15 avril 2024 | International, Naval
This initial contract is to supply Kongsberg Maritime equipment for the fifth ship, Coast Guard Cutter Pickering, which is the first to be built by Austal USA at their yard...
13 juin 2023 | International, Autre défense
The United States is set to remove obstacles that prevent smoother trade with India in critical areas such as defence and high technology, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Tuesday.
5 novembre 2020 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité
Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — A new broad agency announcement shows that the Pentagon's top research arm wants to work with industry to develop technology that can track adversarial influence operations across social media platforms. The announcement from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for a project called INfluence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking (INCAS) will use an automated detection tool to unveil influence operations online. “INCAS tools will directly and automatically detect implicit and explicit indicators of geopolitical influence in multilingual online messaging to include author's agenda, concerns, and emotion,” the BAA reads. The BAA comes as the federal government seeks solutions to defend against foreign influence campaigns, particularly surrounding political campaigns, that aim to sow discord among Americans with inflammatory messages. “The US is engaged with its adversaries in an asymmetric, continual, war of weaponized influence narratives. Adversaries exploit misinformation and true information delivered via influence messaging: blogs, tweets, and other online multimedia content. Analysts require effective tools for continual sensemaking of the vast, noisy, adaptive information environment to identify adversary influence campaigns,” the BAA reads. Through the project, DARPA seeks to improve upon current social media tools to track influence operations. The current tools, the solicitation reads, requires a major manual effort in which analysts have to sift through “high volumes” of messages and decide which ones are relevant and gaining traction, using tools for digital marketing. “These tools lack explanatory and predictive power for deeper issues of geopolitical influence,” the solicitation reads. “Audience analysis is often done using static, demographic segmentation based on online and survey data. This lacks the flexibility, resolution, and timeliness needed for dynamic geopolitical influence campaign detection and sensemaking.” The program has five technical areas. Technical area one focuses on using automated influence detection to enable analysts to analyze influence campaigns. The second area will “dynamically segment" the population that is responding to influence campaigns, and identify “psychographic attributes relevant to geopolitical influence,” such as “worldviews, morals and sacred values.” The INCAS tool's third technical area will assist analysts in linking influence indicators and population response over time across several platforms, in order to capture influence campaigns as they evolve over time. The fourth area will create infrastructure to provide data feeds from online sources to the other three technical areas, and the final technical area will conduct technology evaluations and will not be competed as part the the BAA. DARPA expects multiple awards for technical areas one and two, and single awards for technical areas three and four. Abstracts are due Nov. 17, 2020, with proposals due Jan. 8, 2021. Awards will be made around July 2012 using standard procurement contracts or Other Transaction Agreements. https://www.c4isrnet.com/artificial-intelligence/2020/11/03/pentagon-research-office-wants-innovative-tools-to-spot-influence-campaigns/
22 juin 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR
By: Jill Lawless, The Associated Press LONDON — The bonds between Europe and North America are under strain and there's no guarantee the trans-Atlantic partnership will survive, the head of NATO warned Thursday. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called for an effort to shore up the military alliance amid the divisions between Europe and the United States over trade, climate change and the Iran nuclear deal. “It is not written in stone that the trans-Atlantic bond will survive forever,” Stoltenberg said during a speech in London. “But I believe we will preserve it.” NATO has been shaken by U.S. President Donald Trump's “America First” stance and mistrust of international institutions. Trump once called NATO obsolete and has repeatedly berated other members of the 29-nation alliance of failing to spend enough on defense. Ahead of a NATO summit in July, Stoltenberg said “we may have seen the weakening” of some bonds between North America and Europe. But he insisted that “maintaining the trans-Atlantic partnership is in our strategic interests.” Stoltenberg said the world faced “the most unpredictable security environment in a generation” due to terrorism, proliferating weapons of mass destruction, cyberattacks and an assertive Russia. “We must continue to protect our multilateral institutions like NATO, and we must continue to stand up for the international rules-based order,” he said. After meeting Prime Minister Theresa May in Downing St., Stoltenberg praised Britain, one of a minority of NATO countries to meet a target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense. He said that despite differences between the U.S. and Europe, NATO delivered “trans-Atlantic unity” every day. “We have had differences before, and the lesson of history is that we overcome these differences every time,” Stoltenberg said. Some European officials worry the Trump administration is cool on efforts to hold Russia to account for misdeeds including election meddling and the nerve-agent poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal in England, which the U.K. blames on Moscow. At a G-7 summit this month, Trump suggested that Russia should be readmitted to the group of industrial powers, from which it was expelled over its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Some U.S. allies are concerned by reports that Trump plans to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin when the American leader travels to Europe for the NATO summit next month. But Stoltenberg said meeting Putin does not contradict NATO policies. “We are in favor of dialogue with Russia,” he said. “We don't want a new cold war. We don't want a new arms race. We don't want to isolate Russia.” https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2018/06/21/why-the-head-of-nato-says-theres-no-guarantee-that-the-trans-atlantic-alliance-will-survive/