23 mars 2022 | International, Terrestre
Patria vehicle scores highest in Slovak armored-vehicle acquisition race
The Finnish company is line to win a $366 million contract aimed at replacing Slovakia's Soviet-era fleet or rides.
4 septembre 2018 | International, C4ISR
The rising importance of data as a weapon of war
By: Adam Stone
As Navy Cyber Security Division director, Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett casts a wary eye over the rising importance of data as a weapon of war. Data is an ever-more-critical battlefield asset, given the rising internet of things, including a rapidly growing inventory of unmanned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets across the Navy. Protecting all that data from enemy exploitation represents a potentially massive cyber challenge.
This spring, the Navy announced “Compile to Combat in 24 Hours,” a pilot project to leverage web services and a new cloud architecture in the service of data security. C4ISRNET's Adam Stone spoke to Barrett about the potential there, and about the emerging IT security landscape in a data-centric military.
C4ISRNET: Data has become increasingly valuable, especially in terms of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. How valuable is it? How do you describe the significance of data these days?
REAR ADM. DANELLE BARRETT: If you look at what goes on in industry and how they use big data for decision making, to be predictive and proactive: that's exactly the kind of environment that we want to get to. Being able to trust those data, to access the data, expose the data, reuse the data — that becomes actually the hardest part.
C4ISRNET: Let's talk about that. Sharing data involves risk. Talk about that risk landscape.
BARRETT: The more data that you have out there and the more places you have it, obviously you have an increased attack surface. Adversaries will go after your data to try to get an advantage. So, you want to protect data down to the lowest layer and you want to make sure that you have defense in depth built in, and resiliency to be able to work through any kind of attack or interruption in your data flow.
We build our architectures around being resilient using the NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] model of “detect, react and restore.” You build in as much resiliency as you can.
C4ISRNET: Can you say, specifically, how that's done?
BARRETT: I'll give you an example of something that we're testing in our architecture to try to improve the data down to the data element layer. We have an effort called “Compile to Combat in 24 Hours.” We're looking at modernizing our afloat architecture and, as we do that, we're decomposing big monolithic applications, if you will, into web services similar to what you'd get on an iPhone: smaller capabilities, smaller web services as opposed to these big monolithic applications.
As you do that, you can ensure that you're using standard ports and protocols, so you don't have applications on the ship that are reaching back over nonstandard ports, which would present an increased attack surface. If you can standardize on your ports, you can sense those better and monitor those better.
Then you then go down to the data element layer. Say you standardize on extensible markup language, XML, you can then apply the SAML protocol that is inherent to that to protect your data at that lowest layer. We're testing that concept in an architecture now.
Full article: https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/08/31/the-rising-importance-of-data-as-a-weapon-of-war/
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6 août 2020 | International, Aérospatial
Air Force moves to enact space acquisition reforms, despite hold up of legislative proposals
Nathan Strout WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is trying to move ahead with reforms to how it acquires space systems, even as a report outlining significant legislative changes has gotten held up by the Office of Management and Budget. Released in May, the Department of the Air Force report recommends nine specific proposals to improve contracting under the newly established U.S. Space Force. While most of the changes can be undertaken independently by the Department of Defense, three recommendations would require legislative action by Congress. But according to Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration Shawn Barnes, the report has yet to get past OMB, which oversees the President's budget proposals and ensures legislation proposed by agencies is consistent with the administration. “[It's] still not on the hill. I'm a little frustrated by that, but I think we're very close with OMB at this point and I think we're just about there,” said Barnes during a July 30 call with reporters. “There are a couple of sticking points, but I'm not going to talk about those directly here.” Barnes continued on to say that OMB had no issues with the vast majority of the report. And while the Air Force has to wait for legislative action on some recommendations, Barnes said they are already moving ahead with internal reforms, such as establishing a distinct Space Force budget. “We're in the process of figuring out how to implement those actions within the alt-acquisition report that don't require any legislative change, and of the somewhat less than ten of those specific actions, probably six of them are within the Department of Defense's ability to get after. So we're building implementation plans for that,” he said. The most important recommendation in the report, at least according to the Air Force, is budgetary. They want to be able to consolidate Space Force budget line items along mission portfolios, such as missile warning or communications, instead of by platforms, allowing them more flexibility to move funding between related systems without having to submit reprogramming requests to Congress. This was a point of contention between the Pentagon and legislators last year, as the Air Force issued repeated reprogramming requests to secure the funding needed to push up the delivery date of the first Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared satellite. Barnes insisted that managing funding at the portfolio would give the Space Force more flexibility to react to program developments without sacrificing transparency. While funding would not longer be broken out at the program level, it could still be expressed at a lower level, he said. “We would still be breaking it down at a subordinate level but what we would hope is that we would have the ability to still move money from one of those subordinate levels to another, and that's where we can have that transparency,” he explained. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2020/07/30/air-force-moves-to-enact-space-acquisition-reforms-despite-hold-up-of-legislative-proposals
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28 décembre 2022 | International, Terrestre
Army special operations rethinking force structure, tech
Restructuring is needed for a new kind of fight.