Study: Counter-Drone Systems Proliferate, Challenges Endure

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  14 mai 2021 | International, Aérospatial

  The Air Force Built a Robot to Wash F-16s

  The Air Force built a robot that can wash an F-16 fighter jet in just 1 hour. It typically takes a crew of four airmen up to 6 hours to do the same job.

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  11 janvier 2019 | International, Terrestre

  Here’s how the Army acquisition chief plans to equip soldiers for the next war

  By: Todd South In the last year, the Army has embarked on several major modernization goals, creating cross-functional teams for major priorities and the new four-star Army Futures Command, the first such effort in decades. Bruce Jette has served as the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, and during that time he helped shepherd the Army's efforts to modernize following almost two decades of war. On Thursday, Jette sat down with reporters at a Defense Writers Group meeting to discuss the Army's ongoing modernization work. Your office now coordinates with the recently created Army Futures Command and the cross-functional teams. What is a concrete example of how work in priority areas has changed with the addition of these new organizations? I'll give you a prime example. In the past, we looked at air defense as systems. The way you do air defense [is], okay, I've got this altitude, that altitude and that altitude. I need a system that works at those altitudes. Okay, you told me to develop and build a system that can deal with a threat at this altitude, that altitude or another altitude. They were standalone concepts. The integration of them in a battlespace was purely done at the operator level. So, when I deliver a system under that methodology, I give you the Patriot battery. [It] stands alone, all you've got to do is put fuel in the thing, a couple of soldiers, and the thing works. So, we've taken a look at the overall threat environment. The threat environment has become more complicated. It's not just tactical ballistic missiles or jets or helicopters. Now we've got UAVs, we've got swarms, we've got cruise missiles, we've got rockets, artillery, mortar. I've got to find a way to integrate all of this. So, using the cross-functional teams, the technical side has come back and said, “Listen, normally if you want to deal with some of the inbounds that are not missiles, things like rockets, artillery and mortars, the radars that come with the Patriot battery are not the same radars you need to see RAM. Oh, by the way, we were working on this thing for the air defense that's called Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, delivering next December, systems that are deployable.” So, I don't deliver you a Patriot battery anymore — I deliver you missile systems; I deliver you radars; I deliver you a command-and-control architecture. They all integrate, and any of the C2 components can fire any of the sets, leverage any of the sensor systems to employ an effector against any of the threats. This has positioned us to put artificial intelligence in the backside to optimize against the threat that we see in the aggregate. What role does artificial intelligence play in the work that your office is doing, especially in Army technology? AI is critically important. You'll hear a theme inside of ASA(ALT), “Time is a weapon.” Undersecretary [of the Army] Ryan McCarthy has been active in positioning for being able to pick up on some of these critical new technology areas. AFC has responsibility to focus on AI for requirements and research. We've established a center at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for AI, and AFC has established a uniformed person and he's trying to put his arms around AI in an operational context and what has to go into the background. Meantime, the undersecretary and I and ASA(ALT) are going to be establishing for the Army a managerial approach to this. We're trying to structure an AI architecture that will become enduring and will facilitate our ability to allocate resources and conduct research and implementation of those AI capabilities throughout the force. There are AI efforts ongoing, it's just that we need to organize for combat, so to speak. So, here's one issue that we're going to run into. People get worried about whether a weapons system has AI controlling the weapon. And there are some constraints about what we're allowed to do with AI. Here's your problem: If I can't get AI involved with being able to properly manage weapons systems and firing sequences, then in the long run I lose the time window. An example is let's say you fire a bunch of artillery at me, and I need to fire at them, and you require a man in the loop for every one of those shots. There's not enough men to put in the loop to get them done fast enough. So, there's no way to counter those types of shots. So how do we put AI hardware and architecture but do proper policy? Those are some of the wrestling matches we're dealing with right now. Last year your office moved from an annual program review process to adding in monthly meetings to evaluate program progress. What's been the result of this change? Much less pain. We have System Acquisition Review reporting. We report to Congress on our Major Defense Acquisition Programs every year, and we have to tell them how it's going. At each level, we have certification requirements. In that process of doing those reports, we do these program reviews. I do basically a mini SAR review every six weeks with the entire Army staff senior leadership, with the secretary and chief present. If you figure out what's important and make a way to put metrics and reporting processes together, it makes it so much less painful. We report regularly, we report often, we report any change. If any change occurs that I need [the Army secretary] to know about, if it's a significant one, he gets an email that day, then an information paper comes to follow up, and then we'll update him at the next briefing. And then if it's an issue that's an ongoing one, then we go ahead and ensure things are done. In some cases, he gets in the plane and has flown up to meet with the CEO of the company. The [Army] secretary is very much about making us much more accessible to industry. Dinner every Monday night with a CEO of a company has been everything from a big defense contracting company to a second- or third-tier supplier. To know what did we do that we could do better, and what did we not ask for that we should be asking for? This much deeper involvement is making it much easier to keep on track. How are new approaches, such as ‘racking and stacking' groups of Army acquisitions and programs, being evaluated by senior leadership? We began something we call the deep dives. Funding is broken up into Program Element Groups, or PEGs, or groupings. Procurement is one of the PEGs. Money comes with different constraints on what we can and can't use it for. To manage those priorities and comply with the law, we have these PEGs. All procurement-style money gets managed through the equipping PEG. Last year, the secretary and the chief and I sat and went through every single program and said, “why are we doing this?” Because the truth of the matter is programs have momentum. So, why are we doing that? Because we did it last year. Do we need it? Is it the most important thing? Should we reallocate that funding against something else? We did this through all of the PEGs and prioritized all of the funding allocations for the Army. It was a very deliberate process we went through last year for the secretary and the chief to go through those things and prioritize where does the Army's operational effectiveness come from and are we properly funding and how much of that is just because of momentum and what should we do about it? We did that and a series of deep dive follow ups through the year. None of that stuff's been announced, and I'm not going to be the one to do it. That's the secretary's prerogative. He's got to go over and talk with Congress, tell them why we're doing things and sort through those pieces before he starts putting out details of what got cut and what got skinnied down or what got plussed up. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2019/01/10/heres-how-the-army-acquisition-chief-plans-to-equip-soldiers-for-the-next-war

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  24 septembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  Pentagon Mulls F-35 Sustainment Proposal

  The Pentagon is assessing Lockheed Martin's proposal to reduce Joint Strike Fighter sustainment pricing by 16% over five years through a performance based logistics (PBL) contract, but the largest F-35 customer, the U.S. Air Force, says there are several things that must be worked out before signing the dotted line. The company delivered a white paper to Ellen Lord, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, in August outlining how a five-year PBL contract could save the military money on F-35 sustainment, Ken Merchant, F-35 sustainment vice president for Lockheed Martin, told reporters last week at the Air Force Association's annual conference in National Harbor, Maryland. Current F-35 sustainment contracts are annual and do not allow the Joint Strike Fighter's supplier base to conduct forward planning, he said. “What a PBL would do for us is give a five-year contract with [the] government and it would allow our suppliers to make those investments knowing that they have five years worth of business guaranteed,” Merchant said. The F-35 program has delivered over 425 aircraft to the fleet and will continue to grow; in fact it will double over the next few years. This is something the Pentagon must consider before entering a PBL with Lockheed Martin, Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, told Aerospace DAILY in an exclusive Sept. 18 interview. “Normally a performance-based logistics contract makes sense when you have a majority of the fleet fielded, then you can start doing stable buys,” Roper said. “Those are the details that we'll need to look at. It's not just, would the performance-based logistics contract make sense if the fleet size were frozen? Does it make sense as the fleet size grows?” The Pentagon also must consider supply chain issues and software for the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) as the fleet size grows, he said. “Those problems might grow linearly as the fleet size grows [or] we might get a non-linear effect where they compound,” Roper said. “Those are the things we'll need to think through.” In a perfect world, Lockheed Martin would like to negotiate a multiyear sustainment contract for the F-35, but executives admit the construct would be hard to sell on Capitol Hill. “Multiyear contracts that are performance based can be very successful because they invite industry to make the upfront investment so that they can recoup their investment in terms of profit at a predictable period without worrying about the variability and the vacillations of the budgeting cycle,” Roper said. “The theory is sound, it's just the practice that has to be reviewed.” Roper worries about F-35 software the most because it is not only needed to sustain the system but also is integral for modernization. “Agile software development is so critical on our programs and I think it's not going to be a ‘nice to have' for the F-35, it's going to be an absolute ‘must have,'” he said. Under Roper's direction the Air Force launched Mad Hatter, a software coding project tackling ALIS that has delivered initial applications to the flightline at Nellis AFB in Nevada. “I'm really pleased that new [F-35 Joint Program Office] leadership under [Lt. Gen.] Eric Fick have viewed that as a very favorable direction for all of F-35 software that goes forward,” Roper said. “We're making the results available to them—not just the results in the field, but the process that produced them.” Lockheed Martin has pledged to migrate ALIS to the cloud by 2020 and Roper agrees this is paramount for the future of the program because the enterprise must use cloud-based development tools. This is the way the commercial industry is heading and it provides security benefits, he added. “I've directed numerous programs in the Air Force to move to our cloud-based DevSecOps stack, which is called Cloud One. F-16, F-22, B-21, [Ground Based Strategic Deterrent]—these are programs that need to write a lot of cloud quickly and securely,” Roper said. “Cloud-based development, if done correctly ... you can write secure code really quickly and get it accredited quickly, which we also want.” https://aviationweek.com/defense/pentagon-mulls-f-35-sustainment-proposal