12 octobre 2023 | International, C4ISR
The Army needs a near-term strategy for the 2020s
The U.S. Army must close the munitions gap, improve the survivability of tanks and strengthen competencies within the electromagnetic spectrum.
7 mai 2019 | International, Aérospatial, Naval
The US Navy’s unmanned dream: A common control system
By: David B. Larter
NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The U.S. Navy's growing and increasingly diverse portfolio of unmanned systems is creating a jumble of control systems, creating problems for a force that hopes robot ships, aircraft and submarines will help it regain a significant advantage over rivals China and Russia.
One significant issue is having to train sailors on a number of different systems, which can prove time-consuming, inefficient and expensive.
“From a manned-machine teaming and sailor-integration perspective, we need a portfolio of systems to do a wide variety of things,” said Capt. Pete Small, the head of unmanned maritime systems at Naval Sea Systems Command. “We can't bring a different interface for each platform to our sailors — from a training perspective but also from an integration perspective.
“We might have a destroyer that needs to operate an [unmanned surface vessel] and an [unmanned underwater vehicle] and they all need to be linked back to a shore command center. So we've got to have common communications protocols to make that all happen, and we want to reduce the burden on sailors to go do that.”
That's driving the Navy toward a goal of having one control system to run all the unmanned platforms in the service's portfolio: a goal that is a good ways away, Small said.
“The end state is — future state nirvana — would be one set of software that you could do it all on,” he said. “I think that's a faraway vision. And the challenges are every unmanned system is a little bit different and has its own requirements. And each of the integration points — a destroyer, a shore base or a submarine — has slightly different integration requirements as well.
“But the vision is that we can enjoy commonality as much as possible and share pieces of software wherever possible.”
The effort mirrors a similar endeavor in the surface Navy to develop a single combat system that controls every ship's systems.
The goal here is that if a sailor who is trained on a big-deck amphibious ship transfers to a destroyer, no extra training will be necessary to run the equipment on the destroyer.
“That's an imperative going forward — we have to get to one, integrated combat system,” Rear Adm. Ron Boxall, the chief of naval operations' director of surface warfare, said in a December interview at the Pentagon with Defense News.
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19 septembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial
F-35 stress tests raise possibility of longer service life
SOURCE: FLIGHTGLOBAL.COM, BY: GARRETT REIM After completing static, drop and durability testing on the F-35A, Lockheed Martin believes that early results indicate potential for an increased service life certification of the stealth fighter. The F-35's service lifetime is designed to be 8,000h, but each test airframe is required to successfully complete two lifetimes of testing, the equivalent of 16,000h. The F-35A exceeded the requirement by completing three full lifetimes of testing, 24,000h, prompting Lockheed to moot the potential service-life extension. “We look forward to analyzing the results and bringing forward the data to potentially extend the aircraft's lifetime certification even further,” said Greg Ulmer, Lockheed Martin's vice president and general manager of the F-35 program. “Already certified for one of the longest lifetimes of any fighter, an increase would greatly reduce future costs for all F-35 customers over several decades to come.” The USAF plans to fly the F-35A until at least 2070, so a longer lifespan per aircraft may allow the service to reach that goal without having to purchase new fighters. However, as aircraft age they become more expensive to maintain and operate, making it unclear if a service life extension of the F-35A would be economical. The F-35A airframe completed its testing at BAE Systems in Brough, England. The F-35B and C variants were tested at Lockheed Martin's facility in Fort Worth, Texas, though the company did not release the results for those variants. All variants will eventually undergo final teardown inspections at the National Institute for Aviation Research in Wichita, Kansas. https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/f-35-stress-tests-raise-possibility-of-longer-servic-451964
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4 mai 2018 | International, C4ISR
The Army Is Working on Brain Hacks to Help Soldiers Deal With Information Overload
David Axe The Army hopes that technology can solve the info-overload problem that technology has created, and free up people to do what people do best. With drones and tiny sensors spreading across the planet, the US Army is worried that there's simply too much information for soldiers to process. So the ground-combat branch wants to hack troops' brains, and develop new technologies and methods for pairing human beings and artificial intelligence. The idea is for the AI—"intelligent agent" is the term the Army uses—to process raw information, leaving the human soldier to do what they're best at: make decisions, especially creative ones. "In theory, intelligent agents will have parallel computational power that is much greater than that of humans," Dr. Jonathan Touryan, a neuroscientist at the Army's Human Research and Engineering Directorate in Maryland, said in an Army release. "In developing human-agent integration principles, we hope to accentuate the strengths of both while mitigating individual weaknesses." For its main human-AI integration effort, the Army teamed up with private industry and universities in California, Texas, Florida, and New York. The resulting Cognition and Neuroergonomics Collaborative Technology Alliance began in 2010 and is scheduled to continue in its current form until at least 2020. One recent experiment involved two people—a driver and passenger—traveling together along a busy highway. The passenger, acting as a sort of surrogate AI, talked to the driver in order to test how well a human being can remember and respond to new information while under stress. "What we're interested in doing is understanding whether we can look at the synchrony between the physiologies—the brain response or the heart rate response—between the driver and passenger, and use that synchrony to predict whether the driver is going to remember the information the passenger is telling them after the drive is over," Dr. Jean Vettel, an Army neuroscientist, said in an official release. The resulting data could help the Army determine when and how an AI should relay information to a soldier in combat. This man-machine division of labor could become even more important in coming years. The Defense Advanced Research Project's Squad X initiative, which began in 2013, aims to “increase squad members' real-time knowledge of their own and teammates' locations ... through collaboration with embedded unmanned air and ground systems." More drones and sensors means more information for troops to sort through during a firefight or some other life-or-death situation. Separately from the Army's Cognition and Neuroergonomics Collaborative Technology Alliance and DARPA's Squad X, the military has been working on an “implantable neural interface” that could allow soldiers and AIs to directly communicate. That's right, a brain modem, one that translates data into electronic impulses that are compatible with a human being's own thoughts. Inspired by the rapid advancements in cochlear implants and other medical implants, DARPA began work on the modem in 2016 as part of a four-year, $60-million program. Experts say the brain modem might not work. “The big challenge is you're talking about interfacing with the human brain—that's not a trivial thing," Dr. Bradley Greger, a neuroscientist at Arizona State University, told me. But for the Army, it could be worth taking a chance on this and similar technology. Drones and sensors are steadily getting better, smaller, cheaper and more numerous. There's more data by the day. "Humans simply cannot process the amount of information that is potentially available," Touryan said. "Yet, humans remain unmatched in their ability to adapt to complex and dynamic situations, such as a battlefield environment." The Army hopes that technology can solve the info-overload problem that technology has created, and free up people to do what people do best: think creatively. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59j7ja/the-army-is-working-on-brain-hacks-to-help-soldiers-deal-with-information-overload