15 juin 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau
The Army is holding what it calls software solariums as a way to improve the business side of the service's multi-billion software efforts during the life of programs.
“Software has become both a critically important element to readiness and a critically under-managed element of our capability portfolio,” Maj. Gen. Randy Taylor, commander of Communications and Electronics Command, said at the event held May 22-23. “Cohesive software management is a necessary enabler to maintaining overmatch in the multi-domain battle.”
Providing software updates to units in austere field locations can be challenging. Prolonging such updates can make the systems they run on vulnerable.
The Army has sought to develop new and innovative ways for automated software updates to these units.
As the Army is also undergoing major IT modernization, both to its tactical and enterprise networks, software becomes a critical enabler in that future end state.
“I believe that we are literally in the midst of the largest modernization of our networks,” Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, the Army CIO who began the software solariums as commander of CECOM, said at the recent event. “And that's all of our networks, from the tactical to the enterprise, to the business to the intelligence systems in the last 30 years.”
With these modernization efforts, the Army realizes it must be better stewards of overall software costs.
“We've got to be more holistic on how we approach this, especially when you consider that we, the U.S. taxpayer, spend 55 to 70 percent of a program's lifecycle on that post-acquisition and post-operations sustainment. That's a pretty big bill,” Taylor said.
During a March conference, Crawford noted the service spends about $3 billion over a five year period on enterprise software sustainment.
The previous solariums, officials said, have included new patching solutions and a goal to have no more than two fielded software baselines at any one time for all programs of record.
Army leaders said CECOM will coordinate with stakeholders to finalize recommendations in the coming months. Those goals then will be submitted to the Army level Information Technology Oversight Council for approval and implementation.
17 mars 2021 | International, Aérospatial, C4ISR
The ENVG-B provides enhanced capability to the entire force by delivering imagery and data from the battlefield directly to the soldier’s eye
17 septembre 2018 | International, C4ISR
By Editorial Board GOOGLE DECIDED after an employee backlash this summer that it no longer wanted to help the U.S. military craft artificial intelligence to help analyze drone footage. Now, the military is inviting companies and researchers across the country to become more involved in machine learning. The firms should accept the invitation. The Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will invest up to $2 billion over the next five years in artificial intelligence, a significant increase for the bureau whose goal is promoting innovative research. The influx suggests the United States is preparing to start sprinting in an arms race against China. It gives companies and researchers who want to see a safer world an opportunity not only to contribute to national security but also to ensure a more ethical future for AI. The DARPA contracts will focus on helping machines operate in complex real-world scenarios. They will also tackle one of the central conundrums in AI: something insiders like to call “explainability.” Right now, what motivates the results that algorithms return and the decisions they make is something of a black box. That's worrying enough when it comes to policing posts on a social media site, but it is far scarier when lives are at stake. Military commanders are more likely to trust artificial intelligence if they know what it is “thinking,” and the better any of us understands technology, the more responsibly we can use it. There is a strong defense imperative to make AI the best it can be, whether to deter other countries from using their own machine-learning capabilities to target the United States, or to ensure the United States can effectively counter them when they do. Smarter technologies, such as improved target recognition, can save civilian lives, and allowing machines to perform some tasks instead of humans can protect service members. But patriotism is not the only reason companies should want to participate. They know better than most in government the potential these technologies have to help and to harm, and they can leverage that knowledge to maximize the former and minimize the latter. Because DARPA contracts are public, the work researchers do will be transparent in a way that Project Maven, the program that caused so much controversy at Google, was not. Employees aware of what their companies are working on can exert influence over how those innovations are used, and the public can chime in as well. DARPA contractors will probably develop products with nonlethal applications, like improved self-driving cars for convoys and autopilot programs for aircraft. But the killer robots that have many people worried are not outside the realm of technological possibility. The future of AI will require outlining principles that explain how what is possible may differ from what is right. If the best minds refuse to contribute, worse ones will. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/silicon-valley-should-work-with-the-military-on-ai-heres-why/2018/09/12/1085caee-b534-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html
11 mars 2022 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
Alors qu'elles se montraient jusque-là réfractaires à financer une industrie de la défense jugée peu conforme aux critères socialement responsables (ESG), certaines banques européennes ont changé de position après l'invasion russe de l'Ukraine. « L'industrie de la défense doit continuer à être bien financée, et les efforts des banques françaises, parmi les plus actives dans le monde dans ce domaine, le démontrent », considère la Fédération bancaire française. « Alors que nous alertons sur les difficultés de financement rencontrées par les industriels depuis deux ans maintenant, au niveau national et européen, nous observons un changement de perception générale », indique aux Echos Jan Pie, le secrétaire général de l'ASD (AeroSpace and Defence Industries Association of Europe). Les valeurs des industries de Défense, comme Dassault Aviation et Thales, qui s'étaient vues exclure en novembre dernier, comme douze autres sociétés du secteur, de la politique d'investissement du premier fonds de pension norvégien (KLP), ont considérablement augmenté, relèvent Les Echos. Les Echos du 9 mars