18 décembre 2023 | International, Terrestre
Opinion: Europeans can help blunt the argument in Washington that U.S. resources are too stretched to focus on Europe and the Indo-Pacific at the same time.
18 février 2022 | International, Aérospatial
A government spokesman confirmed to Defense News that the 68 F-15s in line for the upgrade will be single-seat F-15Js that have previously gone through the Multi-Stage Improvement Program. That leaves the fate of 34 jets still up in the air.
8 juin 2020 | International, Terrestre
By: Mike Yeo MELBOURNE, Australia — China could stand to lose almost all of its ballistic and cruise missiles if it were to sign a new strategic arms control treaty, according to a new regional security assessment. The analysis, titled “The End of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty: Implications for Asia,” is one of the chapters of the annual Asia-Pacific regional security assessment published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank. IISS' report was released June 5 and covered regional security topics such as Sino-U.S. relations, North Korea and Japanese policy. China could lose 95 percent of its ballistic and cruise missile stockpile if it signs a treaty similar to the 1980s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, according to the chapter's co-authors Douglas Barrie, a senior fellow focused on military air power; Michael Elleman, the director of the Non-Proliferation and Nuclear Policy Program; and Meia Nouwens, a research fellow focused on Chinese defense policy and military modernization. The treaty, signed between by the United States and the Soviet Union in 1987, banned all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles systems with ranges between 310 and 3,420 miles (500-5,500 kilometres). The U.S. withdrew from the INF Treaty in August 2019, citing Russian violations of the agreement with its development and fielding of the 9M279 missile, although Russia denies that the missile violated range restrictions. However, the IISS report suggested the U.S. withdrawal was done with an eye toward China's missile arsenal, which has grown to what is believed to be the world's largest inventory of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles. IISS' own figures estimate China possesses more than 2,200 missiles that fall under the INF Treaty's restrictions. These short- and medium-range missiles are important assets in exerting pressure on Taiwan, which China sees as a rogue province and has vowed to reunite with the mainland, by force if necessary, although it continues to describe its fielding of ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles as solely for defensive purposes. Given these missiles provide China with what Barrie described as a “comparative advantage” in the region, it's unlikely the country would willingly sign a potential arms control treaty like the INF Treaty. The U.S, for its part, has already started testing missiles previously prohibited by the treaty, and there have been suggestions that the country might deploy such missiles to the Asia-Pacific region to address an imbalance in such weapons between itself and its rivals without solely relying on air- and sea-launched cruise missiles. (Those cruise missiles existed under the INF Treaty, as they did not violate the pact.) The report cautioned there is a two-fold risk in deploying such weapons to the Asia-Pacific. Chief among those: exacerbating Chinese concerns that the missiles will be positioned for use against it, increasing the potential for a response from China that could lead to an “action-reaction cycle of weapons development and deployment” and continued regional instability. The U.S. is also faced with the quandary of basing any potential INF-busting systems, with regional allies and partners unlikely to accede to locating such missiles on their territory, partly because of the diplomatic and economic reprisals Beijing could inflict on them. And there's precedent here: China targeted South Korea's economy in response to and expressed its distaste at the deployment of a U.S. missile defense system on South Korean soil in 2017. As for the U.S. territory of Guam, basing missiles there would limit their utility due to the distances involved. The IISS report also raised questions about whether U.S. moves to develop and deploy weapons previously prohibited by the INF Treaty will bring China to the arms control negotiating table. However, the think tank conceded that not deploying such weapons is also unlikely to persuade China, noting that that Beijing has shown little appetite for participating in any form of strategic and regional arms control. https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2020/06/05/china-could-lose-95-of-ballistic-cruise-missiles-under-strategic-arms-control-pact-says-new-analysis/
8 janvier 2019 | International, Naval, C4ISR
By: Justin Lynch They have been hacked, tricked and stolen from. Now the message is clear -- no more. The Navy is looking to support research in 36 areas that can help protect weapons systems from cyberattacks, Naval Air Systems Command said in a Jan. 7 update to a broad agency announcement. “It's not necessarily cutting edge research, but it is the first step in cybersecurity quality control that should have already been done,” said Bryson Bort, the founder and chief executive officer of Scythe, a cybersecurity platform. The Navy had admitted as much. Research into protecting the department's weapons comes amid reports that the American military suffers from sustained cyberattacks. In December, an Inspector General report found that some in the Pentagon were not taking basic cybersecurity steps to protect its ballistic missile system. Although the Pentagon's weapons are worth roughly $1.66 trillion, an October report from the Government Accountability Office found that “nearly all” American missiles, jets, ships and lethal equipment in development are vulnerable to cyberattacks. The announcement comes after Congress has mandated the Pentagon address its cyber vulnerabilities. Three of the research areas the Navy is interested are commonly described as the pillars of strong cybersecurity, no matter the institution. They include: Dynamic reconfiguration In an effort to confuse attackers, the Navy wants to research “dynamic reconfiguration.” The National Institute of Standards and Technology defines the term as “changes to router rules, access control lists, intrusion detection/prevention system parameters, and filter rules for firewalls and gateways.” "Organizations perform dynamic reconfiguration of information systems, for example, to stop attacks, to misdirect attackers, and to isolate components of systems, thus limiting the extent of the damage from breaches or compromises,” NIST officials wrote. Research by the University of Maryland's Christian Johnson found that pairing predictive analytics with dynamic reconfiguration tactics, the new approach can lead to the "successful development of learning models that identify specific classes of malware such as ransomware,” Johnson wrote in a paper for the RSA conference. Deception tactics Experts have long used strategies of physical war in digital battles, including with the use of denial and deception tactics. The Navy wants to boost understanding of this area to better secure its weapons systems. In 2015, researchers at MITRE, which conducts federally funded research, advocated for a 10-step process for planning and executing deception operations. “Leveraging classical denial and deception techniques to understand the specifics of adversary attacks enables an organization to build an active, threat-based cyber defense,” a team of researchers wrote. But the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity, the intelligence community's research arm, says that the use of deceptive software and hardware in cybersecurity is still in its infancy. “Many techniques lack rigorous experimental measures of effectiveness,” the organization said, adding that “information is insufficient to determine how defensive deception changes attacker behavior.” Artificial intelligence If there was a common denominator of the federal government's investment in cybersecurity it is the use or artificial intelligence. The Navy has embraced artificial intelligence since its Task Force Cyber Awakening project in 2015. “We see that the more we automate our networks and the more we use machines to do the heavy lifting, the better. Our brains do not have the intellectual capacity to process all of that information,” Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett, Navy Cyber Security Division Director,told Defense Systems, a trade publication, in a 2017 interview. More than half of the challenges and research opportunities announced by IARPA in 2018 involved machine learning, according to an analysis by Fifth Domain. Cyber Command has embraced the technology in a short time period, Capt. Ed Devinney, director of corporate partnerships at the body, said during the November Cyber Con conference hosted by Fifth Domain. “If you talked to anyone at the command two or three years ago about a system that would be all autonomous, you probably wouldn't get much traction. But I think there is a growing understanding and consensus that we need to operate at machine speed, especially when talking about active defense of the network,” Devinney said. He said that everyone likes to use the phrases “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning,” however “there aren't that many people who do AI very well.” https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/2019/01/07/3-ways-the-navy-wants-to-protect-its-weapons-from-cyberattacks