NATO’s task in Vilnius is simple: Transform European defense

Sur le même sujet

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  11 juin 2020 | International, Terrestre

  The next few months are ‘critical’ for the Army’s new helicopter engine

  By: Aaron Mehta WASHINGTON — The Army's Improved Turbine Engine Program is facing a “critical” stretch which will determine whether testing on the engine will occur on time or be delayed, thanks to challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic, a pair of Army officials said Wednesday. Patrick Mason, the program executive officer for Army aviation, and Brig. Gen. Walter Rugen, the director for future vertical lift inside Army Futures Command, said that the service has finished its component critical design review (CDR) process, and has moved on to its full program CDR, a key milestone before moving into testing. However, “given COVID and all of the factors that have gone on with COVID,” the plan to have the full CDR done during second quarter has been pushed to third quarter, Mason said at an event hosted by the Heritage Foundation. ITEP is “the number one watch item we've had across the future vertical lift portfolio for COVID impacts,” Mason said, because “hardware needs to be coming in the latter part of this year so we can test at the component level, assemble into the engine, and then go to first engine test.” “So that's going to be critical over the next month to two months, to see where we stand on hardware deliveries with that, and then whether or not we will reach first engine test at the time that we had originally stated,” he said, noting the plan is for engine tests to proceed in 2021. Mason also noted that the delay is less dramatic than it may seem, because the original plan for ITEP called for the full CDR to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year; the Army felt it was ahead of schedule enough to shift that target to second quarter, until COVID caused the delay. In other words, CDR being completed in Q3 still means the program is ahead of its original baseline. General Electric Aviation won the $517 million award for the engineering, manufacturing and development phase in February 2019. The requirements included developing a 3,000 shaft horsepower engine that reduces fuel consumption by 25 percent and increases service life by 20 percent compared to the legacy T700 currently used in the Army's AH-64 Apache and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. In addition to replacing the engines on those two leacy platforms, ITEP is expected to power the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, or FARA design. For the heavier future rotorcraft known as the Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft, or FLRAA, the Army is looking at a heavier engine design, although the companies competing for the design will have the ability to pick their own engine designs as part of their pitches. “We really think the efficiencies there with a two engines strategy across all of Army aviation's tactical fleet would be a powerful way to go at both readiness and affordability concerns,” said Rugen. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2020/06/10/the-next-few-months-are-critical-for-the-armys-new-helicopter-engine/

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  28 août 2018 | International, C4ISR

  What commanders will need in multidomain operations

  By: Mark Pomerleau Mission command systems exist for the physical world, providing commanders a picture of the ground and air environment. However, the Army, as well as the joint force, is shifting to so-called multidomain operations, which opens up a need for new tools to fully understand the operating environment. "What we lack right now is a comprehensive understanding of cyberspace,” Col. Steve Rehn, the cyber capabilities manager at the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, said Aug. 23 at TechNet Augusta. In multidomain battle, the commander cannot make a decision unless he understands the entirety battlespace, Rehn said, which makes it imperative that someone develop systems for understanding cyberspace (broadly defined as cyber, the electromagnetic spectrum, space and even the social media environment). Rehn said the Army is in the process of prototyping what will eventually become a program in 2020 called cyber situational understanding, or cyber SU. This tool will help commanders visualize and understand what is happening in the nonphysical battlespace under their command, which could have drastic impacts during operations. For example, Rehn said, speaking a day prior during the same conference, there's at least seven different networks within an average brigade combat team aside from the primary command or communications network. The communications personnel within the brigade generally have a good handle on the primary one, but not all the others. This presents openings for the adversary if they can exploit one portion of this network and move laterally to the most important ones, gleaning sensitive information or shutting it down. One component of cyber SU is to pull this data on all the networks together to provide the commander a more complete picture of his battlespace, which now includes the broad realm of cyber. Not only that, Rehn said, but the general vision for a cyber SU capability, on a conceptual level, is to be able to pull information from all types of sensors in the battlespace that might provide greater intelligence about adversary action. He provided another example in which a link goes down on the battlefield. While the normal course of action when a link goes down is to troubleshoot, if personnel were able to detect and correlate at the time the link went down that there was radio frequency interference in the same location, that would likely change the reaction and how the staff would approach a down link. With a situational awareness tool, staff can tell the commander what the impact to the mission might be, as well as provide additional intelligence that it is typical in the doctrinal template, such as inferring from the adversary they're facing that a denial-of-service attack means the enemy is about to launch an attack and where the attack might take place. However, Rehn noted earlier, such understanding of adversary tactics has not been realized yet. He said he'd like to get to a place where, if the adversary is targeting certain friendly systems, friendly forces might be able to discern if that is an indicator of a particular action they might take in the physical space. The Army hasn't linked observed activity within cyberspace yet to understand what that might mean in the physical space, he said. Overall, he noted, cyber situational understanding can tip off the commander to certain indicators in which there were no physical effects or indicators. https://www.c4isrnet.com/show-reporter/technet-augusta/2018/08/27/what-commanders-will-need-in-multidomain-operations

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  12 août 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Lockheed Martin Ventures Scouts Next-Gen AI/ML Tech

  "There's a massive scramble for autonomy engineers, software -- you name it," says Chris Moran, Lockheed Martin executive director. By THERESA HITCHENSon August 11, 2020 at 4:16 PM WASHINGTON: As defense primes scramble to meet DoD's insatiable demand for AI and machine learning (ML) tools, Lockheed Martin is investing in startups like Fiddler with next-generation tech to help operators understand how autonomous systems actually work (and don't work) in the field. “I think what everyone is seeing is that, as you go toward deploying an AI/ML system, people start questioning well, how does this thing work?,” Chris Moran, executive director and general manager of Lockheed Martin Ventures explained in an interview yesterday. “And how do you know, how are you sure, it's making the right decisions? And how can you change those decisions if they're the wrong ones?” “You want to make sure that these things are behaving,” he added. “Fiddler provides some of that insight into how artificial intelligence is working. They're in what's called ‘explainable AI' space, so they can reveal things about how the neural network was created, and how it's made decisions, right, which gives people a level of comfort,” Moran said. Lockheed Martin Ventures, the mega-prime's venture capital arm, announced its investment yesterday in Fiddler, a two-year-old Palo Alto startup. According to the joint press release, the two firms will work together “on the development, testing and scaling of Fiddler's technology in applying explainable AI in the defense and aerospace industries. ... At the heart of Fiddler's Platform lies AI Explainability, which provides continuous insights understandable by humans to help build responsible, transparent, and fair AI systems.” AI/ML and autonomy are two of the key focus areas for Lockheed Martin Ventures, which buys equity shares in infant companies interested in selling to both the defense commercial marketplace, Moran said. Not only is DoD racing to deploy AI/ML capabilities for everything from killer drone swarms to spare parts management, such systems are being integrated into almost every civil market sector from aerospace to agriculture — meaning an almost guaranteed return on investment, Moran explained. That return is then re-channeled into future investments. “AI is such a hot topic right now that every company, not just the Lockheeds and the Boeings and the Northrops, but every single Fortune 500 company, maybe even every Fortune 1000 company, has realized ‘wow, I can simplify my tasks and move some of these mundane things into autonomous system, and thereby have people work on more complicated things that maybe are not suited for autonomy'. So, everybody is trying to do this. Everybody!” Moran enthused. “There's a massive scramble for autonomy engineers, software, you name it.” Another next-generation autonomous technology development that has caught Moran's eye for possible future investment is the advent of what he called “autonomy factories;” that is, the ability to automate the process of building neural networks that can then build autonomous systems, autonomously. “What's happened is that companies are starting to figure out how to automate autonomy — how do you autonomously create neural networks and machine learning systems?” he said with a chuckle of amazement. “You know, necessity is the mother of invention.” Moran and his team of some six scouts have a $200 million fund to bet on newbie entrepreneurs and their technology. Currently, he said, Lockheed Martin Ventures has an investment in 40-odd companies, across 18 focus areas ranging from AI to rockets and propulsion systems to quantum science. The focus areas are determined by a conclave, usually held in March, with Lockheed Martin's business units, as well as via the Ventures team's own knowledge of the startup ecosystem, he explained. In addition, Lockheed Martin Ventures haunts the increasing number of DoD, and especially Air Force, “pitch days” in hopes of finding matches for the aerospace prime contractor's interests. As Breaking D readers know, “pitch days” are one of the new methods being championed by acquisition czar Will Roper as a way for the service to harness commercial innovation. And the Air Force is one of Lockheed Martin's biggest customers, if not the biggest if you count space acquisitions. The Ventures team invested in 10 startups last yea,r including one discovered at an Air Force pitch day, and is on a path to adding another 10 to its portfolio this year, Moran said. Finding those winners is an intensive process that involves scouting 700 to 1,000 startups per year, he explained. Once a startup is chosen, Lockheed Martin Ventures gives it an opportunity to pitch ideas/products/services across all interested Lockheed Martin business areas. “We have an internal, if you will, we call it ‘demo day,' that we're holding this week, and right now I think there are well over 100 Lockheed Martin engineers and technologists set up to listen to 12 or 13 of the portfolio companies that we've invested in the last year,” he said. “That's part of what we do as a service inside the company. And hopefully out of those discussions and presentations, there are further collaborations.” Moran explained that those collaborations can include software licenses or contracts for services — and even, once a startup has established a larger market presence, traditional subcontractor ties. And while investment allows Lockheed Martin Ventures to get in early on the startup's expertise and tech concepts, the prime contractor is not seeking to tie the hands of the entrepreneurs regarding clientele. Instead, he said, the objective is to grow the startup into the overall defense and aerospace industrial base. “We're creating, eventually, a market for them,” Moran said. “And it's kind of a weird dynamic, but we give them money, and then my group goes off and works for them inside the company — so we're paying them for us to work. It's weird, but ... that money goes to supporting the small companies grow and scale so that they'll be around for when a Lockheed Martin or any large company wants to use their tools and services. So we look at it as a win-win.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/08/lockheed-martin-ventures-scouts-next-gen-ai-ml-tech