New Zealand to create intel agency recommended over two years ago

Sur le même sujet

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  26 juillet 2018 | International, Aérospatial

  Textron is no longer working with the Air Force on an airworthiness assessment for the Scorpion jet. But these two companies are.

  By: Valerie Insinna LONDON — In 2016, the Air Force opened a new office to evaluate the airworthiness of military aircraft it didn't plan to buy, thus making it easier for those U.S. companies to sell internationally. Now its flagship effort with Textron's Scorpion jet has been suspended. After moving through the first phase of the airworthiness assessment, Textron decided to step away from the process, Bill Harris, Textron's vice president for Scorpion sales, confirmed in a July 14 interview. The reason, he said, is that the company opted to pool its financial resources in support of its AT-6 Wolverine turboprop that the Air Force is evaluating as part of the light attack experiment. If turned into a program of record, that opportunity could be worth several hundred planes. “AT-6 is a very important program,” Harris told Defense News at the Royal International Air Tattoo. “Any smart company moves their resources where they need to go, and all of our efforts with the Scorpion are privately funded.” The Air Force announced in July 2016 that it had signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, or CRADA, with Textron. The agreement was the first of its kind, aimed at allowing the Air Force to gain insight into technologies they aren't purchasing and to clear away some of the evaluations that must be done before a sale to a foreign nation. That agreement — along with the opening of a new Non-DoD Military Aircraft Office (NDMAO)— garnered much media attention in the months following. In an August 2016 interview, the head of the NDMA office said that a CRADA to assess the Lockheed Martin-Korean Aerospace Industries F/A-50 was soon to be signed, and that another agreement for a different aircraft could be on its heels. However, no such agreement on the F/A-50 or any other aircraft ever surfaced, and the work of the NDMAO faded into obscurity. Textron may have suspended its efforts to assess the Scorpion jet, but the NDMAO is working on two active projects, said Robert FitzHarris, the deputy director of the service's airworthiness office, in a statement. One involves the an agreement between the Air Force and General Atomics to conduct an airworthiness assessment of the MQ-9B SkyGuardian drone and the SeaGuardian, its maritime variant, he said. The CRADA is the first between the office an a maker of unmanned aircraft. In essence, SkyGuardian is a version of the MQ-9 Reaper that will be certified to fly in any airspace safely. The drone has already found its first customer: the United Kingdom, which could buy anywhere from 21 to 26 copies. Beyond that, the airworthiness assessment could raise the confidence levels of other countries interested in buying SkyGuardian. And, importantly, it gives the U.S. Air Force a window into the MQ-9B's capabilities — which could help SkyGuardian break into the U.S. market. IOMAX is also engaged in a CRADA with the Air Force for an assessment of its Archangel turboprop aircraft, FitzHarris said. Like General Atomics, IOMAX has sold the Archangel internationally, but the addition of an airworthiness assessment from the Air Force may help attract new customers or pave the way for speedier sales. Both the General Atomics and Iomax efforts are still in Phase 1, where the Air Force and company lay out an “airworthiness assessment basis” that establishes a common understanding of how the airworthiness of a given aircraft would have been evaluated and graded. Phase 2 revolves around submitting test reports, risk assessments and engineering data to the Air Force, who then conducts a technical assessment based on that data. “We don't do flight testing. We simply rely upon the data provided by the collaborator," FitzHarris told Defense News in 2016, when he was leading the NDMA office. "There's testing, analysis, all of these things that typically feed into an assessment,” he said. “We have the technical expertise to take that [...] and give an assessment of compliance. Where there is compliance lacking or data lacking, we're going to assess risk and then we provide that information in an assessment package back to the collaborator." Textron is open to restarting the airworthiness assessment effort for Scorpion in the future, provided it's able to nail down a first customer to help offset the expense of doing the evaluations, Harris said. "[Once] we that launch customer, then we'll re-initiate that program,” he said. “Until we get that, being privately funded and not a program of record with the air force, that continues to be all on our nickel.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/riat/2018/07/25/textron-is-no-longer-working-with-the-air-force-on-an-airworthiness-assessment-for-the-scorpion-jet-but-these-two-companies-are/

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  6 mars 2023 | International, Aérospatial

  Top Aces Announces Strategic Investment in EpiSci - Top Aces

  Leading provider of adversary air and JTAC training invests in developer of next generation artificial intelligence (AI) technologies Mesa, AZ, March 3, 2023 – Top Aces Corp. (Top Aces), the world’s only commercial owner and operator of F-16 fighter aircraft, today announced an investment in San Diego-based EpiSci, developer of the most trusted, resilient and modular Tactical AI solutions for defense, aerospace and commercial applications. This investment expands on Top Aces’ commitment of providing world-class training to the next generation of combat leaders, positioning the company at the forefront of development and training in the future ‘human-machine’ collaborative battlefield.

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  10 juin 2019 | International, Autre défense

  How industry can build better AI for the military

  By: Kelsey Reichmann As AI becomes more prominent in the national security community, officials are grappling with where to use it most effectively. During a panel discussion at the C4ISRNET conference June 6, leaders discussed the role of industry building AI that will be used by the military. After studying small and big companies creating AI technology, Col. Stoney Trent, the chief of operations at the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said he found commercial groups do not have the same motivations that exist in the government. “Commercial groups are poorly incentivized for rigorous testing. For them that represents a business risk,” Trent said. Because of this, he the government needs to work with the commercial sector to create these technologies. “What the Defense Department has to offer in this space is encouragement, an incentive structure for better testing tools and methods that allows us to understand how a product is going to perform when we are under conditions of national consequence because I can't wait,” Trent said. “Hopefully, the nation will be at peace long enough to not have a high bandwidth of experiences with weapons implementations, but when that happens, we need them to absolutely work. That's a quality of commercial technology development.” For this to take place, the Department of Defense needs to help create the right environment. “All of this is predicated on the Pentagon doing things as well,” said Kara Frederick, associate fellow for the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security. “Making an environment conducive to the behaviors that you are seeking to encourage. That environment can be the IT environment, common standards for data processing, common standards for interactions with industry, I think would help.” Panelists said national security leaders also need to weigh the risks of relying more on AI technology, one of which is non-state actors using AI for nefarious purposes. Trent said he sees AI as the new arms race but noted that in this arena, destruction may be easier than creation. “AI is the modern-day armor anti-armor arms race,” Trent said. “The Joint AI Center, one of the important features of it is that it does offer convergence for best practices, data sources, data standards, etc. The flip side is we fully understand there are a variety of ways you can undermine artificial intelligence and most of those are actually easier than developing good resilient AI.” Frederick said part of this problem stems from the structure of the AI community. “I think what's so singular about the AI community, especially the AI research community, is that its so open,” Frederick said. “Even at Facebook, we open source some of these algorithms and we put it our there for people to manipulate. [There is this] idea that non-state actors, especially those without strategic intent or ones that we can't pin strategic intent to, could get a hold of some of these ways to code in certain malicious inputs [and] we need to start being serious about it.” However, before tackling any of these problems, leaders need to first decide when it is appropriate to use AI Rob Monto, lead of the Army's Advanced Concepts and Experimentation office, described this process as an evolution that takes place between AI and its users. “AI is like electricity,” he said. “It can be anywhere and everywhere. You can either get electrocuted by it or you target specific applications for it. You need to know what you want the AI to do, and then you spend months and years building out. If you don't have your data set available, you do that upfront architecture and collection of information. Then you train your algorithms and build that specifically to support that specific use case...AI is for targeted applications to aid decisions, at least in the military space, to aid the user.” Once the decision is made how and where to use AI, there are other technologies that must make advances to meet AI. One the biggest challenges, said Chad Hutchinson, director of engineering at the Crystal Group., is the question of hardware and characteristics such as thermal performance. “AI itself is pushing the boundaries of what the hardware can do,” Hutchinson said. Hardware technology is not the only obstacle in AI's path. These issues could stem from policy or human resource shortfalls. “What we find is the non-technology barriers are far more significant than the technology barriers,” Trent said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/show-reporter/c4isrnet-conference/2019/06/09/how-industry-can-build-better-ai-for-the-military/