U.S. Army Awards Lockheed Martin Contract to Increase PAC-3 MSE Production Capacity

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  27 juin 2018 | International, C4ISR

  US military aims for $1 billion missile defense radar in Hawaii

  By: Audrey McAvoy, The Associated Press HONOLULU — The U.S. military wants to install missile defense radar in Hawaii to identify any ballistic missiles that are fired from North Korea or elsewhere, officials said Tuesday. The $1 billion system would spot warheads on missiles headed for Hawaii and other U.S. states, and provide that information to ground-based interceptors in Alaska designed to shoot them down. It would be able to distinguish warheads from decoys that are designed to trick missile defense systems. The radar would help give the Alaska missiles “better eyes,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii and a supporter of the project. So far, lawmakers have appropriated $61 million for planning but not funds for construction. Schatz, who serves on the defense subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he doesn't have much doubt about the likelihood of follow-on funding. The radar would be about 30 to 50 feet wide and 60 feet to 80 feet high, according to the Missile Defense Agency. It will likely to have a flat-face surface like one in Shemya, Alaska, instead of a ball-like appearance of other military radar. Experts say the larger the face, the more precisely it will be able to distinguish between warheads and decoys. The agency is studying two possible locations for the radar, both of which are on Oahu's North Shore. It's collecting public comment through July 16. Schatz said lawmakers discussed the radar with the previous commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. Harry Harris, who recently retired and has been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to South Korea. “We already have robust capabilities, but working with Admiral Harris, we wanted to double down and make sure we have the most powerful combination of missile interceptors and radar systems anywhere,” Schatz said in a phone interview. The radar would help identify long-range ballistic missile threats mid-way through flight. David Santoro, a director and senior fellow for nuclear policy at the Pacific Forum think tank in Honolulu, said threats from North Korea were increasing as Pyongyang developed more sophisticated missiles and nuclear weapons. “Over the past few weeks, we have seen a so-called peace initiative developing, but the reality is the threat is still there. It's not going away,” Santoro said. The U.S. would be expected to build a radar system to counter the threats, he said. U.S. concerns about the threat from North Korean missiles spiked last year as North Korea test-fired long-range missile over Japan and threatened to launch ballistic missiles toward the Guam, a major U.S. military hub in the Pacific. President Donald Trump warned the U.S. military was “locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely” and that the U.S. would unleash “fire and fury” on the North if it continued to threaten America. But then Trump and North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, met in Singapore earlier this month and issued a declaration agreeing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” The statement did not define a process, say when it would begin or say how long it might take. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/06/27/us-military-aims-for-1-billion-missile-defense-radar-in-hawaii/

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  13 février 2020 | International, Terrestre

  DARPA wants commanding robots to work like a video game

  By: Kelsey D. Atherton In a fake city in Mississippi, DARPA is training robots for war. In December 2019, at a camp southeast of Hattiesburg, hundreds of robots gathered to scout an urban environment, and then convert that scouting data into useful information for humans. Conducted at Camp Shelby Joint Forces Training Center, the exercise was the third test of DARPA's OFFensive Swarm-Enable Tactics (OFFSET) program. OFFSET is explicitly about robots assisting humans in fighting in urban areas, with many robots working together at the behents of a small group of infantry to provide greater situational awareness than a human team could achieve on its own. The real-time nature of the information is vital to the vision of OFFSET. It is one thing to operate from existing maps, and another entirely to operate from recently mapped space, with continuing situational awareness of possible threats and other movement through the space. Dating back to at least 2017, OFFSET is in part an iterative process, with contractors competing for and receiving awards for various ‘sprints,' or narrower short-turnaround developments in coding capabilities. Many of these capabilities involve translating innovations from real-time strategy video games into real life, like dragging-and-dropping groups units to give them commands. For the exercise at Camp Shelby, the swarms involved both ground and flying robots. These machines were tasked with finding specific items of interest located in buildings at Camp Shelby's Combined Arms Collective training Facility. To assist the robots in the field experiment, organized seeded the environment with AprilTags. These tags, which are similar to QR codes but trade complexity of data stored for simplicity and robustness in being read at difference, were used to mark the sites of interest, as well as hazards to avoid. In practical use, hazards seldom if ever arrive with barcodes explicitly labeling themselves as hazards, but for training the AprilTags provide a useful scaffolding while the robots coordinate in other ways. “As the swarm relayed information acquired from the tags,” wrote DAPRA, “human swarm tacticians adaptively employed various swarm tactics their teams had developed to isolate and secure the building(s) containing the identified items.” That information is relayed in various ways, from updated live maps on computer screens to floating maps displayed in real time in augmented reality headsets. As foreshadowed by countless works of cyberpunk fiction, these “human swarm tacticians” interfaced with both the real world and a virtual representation of that world at once. Commanding robots to move in real space by manipulating objects in a virtual environment, itself generated by robots exploring and scouting the real space, blurs the distinction between artificial and real environments. That these moves were guided by gesture and haptic feedback only further underscores how deeply linked commanding robots can be to augmented reality. The gesture and haptic feedback command systems were built through sprinter contracts by Charles River Analytics, Inc., Case Western University, and Northwestern University, with an emphasis on novel interaction for human-swarm teaming. Another development, which would be as at home in the real-time strategy game series Starcraft as it is in a DARPA OFFSET exercise, is the operational management of swarm tactics from Carnegie Mellon University and Soar Technology. Their developments allowed the swarm to search and map a building on its own, and to automate resource allocation in the process of accomplishing tasks. For now, the heart of the swarm is as a scouting organism built to provide information to human operators. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2020/02/11/darpa-wants-commanding-robots-to-work-like-a-video-game

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  29 décembre 2024 | International, Aérospatial

  Russian air defenses may have downed Azerbaijani plane: U.S. official

  Moscow officials have not addressed statements from aviation experts who blamed the crash on Russian air defenses responding to a Ukrainian attack.