23 avril 2018 | International, Sécurité
By: Adam Stone
From their perch in the operations center at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., security analysts peer down like hawks over the Naval Research Lab, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling and a half-dozen other major military installations scattered around the national capital region.
It takes just 10 people to maintain constant surveillance over all those disparate sites, “but you need machines to help you,” said Robert Baker, command information officer for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command. Those machines include a complex network of cameras and sensors, supported by analytics software. When the software spots a suspect event – traffic headed in the wrong direction, for example – that video feed gets pushed to the foreground for human analysis.
This is just one example of how the military looks to technology to improve physical security.
The real-world influence of technology is evident across the military: Everything from targeting systems to logistics to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance has been enhanced in some way by IT. Physical security represents an emerging frontier, where artificial intelligence, machine learning, autonomous technologies and other advances could give the military an edge.
Force multiplier
At Edwards Air Force Base in California last summer, a security team installed a ground-based radar system to monitor a wide landscape using electro-optical and infrared sensors. The team turned to technology to give them insight across a massive 308,000-acre facility.
“The driving need for this system is to proactively defend Edwards AFB. Given the mission of Edwards, and how much terrain we have, we need a system that can overcome the difficulties of patrolling the vast amount of land Edwards presents to our patrols,” Staff Sgt. Alexander Deguzman, an installation security technician with the 412th security forces squadron said in a news release.
As at the Navy Yard, the effort at Edwards is all about using some combination of remote sensing, networked surveillance and machine intelligence to create a force multiplier in physical security. Analysts say such initiatives could make bases and installations markedly safer at a lower cost and with less labor required.
The rise of artificial intelligence is a critical technology moving forward. Security often involves the constant observation of multiple video and data feeds for prolonged periods of time. Human analysts get tired. They look away for a moment. In short, they miss stuff.
“A human can look at things once or twice, but after 100 times they start to lose their edge,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Bob Elder, chair of the cyber and emerging technologies division at the National Defense Industrial Association. “AI goes beyond what a human can do, because it doesn't get tired.”
Elder envisions a future in the near-term in which routine surveillance can be carried out by software-supported machines, with computers scanning for anomalies and alerting human analysts to potential threats. That saves on labor. In addition, such as approach also would allow the military to use less highly-skilled operators, relying instead on the machine's expertise and accuracy.
Eyes in the sky
Industry's interest in this subject has helped bring AI and autonomy to the fore as potential security assets. With the rise of the drones and the imminent arrival of driverless cars, some experts are looking to autonomy as the next logical step in military security.
Drones alone don't offer a security fix: Their batteries run down too fast. The military might however consider the use of tethered drones, autonomous ISR assets that can hover in place and remain attached to a power source for ongoing operations. Put one at each corner of a base camp and leaders can put together a big-picture view of any approaching hazard.
“This kind of solution is really smart, because you can constantly feed it power, you don't have to worry about it flying away, and if someone tries to damage it or take control of it, you know about it right away,” said Steve Surfaro, chairman of the Security Industry Association public safety working group.
Another key industry trend, biometrics, may also point the way forward on physical security. “Investing in facial recognition software ... can improve perimeter security by automating aspects of it to speed up entry to bases for those authorized and focus screening attention on those that represent a risk,” according to a Deloitte report on smart military bases titled “Byting the Bullet.”
The networking needs
To make the most of the technological imperative around security, experts say, the military will have to give serious thought to issues of infrastructure.
Security is becoming a data function: Sensor streams, video feeds, drone surveillance and other methodologies all will require robust network support and substantial compute resources. The data will need to flow freely, even in great quantities, with ample processing available to put it to use.
Much of the processing will be done in the cloud, “but you still need to have a reliable connection to that cloud, which means you want diversity and redundancy. At a minimum you want two connections and ideally you want three ways of doing it – wires, line of sight wireless, and satellite,” Elder said. “You need a reliable way to get to your cloud services.”
Such an implementation will require, at the least, a significant amount of bandwidth. At the Navy Yard, Baker said he is able to overcome that hurdle through thoughtful network design. In other words: Rather than pushing all the information back to the operations center for processing, new video and sensor analytics takes place on the edge, shrinking the overall networking demand.
“The more processing you can do at the edge of the network, the less robust your network needs to be,” he said. Efficient network design weeds out routine activity “and then the really interesting information is being sent for human analysis.”
While emerging technologies can enhance the military's security operations, some argue that IT capabilities are not, in themselves, a rationale for upgrading systems that may already be meeting mission. Budgetary constraints apply.
“You could make processing faster, but what is the threat that we are trying to counter? If we are seeing zero incidents, why we would gold-plate that area? We want to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollars,” Baker said. “At the same time, if there was some high-risk area where we needed to do that better, we would absolutely want to put resources against that.”
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19 novembre 2023 | International, C4ISR
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13 janvier 2021 | International, Aérospatial
By: Joe Gould WASHINGTON ― A small, 2-year-old nonprofit think tank has taken a step that most advocacy organizations never dare try: It has sued the U.S. State Department to derail a $23 billion arms sale to the United Arab Emirates. In a legal claim announced last month, the New York Center For Foreign Policy Affairs asserted that the Trump administration failed to provide a reasonable explanation for its decision to sell F-35 fighter jets and other weapons to the UAE, which places it in breach of the Administrative Procedure Act. It has asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to find the sale invalid. The case is unusual, as is the theory of the case, but so is the Trump administration's approach to the sale, said Brittany Benowitz, a legal expert on human rights and arms trade. Such legal challenges rarely succeed, but if this one does, it could halt the deal even if Washington and Abu Dhabi follow through with plans to sign contracts in the waning days of the Trump administration. “If you can say this deal was executed improperly and the contractor was on notice of that, which they are, then I think you can say it's possible to stop the sale before delivery,” Benowitz said. The State Department declined to comment on the pending litigation, in line with its policy. The new lawsuit against the State Department came after a failed attempt in Congress to block the sale of 50 Lockheed Martin-made F-35 aircraft, 18 General Atomics-made MQ–9B Reaper drones and Raytheon Technologies-made munitions. The Senate narrowly rejected a challenge to the sale amid arguments from the administration that the sales would make the UAE more interoperable with partners and defend itself from “heightened threats from Iran.” Opponents said the fast-tracked process was incomplete, leaving questions about the security of U.S. weapons technology, the potential of sparking a Middle Eastern arms race, and the potential for the weapons to be used in Yemen and Libya; these arguments were echoed in the lawsuit. The State Department came under scrutiny for irregularities in a previous sale. Its inspector general, who was later fired, found that a separate “emergency” sale of $8 billion in precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia and the UAE failed to “fully assess” or mitigate the risk of civilian casualties in Yemen. To boot, Saudi Arabia and the UAE reportedly breached arms sale agreements with the U.S. by transferring American materiel to al-Qaida-linked fighters and other militant factions in Yemen. Lawmakers have also called for an an investigation into reporting that the UAE may have transferred American-made Javelin anti-armor missiles to the Libyan National Army in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. “What we're saying is that the State Department rushed this through without congressional oversight, they didn't follow their own rules and they didn't apply the same metrics that would guide approval to others,” said Justin Russell, the director of the New York Center For Foreign Policy Affairs. The organization conducts advocacy and research on the conflicts in Libya and Yemen. “Congress tried to block [the sale] on the same merits and when that legislation failed, we said, ‘Wait a minute, we've got to stand up and do something.'” The Administrative Procedure Act allows a court to “hold unlawful and set aside any agency action ... found to be in arbitrary, capricious, an abseils of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with the law.” Here, the lawsuit argues the State Department didn't find, as required under the Arms Export Control Act, that the sale “will strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace” ― or present “a reasoned explanation” for its actions as required by the Administrative Procedure Act. In 2019, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade won a U.K. Court of Appeal ruling to ban new arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The government has since renewed sales, and CAAT applied for judicial review into the legality of the U.K. government's decision to renew arms sales to Saudi Arabia. In the U.S., there has not been a successful court case of targeting government-to-government sales in recent years, according to Benowitz. What's also unusual about the New York Center For Foreign Policy Affairs' approach is that it doesn't rely on a human rights argument but rather points to aberrations in the process ― particularly past end-use violations that ought to have have disqualified the UAE, she said. “There have been court challenges to arms sales in the past on human rights grounds, but this challenge on national security grounds under the Administrative Procedure Act is unprecedented,” she said. “It's rare because we have never had a record of irregularities like the one we have now.” By Benowitz's reckoning, if a finalized deal is invalidated in the courts and it is found that the deal never should have been entered in the first place, its unlikely the U.S. could be penalized financially by the UAE. “To get a remedy, or damages, under contract law, you have to have ‘clean hands,' so it would be difficult for the Emiratis to recoup,” she said. https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2021/01/12/lawsuit-threatens-23b-weapons-sale-to-uae