US Army seeks high-altitude ISR aircraft

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  4 janvier 2019 | International, C4ISR

  DARPA: Generating Actionable Understanding of Real-World Phenomena with AI

  DARPA seeks to develop schema-based AI capability to enhance reasoning about complex world events and generate actionable insights Rapid comprehension of world events is critical to informing national security efforts. These noteworthy changes in the natural world or human society can create significant impact on their own, or may form part of a causal chain that produces broader impact. Many events are not simple occurrences but complex phenomena composed of a web of numerous subsidiary elements – from actors to timelines. The growing volume of unstructured, multimedia information available, however, hampers uncovering and understanding these events and their underlying elements. “The process of uncovering relevant connections across mountains of information and the static elements that they underlie requires temporal information and event patterns, which can be difficult to capture at scale with currently available tools and systems,” said Dr. Boyan Onyshkevych, a program manager in DARPA's Information Innovation Office (I2O). The use of schemas to help draw correlations across information isn't a new concept. First defined by cognitive scientist Jean Piaget in 1923, schemas are units of knowledge that humans reference to make sense of events by organizing them into commonly occurring narrative structures. For example, a trip to the grocery store typically involves a purchase transaction schema, which is defined by a set of actions (payment), roles (buyer, seller), and temporal constraints (items are scanned and then payment is exchanged). To help uncover complex events found in multimedia information and bring them to the attention of system users, DARPA created the Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas (KAIROS) program. KAIROS seeks to create a schema-based AI capability to enable contextual and temporal reasoning about complex real-world events in order to generate actionable understanding of these events and predict how they will unfold. The program aims to develop a semi-automated system capable of identifying and drawing correlations between seemingly unrelated events or data, helping to inform or create broad narratives about the world around us. KAIROS' research objectives will be approached in two stages. The first stage will focus on creating schemas from large volumes of data by detecting, classifying and clustering sub-events based on linguistic inference and common sense reasoning. Researchers taking on this challenge will apply generalization, composition and specialization processes to help generate schemas that describe both simple and complex events, sequence multiple schemas together to understand key contextual elements like roles and timelines, and apply domain-specific knowledge to tailor the analysis for a particular need. The second stage of the program will focus on applying the library of schemas created during stage one to multimedia, multi-lingual information to uncover and extract complex events. This stage will require identifying events and entities, as well as relationships among them to help construct and extend a knowledge base. DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on January 9, 2019 from 10:00am to 2:30pm (EST) at the Holiday Inn at Ballston, 4610 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22203 to provide more information about KAIROS and answer questions from potential proposers. For details of the event, including registration requirements, visit https://www.schafertmd.com/darpa/i2o/KAIROS/pd/. A Broad Agency Announcement that fully describes the program structure and objectives can be found here, https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=0fc6d1a237556c5d59847e7165af3aef&tab=core&_cview=1. Image Caption: This image outlines the two stages of the KAIROS program. The first stage will focus on creating a library of schemas from large volumes of data by detecting, classifying and clustering sub-events based on linguistic inference and common sense reasoning. The second stage will apply those schemas to new information to uncover and extract complex events, as well as relationships among them, to help construct and extend a knowledge base. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-01-04

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  2 février 2021 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  These five items should top Biden’s defense priorities

  By: Sean Kennedy The Biden administration has the opportunity to institute reforms in several crucial areas at the Department of Defense. First and foremost, it should eliminate the overseas contingency operations account. The continued justification for the OCO has reached the stage of parody. Originally intended for emergency spending in response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the account has transitioned into a slush fund designed to inflate spending at the DoD far above the baseline budget and for purposes unrelated to foreign wars. In fiscal 2015, approximately 50 percent of OCO funding was for nonemergency items. An August 2019 Congressional Budget Office report noted that approximately 85 percent of funding for the OCO in FY20 and FY21 “is designated for base-budget and ‘enduring' activities,” funding maintenance in support of foreign operations that will continue regardless of force size. OCO spending has long outpaced the military's presence in combat zones. In FY08, the U.S. deployed an average of 187,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. OCO spending topped $187 billion that year, equating to $1 million per service member. The DoD currently has approximately 5,000 troops stationed in these countries, meaning the $70.7 billion in OCO spending in FY20 equates to $14.1 million in funding per service member — more than 14 times the amount in FY08. With President Joe Biden unlikely to substantially increase the military's footprint in Afghanistan and Iraq, outsized OCO spending will continue in FY21 and beyond, barring reform. The DoD has received approximately $2 trillion from the OCO since 2001. Were it considered to be a federal agency, the FY20 OCO funding would make it the fourth largest, dwarfing spending at all other agencies except the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Veterans Affairs. The incoming administration must also expand efforts to make DoD finances more transparent and accountable. The bookkeeping is so abysmal that areas within the DoD have been on the Government Accountability Office's list of programs at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement since 1995. The financial black hole is nowhere more evident than in the DoD's inability to pass a clean audit, unlike every other federal agency. On Nov. 16, 2020, the Pentagon announced that for the third straight year it failed its financial review. Progress has been incremental, with seven of 24 DoD agencies thus far producing clean audits. However, the DoD estimates that it will not be able to pass an audit before 2027, or 37 years after it was required to do so by law. The DoD must also determine the replacement mechanism for the chief management officer position, which was the No. 3 civilian slot until it was eliminated in the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act. Despite identifying $22.3 billion in savings between FY18 and FY21, legislators bowed to Pentagon pressure, distributing the duties and responsibilities of the role to various existing positions with far less authority. The acquisition side is also a mess, including several infamous procurement disasters that epitomize the Pentagon's systemic problems. The foremost example is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The program has been under continuous development since the contract was awarded in 2001, and has encountered innumerable delays and cost overruns. Total acquisition costs now exceed $428 billion, nearly double the initial estimate of $233 billion. The total costs for the F-35 are estimated to reach $1.727 trillion over the lifetime of the program. On Jan. 14, 2021, then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller labeled the Joint Strike Fighter a “piece of sh*t.” Enough said. Many of the problems with the F-35 program can be traced to the decision to develop and procure the Joint Strike Fighter simultaneously. Whenever problems have been identified, contractors needed to go back and make changes to aircraft that were already assembled, adding to overall costs. Of course none of this has stopped the Pentagon from asking for Joint Strike Fighter funding, and members of Congress from supplying it, oftentimes exceeding the request from the DoD. This trend continued in FY20, when legislators added $2.1 billion in earmarks to fund the acquisition of 22 Joint Strike Fighters beyond the amount requested by the Pentagon, bringing the total amount of earmarks for the program to $8.9 billion since FY01. Lastly, the Biden administration would do well to introduce some stability into Pentagon leadership. Every defense secretary brings to the job different priorities for the government's largest bureaucracy. President Donald Trump burned through two confirmed and four acting secretaries, the most for any administration. President Biden should endeavor to reverse this churn. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/02/01/these-five-items-should-top-bidens-defense-priorities/

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  22 juillet 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  COVID Drives AUSA Mega-Conference Online: Gen. Ham

  Bringing together an estimated 33,000 soldiers and civilians from around the world was just too dangerous in the coronavirus era. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on July 21, 2020 at 3:42 PM WASHINGTON: Every October, the Walter E. Washington convention center in downtown DC – a behemoth building covering two whole city blocks – fills with soldiers, contractors, and reporters. Over 30,000 people pack shoulder-to-shoulder in conference rooms to hear from Army leaders, speak face to face, line up for fried chicken, shake hands, hug, and handle military hardware from prototype rifles to full-sized tanks. But with COVID-19 cases rising alarmingly around the country, none of that will happen this October. “We've made the difficult decision to convert the 2020 AUSA Annual Meeting from an in-person meeting to a virtual experience,” said retired Gen. Carter Ham, the Association of the US Army's president and CEO, in a statement Tuesday afternoon. The mega-conference – historically one of the biggest in-person gatherings for the defense industry in the DC area – will now take place entirely online over Oct. 13-16. Breaking Defense plans to cover the virtual event as exhaustively (and as exhaustingly for our reporters) as it has the physical one every year since 2011. “With recent trends, it just became clear to me that we simply could not, in any reasonable manner, ensure a safe, secure environment for the 32,000-plus people we expected this October,” Gen. Ham told me in an follow-up email. “We are working very closely with the Army to craft an agenda which provides opportunities for key leaders to connect with our members and constituents.” “One of the keys to that is finding ways to connect Army leaders with the businesses, large and small, who normally are present in the exhibition hall,” Ham said. “Finding a way to do something similar to that experience in the virtual world will be a challenge, but it is an integral part of the AUSA Annual Meeting, so we'll figure it out.” AUSA is still working out the logistics of this massive switch. Registrations and sponsorship agreements from the in-person version of the event will not automatically carry over. “Registration for the new virtual meeting is expected to open by September,” the AUSA statement says. “AUSA is now coordinating details for the virtual event, and team members will be reaching out directly to exhibitors and sponsors about new opportunities.” With over 600 sponsors in a typical year – ranging from small businesses with a single, small booth to titans like Boeing and Lockheed Martin – the Annual Meeting is a major source of revenue for AUSA. How this will impact the association's budget is unclear – even to AUSA itself at this point. Breaking Defense graphic from AUSA data “The AUSA Annual Meeting is our most important revenue-generating event of the year,” Ham said bluntly. “The revenue from this event is largely what allows us to conduct other events throughout the year. So, I don't know yet precisely what the impact will be, but there will be some effect. Fortunately, AUSA is in a strong financial position so we will be able to sustain this change.” AUSA's latest annual report said the 2018 conference “generated $16 million in revenue,” just under half the association's total projected revenue of $33 million for the 2018-2019 fiscal year. (The report for 2019-2020 hasn't been published yet). But AUSA also reported its investment portfolio was worth $51 million; that was as of May 2019, before COVID roiled the stock market, but the portfolio should still be large enough to offer at least some buffer. The initial wave of the COVID-19 coronavirus forced AUSA to cancel its Global Force conference in Huntsville, Ala. this March just a week ahead of opening day. That gave the association no time to schedule virtual alternatives, although multiple events from Army aircraft announcements to Shark Tank-style pitch meetings were hastily turned into teleconferences or webcasts. Global Force had expected some 6,000 attendees. Since then, AUSA has held a host of online events, largely but by no means entirely without glitches, but they were all much smaller in scale. The Annual Meeting had expected some 33,000 attendees. Moving that conference online will be a vastly larger organizational and technical challenge. It's also an opportunity, Ham argued. “While we will all certainly miss the opportunity to be together with the broader Army Family, choosing to provide our programs in a virtual environment does offer us an opportunity to connect with audiences who might not know AUSA all that well or who have simply not been able to travel to Washington DC for the event in prior years,” he told me. “I view this very much as a chance to extend our reach and to more effectively fulfill our mission to support the Army.” Even if nothing glitches, though, the virtual Annual Meeting won't replace the human connection that came from the Army's annual gathering of its disparate tribes. “What will I miss? This is the Army's family reunion,” Ham said. “Every October, the opportunity to see old friends and to make new friends is the most enjoyable part of the Annual Meeting. I'll miss that, to be sure, but I also know that via this virtual experience, we will make new connections, new relationships that will make AUSA 2021 even better when we can all be together again.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/covid-drives-ausa-mega-conference-online/