years, and the tanker would prove to be an asset for the company after the pandemic had run its course. “The tanker has been a drag on us for three or four years in every way you can think of with respect to investors,” he said at the time. “But we are continuing to clear the hurdle with our customers with respect to its performance in their fleet and their need for that tanker. “That whole relationship, I believe, will begin to transition next year, and opposed to being a drag on our franchise — which it's been — I believe it will become a strength in our franchise.” In an message to Boeing employees on Wednesday, Calhoun pointed to some key wins in the defense and space sector, including the first flight of the MQ-25 tanker drone with an aerial refueling store, and the demonstration of the F/A-18 Super Hornet's ski jump launch capability for the Indian Navy. Over the past month, Boeing has inked contracts with the U.S. Air Force for the sixth and seventh lots of KC-46 production, raking in $3.8 billion for an additional 27 tankers. However, during the earnings call, Calhoun noted that analysts should not count on Boeing's defense business to generate a massive amount of near-term growth in the wake of the pandemic. “We continue to believe that we're going to have stable growth, admittedly at the lower end of the single digits. That's the best guidance that we can talk about because we do believe there is pressure that will ultimately come down as a result of all of the COVID spending here in the United States,” he said. “But a large part of our business now is international market, and the order activity in those international markets is pushed to the right somewhat — and almost entirely because of COVID-related stuff,” he said. “We still like our position because we have a lot of ongoing programs that the military and of course our defense [spending] bills have been kind to.” The Air Force plans to buy 179 KC-46 aircraft over the program of record. The first KC-46 was delivered to the service in 2019. https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2021/01/27/boeings-cost-overruns-on-kc-46-now-exceed-its-initial-contract-with-the-air-force