10 janvier 2023 | International, Aérospatial
Air Force, Space Force pursue AI readiness by 2025
To get after AI readiness, the Department of the Air Force must continue investments in training and infrastructure, says the outgoing AI and data chief.
14 août 2018 | International, Aérospatial
New Spy Drone Flies Non-Stop for a Month
Airbus's Zephyr solar-powered drone flew for 25 days straight during a test-flight over Yuma, Arizona beginning on July 11, 2018. The flight represented a record for aircraft endurance, breaking the previous 14-day record also set by a Zephyr back in 2015.
The long flight has big implications for military surveillance. Drones like Zephyr could loiter over a low-intensity battlefield far longer than current drones can do. The latest high-endurance Reaper drone maxes out at 40 hours in the air.
The propeller-driven Zephyr belongs to a class of aircraft known as “high-altitude pseudo-satellites,” or HAPs. Flying as high as 70,000 feet for weeks or even months at a time, HAPs perform many of the same missions that low-orbiting satellites do.
“The main HAP applications are in telecommunications and remote sensing, both civilian and military,” Flavio Araripe d'Oliveira, Francisco Cristovão Lourenço de Melo and Tessaleno Campos Devezas wrote in a 2016 paper.
Compared to comms satellites, HAPs have the advantages of lower latency and the ability to land for maintenance or reconfiguration, d'Oliveira, de Melo and Devezas explained. For surveillance missions, HAPs unlike satellites can linger over a particular area and could produce images with better resolution, since they fly lower than satellites do.
HAPs could be more vulnerable to enemy defenses, however. Where satellites orbit many hundreds of miles over Earth, beyond the reach of most conventional weaponry, Zephyr — so far the only HAP undergoing realistic testing — attained a maximum altitude of 70,000 feet, well under the ceiling for modern air-defense missile systems such as the Russian S-300.
Also, the drone is slow, with a cruising speed of just 20 miles per hour.
Zephyr and similar pseudo-satellite drones could be best-suited for operations over lightly-defended territory. In 2016, the U.K. ministry of defense bought three Zephyrs for around $6 million apiece in order to evaluate them for potential use by the military and other government agencies.
“Zephyr is a cutting edge, record-breaking piece of kit that will be capable of gathering constant, reliable information over vast geographical areas at a much greater level of detail than ever before,” then-defense secretary Michael Fallon said in a statement.
Airbus is still refining Zephyr, in particular its power-consumption. During daytime, the lightly-built solar-powered drone — which features an 82-foot wingspan and yet weighs just 165 pounds — can fly as high as 70,000 feet while also charging its batteries.
After the sun goes down, Zephyr runs on batteries ... and slowly loses altitude. During the record-setting Yuma flight, the drone dipped as low as 50,000 feet at night.
The challenge for Airbus is to balance weight and power-consumption to produce the optimal flight profile for a particular task. “You have to find the right equation between flying altitude plus battery life, maintaining this or that power,” said Alain Dupiech, an Airbus spokesperson.
It's unclear just how long Zephyr could stay aloft under the right conditions. The drone's lithium-ion battery eventually dies, forcing it to land for maintenance. But battery technology is advancing rapidly, driven in part by consumer demand for electric cars, d'Oliveira, de Melo and Devezas wrote.
In the short term, a maximum endurance of several months is not inconceivable. But longer flights might not be particularly useful for surveillance and comms missions, Dupiech said. “At this stage, most of those missions are not calling for a year and half up there.”
Airbus has scheduled Zephyr's next test flight for October in western Australia.
http://warisboring.com/new-spy-drone-flies-non-stop-for-a-month/
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14 avril 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
The coronavirus threatens NATO. Let’s move to protect the alliance.
By: Sophia Becker , Christian Mölling , and Torben Schütz The global fight against COVID-19 has devastating economic consequences which might soon be felt in the defense sector. First estimates by OECD and national institutions conclude that the initial economic impact of the measures to fight the virus will by far exceed that of the 2008 financial crisis. The severe socio-economic consequences may tempt European governments to prioritize immediate economic relief over long-term strategic security and defense considerations. The good news is: there is no automatism – it remains fundamentally a political decision. If European governments do decide to slash defense spending as a result of the current crisis, it would be the second major hit within a decade. Defense budgets have only just begun to recover towards pre-2008 crisis levels, though capabilities have not. Nationally, as well as on an EU and NATO level, significant gaps still exist. European armies have lost roughly one-third of their capabilities over the last two decades. At the same time, the threat environment has intensified with an openly hostile Russia and a rising China. With European defense budgets under pressure, the United States might see any effort to balance burden-sharing among allies fall apart. A militarily weak Europe would be no help against competitors either. The US should work with allies now to maintain NATO's capabilities. Improve coordination to avoid past mistakes Europe's cardinal mistake from the last crisis was uncoordinated national defense cuts instead of harmonized European decisions. In light of the looming budget crisis, governments could be tempted to react the same way. This would be the second round of cuts within a decade, leaving not many capabilities to pool within NATO. If domestic priorities trump considerations about procurement of equipment for the maintenance and generation of military capabilities the system-wide repercussions would be severe. NATO defense, as well as the tightly knit industrial network in Europe, will suffer. Capabilities that can only be generated or sustained multinationally – like effective air defense, strategic air transport or naval strike groups - could become even more fragile; some critical ones may even disappear. If Europeans cut back on capabilities like anti-submarine warfare, armored vehicles of all sorts and mine-warfare equipment again, they could endanger the military capacity of nearly all allies. Ten years ago, such capabilities for large-scale and conventional warfare seemed rather superfluous, but today NATO needs them more than ever. This outcome should be avoided at all costs, because rebuilding those critical forces would be a considerable resource investment and could take years. Europe would become an even less effective military actor and partner to the US, resulting in more discord about burden-sharing. Uncoordinated cuts would also affect the defense industry, as development and procurement programs would be delayed or cancelled altogether – hitting both European and American companies. Moreover, their ability to increase efficiency through transnational mergers and acquisitions and economies of scale is limited due to continued national sentiments in Europe. Companies might decide to either aggressively internationalize, including massive increase of defense exports, or leave the market as national armed forces as otherwise reliable clients drop out. Technological innovation would suffer from a shrinking defense industrial ecosystem and duplicated national research and development efforts, risking the foundation of security for the next generation of defense solutions. To safeguard NATO's strategic autonomy, lean on lead nations In order to prevent the loss of critical capabilities and infrastructure within NATO, the US should immediately start working with its European partners to preemptively plan for increasingly tight budgets. NATO should take stock of existing capabilities and offer alternatives for consolidation. Based on a coordinated effort to redefine NATO's level of ambition and priorities, it should offer plans for maintaining the military capacity to act while retiring unnecessary and outdated resources. Such a coordinated effort should include close cooperation with the European Union. Building on the NATO Framework Nations Concept, the United States should work with a network of larger member states, better equipped to weather the economic shock of the current crisis, to act as lead nations. These countries could safeguard critical defense capabilities and provide a foundation of essential forces, enabling smaller partners to attach their specialized capabilities. Such an arrangement allows for a comparatively good balance of financial strain and retention of military capacity. Additionally, NATO should look beyond the conventional military domain and build on lessons learned from hybrid warfare and foreign influence operations against Europe. The way ahead is clear: As ambitions for European strategic autonomy become wishful thinking in light of the current crisis, allies should focus on retaining NATO's strategic autonomy as a whole. For the foreseeable future, both sides of the Atlantic have to live by one motto: NATO first! The authors are analysts at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP). https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/04/09/the-coronavirus-threatens-nato-lets-move-to-protect-the-alliance/
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11 juin 2018 | International, C4ISR
Reports: Google won’t renew Pentagon contract to use AI
By: The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Google won't renew a contract with the Pentagon that provides the company's artificially intelligent algorithms to interpret video images and improve the targeting of drone strikes. That's according to reports in Gizmodo, Buzzfeed, and The New York Times Friday. The reports said Google Cloud business head Diane Greene told employees of the decision not to renew the 18-month deal past the end of 2019, when the current contract ends. Google representatives did not respond to a request for comment. The so-called Project Maven had riled Google employees, including several who quit and thousands of others who signed a petition asking CEO Sundar Pichai to cancel the project and enact a policy renouncing the use of Google technology in warfare. https://www.c4isrnet.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/06/03/reports-google-wont-renew-pentagon-contract-to-use-ai/