Thales denies wrongdoing as Anglo-French bribery probe hits shares

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  26 février 2021 | International, C4ISR

  IAI, Matrix to Establish an AI Development Center for Automated Target Detection

  IAI, Matrix to Establish an AI Development Center for Automated Target Detection

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  26 octobre 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Defense Digital Service, Army Cyber Command expand partnership with workspace ‘Tatooine’

  by Samantha Ehlinger The Defense Digital Service and Army Cyber Command's growing partnership is getting its own workspace in downtown Augusta, Georgia, DDS announced Thursday. Dubbed Tatooine, the new workspace located at the state-owned Georgia Cyber Center is the expansion of the Jyn Erso pilot project launched last year to join DDS staff and Cyber Command soldiers to solve hard problems. The new space officially opened Thursday with a day-long hackathon “for cyber soldiers and the local tech community,” according to a press release. “Tatooine will be a beacon for technical talent across the military — a place to write code and solve problems of impact,” DDS Director Chris Lynch said in an announcement. “Through this partnership, we are setting our best technical warfighters against our toughest problems with support and training from our DDS software engineers and experts. Together, men and women in uniform and tech nerds are finding new ways to rapidly solve high-impact challenges.” The Army is gradually relocating its Cyber Command headquarters to nearby Fort Gordon. The state's CIO Calvin Rhodes said this week that the center will play host to the unclassified training sessions for personnel who are waiting for their security clearances to be completed, a process that can often take at least six months, sister publication StateScoop reported. The National Security Agency, which has an outpost at Fort Gordon, will also have a presence at the Georgia Cyber Center. Officials said the $100 million development is the single-largest investment by a state in a cybersecurity facility. Tatooine will join Army officers and soldiers with DDS technologists to tackle hard problems in unclassified “startup-like spaces” using private sector tools and methodologies, according to the Pentagon. “For instance, project teams are using concepts of continuous software iteration and user-centered design, which are common in the tech sector, but not in the military,” the department said. Tatooine is a way for DDS and Army Cyber Command to create more pilot teams without having to relocate Cyber Command personnel to Washington D.C. Other planned uses for Tatooine include supporting initiatives like the Hack the Army bug bounty program. Army's Cyber Command and Cyber Center of Excellence are providing the technical soldiers to staff teams and Professional Military Education credit for time spent in the program, according to the announcement. Senior Army officers from the center and the Army Cyber Institute will oversee day-to-day operations in the workspace and report to DDS. “To help the Army resolve its toughest talent management and technical challenges, DDS and U.S. Army Cyber Command (ARCYBER) have partnered to bring technically-gifted soldiers together with private sector civilian talent to rapidly develop immediate-need cyber capabilities,” Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, head of the command, said in a statement. “This innovative partnership will solve tough problems and serve as a powerful retention and recruitment tool.” Through the Jyn Erso program, project teams have already tackled a few projects, such as a program to develop, produce and deploy a capability to combat commercial drones. “The team developed a low-cost software system that is flexible enough to adapt to newly identified targets and easy for operators to use and transport in austere conditions,” the announcement said. DDS and the Cyber Center of Excellence also launched a training pilot earlier this year as part of Jyn Erso to streamline cyber training courses. In its first iteration, DDS cut down the training time for a subset of Army soldiers from six months to just 12 weeks. We know what you're wondering, and yes, the names of the workspace and the pilot are Star Wars references. DDS, since its inception, has referred to itself as the Rebel Alliance ( a shoutout to the good guys in Star Wars), even naming the Pentagon's landmark $10 billion commercial cloud contract the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. https://www.fedscoop.com/defense-digital-service-army-cyber-command-expand-partnership-workspace-tatooine/

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  3 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Budget Shows Flightworthy Sixth-Generation Fighter Engines Ready By 2025

  Steve Trimble July 31, 2020 Details of the first of two mostly secret initiatives to support the U.S. Air Force's five-year-old pursuit of a sixth-generation successor to the Lockheed Martin F-22 are now released and reveal that a critical technology for the Next-Generation Air Dominance program could become flightworthy by mid-2025. GE Aviation and Pratt & Whitney are scheduled to complete separate competitive designs for a Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion (NGAP) system by the second quarter of 2022 and finish assessments on a full-scale engine three years later, according to Air Force budget documents. The schedule and spending details on the NGAP appeared for the first time in the Air Force's budget justification documents for fiscal 2021 that were submitted to Congress in February, but passed unnoticed for several months. The Air Force awarded GE and Pratt each a $427 million contract to support the NGAP program, but the details were shrouded in budget documents within the related Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), an unclassified effort to develop a reengining candidate for the Lockheed F-35. After Senate authorizers cited the Air Force's lack of transparency for justifying a $270 million budget cut for AETP this year, service officials decided to break out funding for the NGAP in budget documents. In fact, the NGAP program reappeared in the fiscal 2021 budget documents for the first time in more than six years. The Air Force has kept all details about the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program highly secret since 2016, but there was a brief, two-year window in 2014-15 when senior defense officials provided information about the underlying technology development efforts. The NGAP was first referenced in testimony by Alan Shaffer before House Armed Services Committee in March 2014. Shaffer is now the deputy to Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. Six years ago, he was the principal deputy to the director for research and engineering. In that role, Shaffer introduced the NGAP as an enabler to the NGAD program, along with another, complementary initiative focused on new airframes. “This program will develop and fly two X-plane prototypes that demonstrate advanced technologies for future aircraft,” Shaffer said in 2014. “Teams will compete to produce the X-plane prototypes, one focused on future Navy operational capabilities, and the other on future Air Force operational capabilities.” A year later, Frank Kendall, then undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, elaborated on the Aerospace Innovation Initiative (AII). The development of the X-planes would be led by DARPA, he said. “To be competitive, the Navy and the Air Force each will have variants focused on their mission requirements,” Kendall said. “There will be a technology period leading up to development of the prototypes. This will lead to the systems that ultimately will come after the F-35.” The results of the AII program have not been released or even acknowledged by Air Force or defense officials since 2015, but the initiative suggests that one or two X-plane aircraft could be in testing now. Kendall's remarks to Congress in 2015 came a year before the Air Force received the results of an Enterprise Capability Collaboration Team on the Air Superiority 2030 Flight Plan, which urged the development of a family of systems anchored by a next-generation fighter to replace the F-22. The Flight Plan prompted the Air Force to commission an analysis of alternatives (AoA) in late 2016. The results of that study were originally scheduled to be released by the end of 2017, but the analysis continued until early 2019. Meanwhile, a 2015 presentation by the Air Force Research Laboratory showed a notional schedule for the NGAD program; a contract award to launch the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase is set for fiscal 2023. As late as the Air Force's fiscal 2019 budget request, the financial resources devoted to the NGAD appeared to support that schedule: A significant increase in funding starts in fiscal 2023, and $13 billion is set aside overall between fiscal 2019 and 2023. Last year, however, as the results of the AoA study became available, the Air Force appeared to defer the launch of the EMD by at least a few years. The fiscal 2020 budget request included only $6.6 billion for the NGAD from fiscal 2020-24. Funding for the NGAD and NGAP programs is accounted for separately in Air Force budget documents. The fiscal 2021 budget justification documents reveal that the Air Force spent $106 million for the NGAP in fiscal 2019. Another $224 million is allocated to the NGAP this year. But the program has requested an additional $403 million in fiscal 2021, the budget documents show. “The Next-Generation Adaptive Propulsion effort consists of four phases: preliminary design, detailed design, engine fabrication and engine assessments,” the Air Force's budget documents state. “Program deliverables include military adaptive engine detailed design parameters and models, engine hardware (plus spare parts), matured technologies, major rig assessment data (controls, combustor, etc.), program reviews, and technology, affordability and sustainability studies for next generation fighter aircraft,” the documents add. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/budget-policy-operations/budget-shows-flightworthy-sixth-generation-fighter-engines