US Air Force awards contract for new helicopter

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  2 octobre 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Pentagon’s CIO shop teams with armed services to prep for move to JEDI cloud

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The Pentagon's top IT official said Wednesday that his office has spent the last few months preparing the armed services to migrate to the department's long-delayed enterprise cloud as soon as it becomes available. “We're doing a lot of work with the services on getting them prepared to move their [software] development processes and cycles to DevOps so when the [Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure] cloud finally does get awarded, we're not starting at Day One,” Dana Deasy, Pentagon chief information officer, said during a Defense Writers Group roundtable. The JEDI cloud contract was originally awarded to Microsoft over Amazon Web Services 11 months ago, and then was halted by a federal judge in February. Though the court case remains unresolved, Deasy said the services must now identify tools, integration environments and directories that need set up to connect users into the cloud when it's available. Despite the judge's decision, “that's all work that we can do because it sits inside our ownership all ready,” Deasy said. While the Department of Defense has faced criticism for its single-award structure, particularly as cloud technologies have advanced during the yearslong delay, Deasy insisted the JEDI cloud still fills a critical capability gap the department needs to deliver to the war fighter: data at the tactical edge and DevOps. The JEDI cloud is the platform the department still envisions for those needs and is an important piece of the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept, an initiative through which the services want to connect sensors and shooters. Deasy said the DoD has solutions in place to form that connection, but still needs “that tactical cloud out at the tactical edge.” “JADC2 is going to point out, time and time again, about the need of being able to swiftly bring data together. And guess what? That data is going to be of different classifications, and bringing that together in a cross-domain way in a very quick-to-need [way] is something that is still a need we have across the Department of Defense that JEDI was specifically designed to solve for,” Deasy said. Cloud, data and artificial intelligence are core elements to enabling JADC2. Using data for joint war fighting is the top priority of the department's forthcoming data strategy, which Deasy said he expects will be released in the next 30 days. The department has a lot of data, but it is not necessarily prepared or stored in a way that is ready to be used for any sort of operations. The data strategy is expected to outline how to approach those challenges. The DoD's new chief data officer, Dave Spirk, will finalize the data strategy. After he started in June, Spirk went on a “listening tour” across the department to inform the strategy. Deasy said Spirk was told by many components that the department needs to set goals to ensure data is visible, understandable and trustworthy, while also easily within classification levels. They also said the data needs to be interoperable and secure, while also linked and integrated between sensors and shooters. The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the department's AI hub that's situated under Deasy's office, is tackling joint war fighting this year under a new project that uses AI to link intelligence gathering systems to operations and effects systems for commanders. The JAIC recently awarded its Joint Common Foundation contract to Deloitte. The company is to provide an environment for an enterprisewide AI development platform. That platform, which uses the Air Force's Cloud One enterprise cloud, was originally supposed to operate inside the JEDI cloud. Therein lies the challenge for the DoD: Components that have been waiting for the JEDI cloud have had to look elsewhere — a problem Deasy recognizes he'll have to grapple with. Right now, Deasy is encouraging components that are waiting for JEDI but have an “urgent war-fighting need” to look elsewhere for platforms. “That is obviously OK in the short term, but over time that starts to become problematic because now you're starting to set up a lot of different solutions in different environments where you're going to have to go back and sort out in an enterprise way,” Deasy said. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/09/30/pentagons-cio-shop-teams-with-armed-services-to-prep-for-move-to-jedi-cloud/

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  7 mai 2024 | International, Naval

  Teledyne unveils Rogue 1 exploding drone sought by Marine Corps

  Should the Rogue 1 drone not explode or be recalled, it can be disarmed and reused thanks to a mechanical disconnect.

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  12 novembre 2018 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre

  Rust Costs the Pentagon $21 Billion Per Year

  By Aaron Boyd, The Defense Department isn't doing a good job determining how much to spend to prevent damage from nature's basic chemical reactions. Rust costs the Pentagon more money annually than many of its most expensive weapons systems—up to $21 billion per year, according to a Defense Department-commissioned audit released in March. The report indicates the corrosion of metals that make up modern weapons systems like fighter jets, ships, ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons can sometimes approach one-third of the total operations and maintenance costs of those systems. The problem is so large, in 2002, the department established the Office of Corrosion Policy and Oversight to ensure big-dollar weapons systems weren't taken offline by oxidation and to help branches determine how much money ought to be spent on rust prevention. But the data being reported by the military branches has been inconsistent and the office has yet to issue guidance on how funding levels should be categorized, according to a related audit released Thursday by the Government Accountability Office. For example, “In fiscal year 2017, the Army and Navy used direct costs, such as salary and training costs, to identify their funding levels, but the Army also included other associated costs. The Air Force used the prior year's funding level and adjusted it for inflation,” the report states. These different methods led to funding requests based on different criteria, making it difficult for Congress to determine what an appropriate funding level should look like. It has also led to vastly different funding requests. In 2017, the Army requested $2.4 million and the Air Force $3 million, while the Navy only requested $220,000. Similarly, all three branches either failed to accurately report the supporting data or, in the Air Force's case, did not provide any data at all some years. “The Army data GAO received did not reconcile with data presented in the Corrosion Office annual reports to Congress for five of eight fiscal years,” auditors wrote. “The Navy data did not reconcile for two of eight fiscal years, and there was no supporting documentation identifying how these figures were calculated. Air Force officials did not provide any figures or supporting documentation for four fiscal years, stating that these figures were not available.” Army officials told GAO they're not able to accurately report how much is spent preventing or combating corrosion because many of those duties are performed by personnel who do many other things, as well. This includes the Army's lead corrosion executive, who also serves as the aviation logistics and safety officer for the Army G-4 logistics organization. “The corrosion-related costs of conducting the corrosion executive role are not separated from this other function,” they told GAO. The Navy had a similar issue but took a different tack. The Navy merely requested $220,000 for the corrosion executive's salary, despite the fact that “this method does not capture other costs, such as personnel assigned to other offices that provide support to the corrosion executive.” The misreported numbers don't appear to be malfeasance, according to the GAO report, but a natural consequence of a lack of direction from the Corrosion Office on how to identify funding needs and properly report that data. GAO made three recommendations to the Defense Department: Issue guidance for identifying and reviewing funding levels for performing corrosion executive duties. Ensure that the Corrosion Office develops a process to maintain documentation of its reviews of corrosion planning. Ensure that corrosion executives establish guidance on reviewing the adequacy of corrosion planning. Defense officials agreed with all three recommendations. https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2018/11/rust-costs-pentagon-21-billion-year/152709/