9 avril 2024 | International, Sécurité
Critical Flaws Leave 92,000 D-Link NAS Devices Vulnerable to Malware Attacks
Hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-3272 and CVE-2024-3273) in D-Link NAS devices. Up to 92,000 devices affected.
11 juin 2018 | International, Terrestre
This Army unit will be first to test an exoskeleton that lightens combat load
By: Todd South
Soldiers with the 10th Mountain Division will be the first to test the long-awaited exoskeleton that developers say can reduce injuries, carrying loads and help troops move around the battlefield with ease.
The U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center partnered with the division in February to identify, evaluate and transition exoskeleton technology to the Army.
NSRDEC has led exoskeleton efforts for the Army for a number of years. One of the more advanced products that will soon hit the division is made by Lockheed Martin.
Army Times spoke recently with company officials about the ONYX device, which will go through phases of testing, beginning as early as this fall.
The first phase will include a six-month “development effort” in which researchers work on “quality of life” portions of making the knee- and hip-focused device fit comfortably and correctly to the soldier's body, said Keith Maxwell, senior program engineer for the company's exoskeleton technologies.
That will be done with 10th Mountain soldiers later this year.
And that's not the only high-tech gear that 10th Mountain soldiers will be testing. They're one of two units, along with the 101st Airborne Division, that will take robotic vehicles to act as gear mules into the formations later this year.
That's part of the Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport program. The program has four vehicles being evaluated by those Army units and a yet-to-be identified Marine Corps unit at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
For the ONYX, 10th Mountain soldiers will evaluate the changes as they develop an exoskeleton “concept of operations.”
A second phase will include a cycle that starts in early 2019 to add in faster, quieter actuators to the device; those will also be tested by 10th Mountain soldiers.
Then a third round will test for ruggedized operation before the Army decides if or when the tech will be fielded. Officials estimate the device could be ready for fielding as early as 2021.
The most challenging movements of climbing, especially with a load, up stairs or mountain faces, present strain on the endurance and strength of a soldier but also put them in a position for significant injury to their back, hips or knees.
The exoskeleton allows a soldier to transfer the weight of the load from his or her frame to the device.
Much of the work began years before with the Human Universal Load Carrier, or HULC. But that system was too bulky and required more power, which meant more batteries. More batteries meant more weight, which could cancel out the benefits of transferring load bearing, Maxwell said.
So, with the ONYX, developers incorporated changes made in systems that came after HULC – removing added power requirements and adding technology that had been used in the medical field by B-Temia for people with extremity injuries.
Last year, a University of Michigan study by their Human Neuromechanics Laboratory showed reduced fatigue using the knee-stress relief device that is part of the ONYX exoskeleton called the FORTIS.
The university had four participants carry a 40-pound backpack at different speeds on a treadmill at a 15-degree incline.
All showed reduced exertion when using the exoskeleton, according to the study.
While the ONYX device has shown considerable promise in clean environments, the big step will be ruggedizing it for fieldwork, Maxwell said.
“That's the hardest part of all, ruggedization,” Maxwell said.
And that's a matter of time and investment.
“None of the stuff we're facing is insurmountable,” Maxwell said.
Waterproofing the device is paramount, he said. The standard is for it to be submersible to three feet of water for 15 minutes.
While the current device focuses on the lower body, which carries most of the load and presents most soldier injury problems, there are technologies that are coming from this research that could eventually work their way into upper body support and possibly the TALOS suit that is being developed by Special Operations Command.
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11 octobre 2023 | International, Sécurité
Canada sending more artillery shells, aircraft bombs to Ukraine, defence minister says | CBC News
Canada is sending more munitions to Ukraine, including artillery rounds and aircraft bombs, Defence Minister Bill Blair announced in Brussels on Wednesday as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy attended the meeting of allies who are helping am his country.
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28 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval
How One Component Improved U.S. Navy F/A-18 Fleet Readiness
The U.S. Navy's F/A-18 and EA-18G fleets have experienced a dramatic turnaround. In 2017, less than half of the Navy's Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets were able to fly. Now, 80% of its carrier-based fighters are ready for missions. The solution involved fixing a single component within the General Electric F414 engine. The Navy faulted constrained spending following the 2008 financial crisis and increased demand from the wars in the Middle East as reasons for the fleet's lack of readiness. More specifically, those conditions exacerbated an issue embedded in the military's vast supply chain. For 20 years, the Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers have continually had electronic systems and new sensors added that placed greater and greater demand for power from its General Electric engine. That demand taxed a key component of the F414's electrical power generation system—its generator control unit (GCU), which keeps the generator output within a specified range. Initial attempts to address the GCU's issues through “component-level reliability improvements were not sustainable,” Navy spokeswoman Gulianna Dunn tells Aviation Week. Eventually, the GCU, already in short supply, failed to keep pace, causing a cascading effect on the availability of the carrier-based fighters. In the words of a Navy program official, the GCU was the “top platform degrader for all naval aviation.” When sequestration-era spending limits were imposed on the Pentagon in 2013, the entire military faced across-the-board funding cuts, including the operations and maintenance accounts. The Navy had to make tough choices about what bills it would pay and what to defer. At the same time, flight hours for the Super Hornet and Growler in the Middle East increased to meet the high operational tempos of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Inherent Resolve. As the Navy reduced aviation sustainment budgets, the program office did not have sufficient funding to purchase spare parts. From fiscal years 2013-16, the program office requested between $193.6-311.5 million and received between $85.2-136.3 million, according to a 2019 Defense Department Inspector General report. To compensate, Navy officials cannibalized aircraft to obtain the required spare parts. Maintainers removed working parts from an aircraft and installed them on a second jet to make that aircraft operational. A backlog of spare parts exacerbated fleet readiness and availability rates—an issue that affected the GCU acutely. New mission payloads created new types of electrical load, straining the aircraft's electronics, and wearing out the GCU at a faster rate. The second-generation (G2) and G3 GCU models that equipped the fleet could handle only about 150 flight hours. To increase reliability General Electric Aviation Systems, in consultation with the Navy, began working to redesign the GCU. A G3-to-G4 conversion kit could reach up to 532 flight hours. A G4 GCU was even better—sustaining 1,220 flight hours. Naval Air Systems Command (Navair) flight-tested the G4 in August 2015, and GE started production in mid-2016, Joe Krisciunas, general manager and president of GE Aviation Electrical Power Systems, tells Aviation Week. But the part was still only being manufactured at a minimal rate. The matter came to a head in October 2018, when then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis set an 80% mission-capable readiness goal. At the time, only 260 F/A-18 and EA-18G aircraft were capable of flying missions—approximately 60%, far short of the mandate. In response, the Navy convened a Reliability Control Board (RCB) in 2019 to improve the F/A-18 and EA-18G mission-capable rate. The board pinpointed the main problem—insufficient production of the F414's GCU. The Navy had 200 of the units on back order. Navair worked with GE to ramp up GCU production, according to Lt. Cmdr. Jason Shaw, power and propulsion lead at the F/A-18 and EA-18G program office. The RCB determined GE was producing roughly six GCUs per month that would funnel into the program office, Boeing or Naval Supply Systems Command (Navsup). The program and Boeing had predictable delivery schedules, but Navsup would only receive GCUs that were produced beyond what the other two contracts required. “It created a hole on the supply shelf,” Shaw says. “When a jet would lose a GCU, there was no other one to replace it from supply.” The team brainstormed and decided GE would increase production to about 21 GCUs each month, while Navair would defer a contract for 320 GCU conversion kits to 2021. Pushing the contract would leave room for Navsup to acquire a more predictable delivery schedule. The company doubled its GCU production rate from 2018 to 2019, and almost doubled it again in 2020 to reach the 21 units per month rate, Krisciunas says. These courses of action resulted in zero GCU back orders by mid-June 2020. Additionally, the team is working with GE to resolve production issues related to GCU testing capacity. The plan is to purchase new, larger test stands and upgrade software on existing test equipment. This would allow the company to conduct more tests and further increase production. The test stand is a large electric motor that simulates the engine spinning the gearbox, and it has a pad that duplicates the GCU interface. A test stand costs approximately $1.5-2 million and typically takes 15-18 months to get up and running, Krisciunas says. Still, more improvements are being made: The program office is now assessing wiring issues that may have also contributed to low GCU reliability. The service awarded a $17 million contract to purchase additional software and cables for Automated Wiring Test Sets, which will allow aircraft mechanics to identify system faults. “The U.S. Navy is the only [Pentagon] military branch to have met and sustained the 80% readiness call that Mattis put out, and that is largely associated with resolving the issues with GCUs,” Shaw says. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/how-one-component-improved-us-navy-fa-18-fleet-readiness