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  29 mai 2020 | International, Naval

  British-Spanish naval team gunning for another go at revamped UK carrier-support program

  By: Andrew Chuter LONDON — Spanish shipbuilder Navantia has formed a joint venture with Northern Ireland's Harland & Wolff to pitch for an upcoming program to build up to three logistics ships to support the Royal Navy's new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers. The Anglo-Spanish partnership, known as Team Resolute, has been announced as expectations grow that the British Ministry of Defence is preparing to reopen a competition to build two, or maybe three, ships capable of delivering ammunition, dry stores and spares in a requirement known as the Fleet Solid Support program. The MoD pulled the plug on the competition late last year claiming the bids did not represent value for money. With the competition poised to be restarted around September, Team Resolute is the first to show its hand. Navantia, one of Europe's leading shipbuilders, and Harland & Wolff have been working together for a while under a memorandum of understanding but the two have now firmed that up into a joint venture agreement as the MoD prepares to restart with a new procurement strategy. The third player in the Team Resolute line-up is British naval design company BMT. Although not a joint venture member, BMT will participate as a subcontractor providing the design. The company worked with Navantia in the original competition. The design house has built a reputation in recent years of providing designs to navies around the world, including oilers for Britain and multi-role logistics ships for Norway, both based on its AEGIR design. For Harland & Wolff, the Belfast yard famous for building the Titanic, it's the latest move in an effort to revive fortunes after the company almost went out of business last year before current owners InfraStrata acquired the operation. InfraStrata, a small British company looking to develop a huge underground gas storage facility just up the coast from Belfast, plans to use Harland & Wolff to undertake much of the fabrication work required on the energy program as well as seek to build a credible shipbuilding and support business. John Wood, CEO of InfraStrata, said the partnership with Navantia could open up the possibility of challenging a status quo which has seen BAE Systems and Babcock dominate the maritime sector here. “This partnership has the capability to disrupt the UK defence shipbuilding and through-life support duopoly that currently exists, as well as providing much needed competition in the defense sector to ensure optimum value for taxpayer money and guaranteed delivery," said Wood. “The Fleet Solid Support program gives us the opportunity to take the expertise in depth that Navantia and BMT have in order to put together a really strong offering based on a best-value-for-money strategy," he said in a telephone interview with Defense News. The yard only employs 130 people at present but Wood said there was plenty of expertise available not least among the 1,200 skilled staff who were laid off at Harland & Wolff prior to the InfraStrata acquisition. Navantia and a British group calling itself TeamUK – led by Babcock and including BAE Systems, Cammell Laird and Rolls-Royce – were the two contenders competing the final stages of the Fleet Solid Support program when the MoD called a halt to the competition amid a growing controversy over the fact that the competition had been opened to foreign bidders and not reserved for local companies. The British government claimed its was acting under European Union regulations as the support vessels were not warships. Britain has now left the European Union but remains subject to its rules and regulations while the two sides try to negotiate a trade deal. Now the MoD is preparing to recompete the requirement, which could be worth approaching $1.9 billion if all three ships are purchased for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, the support arm of the Royal Navy. A spokesperson for TeamUK said the group was formed to deliver prosperity benefits for the local economy. “We look forward to understanding the updated requirements when the Ministry of Defence announces their future plans for this procurement process,” said the spokesperson. Babcock and BAE dominate the shipbuilding business in the UK and have significant contracts building the Type 31 and Type 26 frigate programs, respectively. Few outside the government know whether the new invitation to negotiate will leave the door open to foreign bidders and what the requirement will actually look like. Some analysts think the damage the Covid-19 crisis has done to the economy should rule out foreign bidders, giving priority to high local content to boost jobs and skills. The conundrum is, though, that as a result of the virus, the MoD is likely to have less money rather than more in future budget deliberations, putting even greater pressure on finding the best value for money solution. Wood says he is open-minded about which way the MoD jumps on the issue of foreign bidders. “Who knows where this will go. They are looking for value for money. What we are saying is they can have the best of both worlds with some outside influence from Navantia, a leading shipyard that has massive pedigree, and local company BMT supporting H&W, which has the best facilities for this kind of project in the UK. If we gear up for an international competition we are confident we can come through and put a credible bid on the table. If it's UK bidders only, we think we can do the same,” said Wood. Infrastrata's CEO said a manufacturing role for Navanti has not been ruled out. “There could be workshare going to Spain. There could be components or blocks coming from Spain, but the agreement we have is to do the majority of the work in the UK. It's really about coming up with a project that fits the delivery schedule. Until we get the timelines nothing is ruled in and nothing ruled out. The key fundamental is it's a British cooperation, with the ability to reach back into Navantia,” he said. The executive said the plan was to spread the work beyond Harland & Wolff into other parts of the UK. “We are looking at opportunities in the UK on fabrication. We may also look at another acquisition in the UK to spread the work wider,” he said. Save the Royal Navy, a well regarded online group campaigning to reverse the decline of the Britain's naval forces, speculated recently that rather than buying two or three large Fleet Solid Support ships the MoD may look at altering the requirement and buying several smaller, cheaper, multi-role logistics ships as part of a wider update to British maritime support requirements. https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2020/05/28/british-spanish-naval-team-gunning-for-another-go-at-revamped-uk-carrier-support-program/

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  4 novembre 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Joint Artificial Intelligence Center Keeps Branching Out

  By Yasmin Tadjdeh When the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center was stood up in 2018, it was established to bring together the Defense Department's various AI programs and projects. Two years later, JAIC is pivoting to new mission sets, expanding its portfolio and more closely working with industry. The organization is currently working on 30 different projects across six different areas including joint warfighting operations, warfighter health, business process transformation, threat reduction and protection, joint logistics and joint information warfare. The center is built “around getting a spark going or getting a prototype or making a market in some way, and then handing it off for transition and scaling right to a customer,” said Nand Mulchandani, JAIC chief technology officer. “We're now starting to demonstrate great and exciting success across those products.” The joint warfighting mission initiative is the organization's flagship product and is looking at means to transform the way the United States will go to war, Mulchandani said during an exclusive interview with National Defense on his first day back as chief technology officer after serving as the acting head of JAIC. In late September, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Michael Groen was confirmed by the Senate to serve as its director. “Our early products ... were really focused on kind of starter AI projects when it came to things like predictive maintenance and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,” Mulchandani said. “The algorithms were not that hard. ... [However,] joint warfighting is the hardest problem at the DoD for us to take on.” The center is starting with technology such as human-machine teaming and decision support, Mulchandani said. “There are different ways of displaying information, about communicating information, about absorbing information,” he said. “We're spending time with our commanders, with training and education, etc., on how to absorb AI-enabled systems. And we want to do that in a very systematic, deliberate way where we start out with human-machine teaming, decision support, etc., and then work our way toward things like autonomy and others.” Joint warfighting will contribute to many Pentagon efforts such as joint all-domain command-and-control and the Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System program, he said. In May, the center awarded the joint warfighting operations initiative's prime contract to Booz Allen Hamilton. The contract has an $806 million ceiling. However, the center would likely not spend all of the funding because the entire budget of the JAIC over a couple of years is around $800 million, Mulchandani said during a recent briefing with reporters. Despite the center being gung-ho about the initiative, a continuing resolution for fiscal year 2021 — which began Oct. 1 — could have an outsized effect on joint warfighting programs, he noted. “What this really impacts ... is new starts, our ability to start a bigger new project that we have been potentially forecasting for starting with new FY ‘21 money,” he said. That will require some programs to be delayed. However, JAIC “will be receiving some money as part of the CR that will allow us to kick-start some of these new projects and things along the way, and then scale them ... when we get out of the CR mode” after a full-year appropriations bill is passed by Congress, he added. JAIC had been planning for a continuing resolution for some time, Mulchandani noted. “Many of our projects and products ... have actually been pre-funded through much of the money that we got in FY ‘20,” he said. “We have contracts and vendors and other things working months and months out into the new fiscal year. ... We're not in a crisis mode at all.” Meanwhile, JAIC's relationship with industry has continued to improve over the past two years, Mulchandani said. When it was first stood up, much attention was put on what some perceived to be a reluctance from Silicon Valley to work with the Pentagon. “A lot of people ask us [about] the whole thing with Google and Project Maven and whether that's still” a strained relationship, he said, referring to a 2018 incident where thousands of Google employees signed a letter objecting to the company's work with the Defense Department's Project Maven, a pathfinder AI effort to better analyze drone footage. Google subsequently backed out of the program. However, JAIC collaborates closely with the tech giant now, he said. “We're working with Google on a number of projects directly ... whether it be health or other types ... of products there,” he said. “We have contracts with Google that we're working on, but all the other bigger vendors as well.” Mulchandani said JAIC is working with all of the largest technology companies in Silicon Valley. “Name an AI vendor and we either have work going on with them, or they're involved in some way in some of the newer projects that we're doing,” he said. As the organization continues to work with industry, it is setting up initiatives to better take advantage of rapid acquisition, Mulchandani said. It currently has partnerships with a number of contracting vehicle organizations such as the General Services Administration, the Defense Innovation Unit and the Defense Information Systems Agency. Additionally, legislation is currently in front of Congress that could grant JAIC direct acquisition authority. “We obviously are very excited about that, [but] it's not done yet,” he said. “When the final vote happens and we do get it, we'll be very pleased and happy, and if we don't get it, well, we'll still be obviously continuing business with the partners that we have.” The center is also working on an acquisition effort called Project Tradewind which is a way for JAIC and the Defense Department writ large to better reach out to small companies, he said. Contract vehicles will be created that any organization across the department will be able to use to gain access to “teensy weensy, little companies that normally would hate to work with — or wouldn't know how to work with — the DoD,” Mulchandani said. “They can use Project Tradewind's acquisition frameworks to be able to interact with us in a very low overhead way.” During remarks at the Defense Department's Artificial Intelligence Symposium and Exposition, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper touted the work JAIC has done since its inception. “We have come a long way since establishing the JAIC two years ago,” he said. “Today, more than 200 talented civil service and military professionals work diligently to accelerate AI solutions and deliver these capabilities to the warfighter. From helping the Joint Force organize, fight and win at machine speed, to enhancing wildfire and flood responses through computer vision technology, the JAIC is utilizing every aspect of AI as a transformative instrument at home and abroad.” The center is lowering technical barriers to AI adoption by building a cloud-based platform to allow Defense Department components to test, validate and field capabilities with greater speed and at greater scale, he said. “The goal is to make AI tools and data accessible across the force, which will help synchronize projects and reduce redundancy, among many other benefits,” he said. JAIC is also working on ways to better train the Defense Department's acquisition workforce to buy AI products, Esper noted. The organization, in partnership with the Defense Acquisition University and the Naval Postgraduate School, was slated to launch an intensive six-week pilot course in October to train over 80 defense acquisition professionals of all ranks and grades. The trainees will learn how to apply AI and data science skills to operations, Esper said. The Defense Department plans to request additional funding from Congress for the services to grow the effort over time, he said. Dana Deasy, the Pentagon's chief information officer, noted JAIC's journey is still evolving. Meanwhile, the military is “generating positive momentum from our early days as AI pioneers toward a mature organization of AI practitioners,” he said. The center is now starting to deliver real AI solutions to the warfighter while leading the Defense Department in AI ethics and governance, he noted. Its budget is also growing. It went from $89 million in fiscal year 2019 to $268 million in fiscal year 2020, and the Pentagon plans to spend more than $1.6 billion over the next few years thanks to strong bipartisan support from Congress and Defense Department leadership, Deasy said. The organization is already generating early returns on investment in its mission initiatives, from predictive maintenance to business process transformation, Deasy noted. The center recently delivered an innovative engine health model predictive maintenance capability that is being utilized by Black Hawk helicopter maintainers from the U.S. Army's Special Operations Aviation Regiment, he said. Additionally, JAIC — via its business process transformation initiative — is delivering language-processing AI applications to the Washington Headquarters Service and the Pentagon's administrative and financial management teams, Deasy said. “These capabilities are automating the review of thousands of documents and memos for consistency, accuracy and compliance, thus increasing speed and efficiency while reducing manual, laborious processes,” he said. The center is also laying down the foundations for the Joint Common Foundation, an AI development environment that will broaden opportunities for developers across the Pentagon to build and deliver artificial intelligence capabilities in a secure DevSecOps infrastructure, he said. According to the General Services Administration, DevSecOps promotes a cohesive collaboration between development, security and operations teams as they work toward continuous integration and delivery of products. However, “while we develop and deliver these important near-term projects, we have to be ready for the contingencies of a changing and unpredictable operating environment,” Deasy said. “This is why I believe the true long-term success of the JAIC will depend on how the organization adapts and delivers real-world solutions when the strategic landscape and priorities change.” The organization is already proving it can adapt via its Project Salus effort — which is named after the Roman goddess of health and well-being — that has helped with the federal government's COVID-19 response, he said. “Working alongside a team of private industry partners, the JAIC developed a predictive-logistics AI dashboard platform for the U.S. Northern Command that enabled National Guard teams to assist states and municipalities with mitigating panic buying and managing supply chains,” he said. “That project went from concept to code in a matter of weeks. More importantly, it demonstrated the JAIC's ability to support the emergent needs of a combatant commander and deliver real AI solutions during a national emergency.” https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/11/3/joint-artificial-intelligence-center-keeps-branching-out

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  26 octobre 2023 | International, Aérospatial

  RTX, Rafael to build missile facility in Arkansas | Reuters

  U.S. defense contractor RTX Corp and Israel's Rafael Advanced Defense Systems will build a missile manufacturing facility in East Camden, Arkansas, the companies said on Thursday.