USAF Agility Prime Aims To Boost Investor Confidence In EVTOL Market

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  13 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Pentagon seeks to cut F-35s, other equipment to pay for Trump’s border wall

  By: Aaron Mehta , Valerie Insinna , David B. Larter , and Joe Gould WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is seeking to divert $3.8 billion, largely from its fiscal 2020 weapons procurement budget, in order to fund President Donald Trump's border wall, according to a reprogramming request to congress obtained by Defense News. Among the victims of the cuts: a mass of aircraft purchases including F-35 joint strike fighters, C-130J cargo aircraft, MQ-9 Reaper drones and P-8 maritime surveillance planes, as well as ground vehicles and naval priorities. Overall, the plan would shift $2.202 billion in FY20 defense appropriations and $1.629 billion in FY20 Overseas Contingency Operations funding towards the wall, a key priority from president Donald Trump ahead of the November presidential elections. Air Force and Navy aviation spending takes the brunt of the cuts proposed by the Pentagon, with aircraft procurement going down by $558 million for Navy and Marine Corps and $861 million for the Air Force. Importantly, all of the funding decreases target items that were specifically added by Congress during the budgeting process, which could incur rancor from lawmakers. For the Navy, the Pentagon would cut two of the six F-35B short takeoff and landing aircraft added to the FY20 budget by Congress and two MV-22 Ospreys, stating that “current funding is more than sufficient to keep the production line open.” It also seeks to eliminate funding for one of the nine P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft funded in FY20, stating that the additional aircraft is “[in] excess to the 117 aircraft required.” In the Air Force's budget, the Pentagon slashed funding for the four of the eight C-130Js added by Congress for the reserve and Air National Guard. The department stated that funding for those planes can be rescheduled to fiscal year 2021, when the period of performance for the associated contract starts. The request would eliminate eight MQ-9 Reaper drones, culling most of the funding added by Congress for an increase of 12 MQ-9s. “The program is currently undergoing a strategic review,” the department stated in written justification, referring to an ongoing debate within the Air Force about how many Reapers to buy and retain over the next decade. “Procurement, if necessary, can be rescheduled to a later fiscal year.” Combatant commanders have consistently said they need more surveillance assets around the globe. It also strips $156 million for advanced procurement for the F-35A and removes $180 million for light attack aircraft for the Air Force, which the service has decided against procuring but has been widely supported by lawmakers as a low-cost alternative for the counter-terrorism fight. The Army would stand to lose $100 million in funding for national guard Humvee modernization and $194.5 million in Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck funding. However, with the Humvee set to be replaced by JLTV, the Army is unlikely to be heavily impacted by these funds being shifted around. The reprogramming request also cuts $650 million in advanced procurement funding for an America-class Amphibious Assault Ship, LHA-9, which is being built in Mississippi at Ingalls Shipbuilding. On its website, Huntington Ingalls Industries says the advanced funding provided by Congress, “enables a hot production line and a supplier base of 457 companies in 39 states to build this powerful warship.” The reprogramming also cuts funding one expeditionary fast transport ship, which is built in Alabama at Austal USA, which has been an area of interest for the powerful Republican Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Sen. Richard Shelby. The ship was deemed “excess to current programmatic need,” the reprogramming document says. “The procurement exceeds the program-of-record requirement,” the document reads. “This is a congressional special interest item.” In addition, the national guard and reserves would lose about $1.3 billion in what the reprograming request describes as unnecessary funding, given historic underexecution of prior year funds. A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment. Last year, the defense department had budgets, largely for military construction projects, diverted into funding a stretch of the wall project. Those projects cut included the rebuilding of several DoD schools both in the U.S. and abroad, special operations training centers in Europe and Hurricane Maria relief for Puerto Rico National Guard facilities. Overall, more than 100 projects had funding delayed. Asked on Tuesday about a potential reprograming of defense funds to pay for the wall, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said “We did receive the request from DHS, that's all I'll say right now. We're working our way through the process, we're doing all those things we need to do. So when we're ready to make an announcement, we'll make an announcement.” Word that the Pentagon may once again be raided to pay for the wall came in mid-January, and at the time seemed to catch Republican supporters in Congress off-guard. “I wish they wouldn't take [wall funding] out of defense. I want to build the wall, I supported direct appropriations for it and fought for it — but we have to evaluate what this does to the military, what it affects, where and how,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Richard Shelby, R-Ala, at the time. But he added that nobody should be surprised the administration repeated the tactic, after it worked last year. https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2020/02/13/pentagon-seeks-to-cut-f-35s-other-equipment-to-pay-for-trumps-border-wall

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  18 janvier 2023 | International, C4ISR

  Northrop Grumman to Modernize and Advance AFRL Intelligence Information Systems

  InSITE will modernize the AFRL/RI’s intelligence information collection, sharing and analysis capabilities by implementing state-of-the-art artificial intelligence solutions

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  26 novembre 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Could soldiers silently communicate using brain signals in the future?

  Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — A breakthrough in decoding brain signals could be the first step toward a future where soldiers silently communicate during operations. New research funded by the U.S. Army Research Office successfully separated brain signals that influence action or behavior from signals that do not. Using an algorithm and complex mathematics, the team was able to identify which brain signals were directing motion, or behavior-relevant signals, and then remove those signals from the other brain signals — behavior-irrelevant ones. “Here we're not only measuring signals, but we're interpreting them,” said Hamid Krim, a program manager for the Army Research Office. The service wants to get to the point where the machine can provide feedback to soldier's brains to allow them to take corrective action before something takes place, a capability that could protect the health of a war fighter. Krim pointed to stress and fatigue signals that the brain gives out before someone actually realizes they are stressed or tired, thus letting troops know when they should take a break. The only limit to the possibilities is the imagination, he said. Another potential future use is silent communication, Krim said. Researchers could build on the research to allow the brain and computers to communicate so soldiers can silently talk via a computer in the field. “In a theater, you can have two people talking to each other without ... even whispering a word,” Krim said. “So you and I are out there in the theater and we have to ... talk about something that we're confronting. I basically talked to my computer — your computer can be in your pocket, it can be your mobile phone or whatever — and that computer talks to ... your teammate's computer. And then his or her computer is going to talk to your teammate.” In the experiment, the researchers monitored the brain signals from a monkey reaching for a ball over and over again in order to separate brain signals. But more work is to be done, as any sort of battle-ready machine-human interface using brain signals is likely decades away, Krim said. What's next? Researchers will now try to identify other signals outside of motion signals. “You can read anything you want; doesn't mean that you understand it,” Krim said. “The next step after that is to be able to understand it. The next step after that is to break it down into into words so that ... you can synthesize in a sense, like you learn your vocabulary and your alphabet, then you are able to compose. “At the end of the day, that is the original intent mainly: to have the computer actually being in a full duplex communication mode with the brain.” The Army Research Office-backed program was led by researchers at the University of Southern California, with additional U.S. partners at the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of California, Berkeley; Duke University; and New York University. The program also involved several universities in the United Kingdom, including Essex, Oxford and Imperial College. The Army is providing up to $6.25 million in funding over five years. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/11/25/could-soldiers-silently-communicate-using-brain-signals-in-the-future/