Nouvelles

Kelvin Wong, Singapore - Jane's International Defence Review UAVOS Inc, a US-based company specialising in the design, development and manufacturing of unmanned vehicles and associated control systems, is partnering with India's Bharat Drone Systems to develop a range of air vehicles and technologies to meet emerging Indian armed forces requirements. The company is taking the opportunity at the UAV India 2018 exhibition in New Delhi to highlight its fixed-wing and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The fixed wing Borey 10 is a tactical-class UAV featuring a flying wing airframe with a wingspan of 3.5 m and maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 15 kg. The baseline UAV is powered by a 2,000 W electric motor and four 6S 16Аh lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries that are packaged within a hermetically sealed shell along with its control systems for improved reliability in austere environments, enabling it to continue operations in temperatures as low as -22 °C. According to UAVOS, the Borey 10 – which features automatic take-off and landing capabilities and can be launched and recovered via a catapult and parachute respectively – is designed to transmit video imagery in difficult meteorological operating conditions at distances over 30 km, with a control range of at least 70 km. The company is quoting a continuous flight endurance of up to 4 hours with a 0.5 kg payload. UAVOS has also developed a range of VTOL UAV platforms. The latest addition is the UVH-290E, which has a maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of 2 107 kg and measures 2.43 m long and 0.86 m tall with a main rotor diameter of 3.2 m. It is equipped with a 4-stroke Wankel engine rated at 17 kW, enabling it to achieve cruise and maximum speeds of 70 km/h and 100 km/h respectively, with a stated endurance of about 5 hours while carrying a 5 kg payload. https://www.janes.com/article/82743/uavos-showcases-latest-uavs

By: Jessie Bur The Pentagon has pushed back the response deadline for its $10 billion, single-award Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract by nearly a month, according to an Aug. 31 FedBizOpps posting. The Department of Defense made amendments to five documents associated with the contract, which, according to the new posting, were part of the consideration for moving the request for proposal due date to Oct. 9, rather than the previous Sept. 17 deadline. In addition to the amended documents, the DoD released 59 industry comments and corresponding government answers about the first RFP amendment made Aug. 23. The contract has already received industry protest prior to award, after many criticized the DoD's intent to award the contract to a single cloud provider. The due date for that protest, moved to Dec. 3 after an update was made, is still well beyond the new bidding deadline. https://www.federaltimes.com/govcon/2018/09/04/dod-extends-deadline-for-its-10b-cloud-contract

By Stephen Carlson Sept. 4 (UPI) -- Lockheed Martin, General Atomics and Boeing have received contract modifications for drone-mounted Low Power Laser Demonstrator system missile defense testing. Lockheed Martin's contract has increased to a total value of $37.7 million, while General Atomics and Boeing's have been increased to $34 million and $29.4 million respectively, the Department of Defense announced on Friday. Work for all three companies will take place in various locations across the United States. The contract modifications come from the Missile Defense Agency and can extend as far as July 2019. Specifications listed include a flight altitude of at least 63,000 feet, the endurance to stay on station for at least 36 hours after a transit of 1,900 miles, and a cruising speed of up to Mach .46 while patrolling its station. The aircraft needs to be able to carry a payload between 5,000 and 12,500 pounds and sufficient power generation to operate a 140 kilowatt laser, with the possibility of up to 280 kw or more. The system must also be able to operate the laser for at least 30 minutes without affecting flight performance, and be capable of carrying a one- to two-meter optical system for the laser. The Missile Defense Agency is responsible for the defense of U.S. territory and its allies from ballistic missile threats. It coordinates a network of land-based and ship-based missile interceptors, along with radars and satellites to detect and destroy enemy ballistic missiles. ICBMs are at their most vulnerable during their boost phase. A UAV capable of targeting them before they exit the atmosphere would greatly increase the possibility of intercept, the Pentagon said. https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2018/09/04/Lockheed-Martin-General-Atomics-Boeing-compete-for-laser-armed-drone/9251536091266/

Nick Brown, London Key Points Williams has built a transformable cockpit structure to help BAE Systems experiment with training approaches and assess new cockpit technologies The cockpit tool is part of a holistic approach BAE Systems is taking to improve products and training solutions, using team-based lessons from motorsport BAE Systems is completing integration work on a new cockpit simulator, which it plans to use as a “sandpit for innovation”, chief technologist Julia Sutcliffe told Jane's . The cockpit structure was designed and built by Williams Advanced Engineering using skills and methodologies honed by the Williams Formula 1 team. According to Williams' technical director, Paul McNamara, the design was influenced by the modularity of construction and heavily metricated human factors teamwork that is required for fast pit stops. This modularity will enable engineers to reconfigure the physical cockpit layout, controls, and components to replicate legacy aircraft such as the Hawk and Typhoon, swiftly tailor them for a range of pilot builds, and to experiment with innovative layouts and systems that might feed into the new Tempest future fighter programme, using live feedback from aircrew and engineers. Rather than being used in a traditional aircrew training simulator role, Sutcliffe explained that the new cockpit is designed to be an experimental “workhorse” to support BAE Systems' technology development and product roadmaps for a range of technologies and platforms. She added that “we wanted the ability to experiment with layouts that we can quickly reconfigure – front and back – without having to duck underneath [the cockpit installation] and reconnect wires and all sorts of stuff.” Stuart Olden, business development manager at Williams, told Jane's that this was underpinned by motorsport experience, with the company's whole-system design approach “enabling the maintainers and the operators of the simulator to gain access quickly to particular components to swap in, swap out, and change elements around”. https://www.janes.com/article/82764/bae-systems-draws-on-motorsport-experience-to-revolutionise-cockpit-development

By: Mark Pomerleau The Army is making several changes to be in a better position to compete with adversaries in cyber, the electromagnetic spectrum and space. Russia and China have begun to organize all information-related capability — to include cyber, electronic warfare, information operations and space — under singular entities. Now, Army leaders, say the service must do the same. “Integrated formations will be innovative because they'll help us create novel approaches to problem solving by leveraging multiple skillsets,” David May, senior intelligence adviser at the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, said during a presentation at TechNet Augusta in August. May outlined five force design updates the Army is implementing. Four of those five updates will begin immediately to provide competitive edge in multidomain operations. 1. The widespread introduction of cyber and electromagnetic activities May said the Army will introduce cyber and electromagnetic activities, or CEMA sections, at every echelon from the brigade to service component commands. These sections will plan, synchronize and integrate cyber and EW operations as well as conduct spectrum management. At the Army's cyber school, effective Oct. 1, all previous electronic warfare personnel in the functional area 29 will transition into the cyber branch to serve as these CEMA planners. That's important because it moves those staffers out from working as a functional area specialist and into an operational branch, Maj. Gen. John Morrison, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, the home of the cyber school, told C4ISRNET during an interview at TechNet. May said Army leaders are expected to approve this plan in the next six weeks. Moreover, the update will not require any additional growth to the Army as it will reorganize existing workforce. 2. New electronic warfare platoons Electronic warfare platoons will be stood up within brigades residing inside military intelligence companies working in tandem with signals intelligence teams and double the Army's sensing capability in the electromagnetic spectrum, May said. Full article: https://www.c4isrnet.com/show-reporter/technet-augusta/2018/09/04/here-are-5-army-modernization-efforts-to-keep-pace-in-cyber-and-electronic-warfare

By: Adam Stone With incredible volumes of material on the move – think: arms and munitions, supplies, vehicles – the military quite simply needs a better way to track its stuff. “We hear a lot of concerns about getting in-transit visibility in the last tactical mile, from the supply point to the end user,” said Jim Alexander, product lead for automated movement and identification solutions in PEO EIS – Enterprise Information Systems. “We are working with our partners and with transportation command to gather up the requirements for the next generation of in-transit visibility for DoD.” At the heart of transit tracking today is radio-frequency identification (RFID), which allows logisticians to tag and track goods on the move. But RFID has its limitations: It's infrastructure intensive and not globally available. Military planners are looking to do better. Falling short RFID technology took a big step forward about 20 years ago with the widespread adoption of “active RFID.” Rather than scan individual items by hand, active RFID uses a fixed scanner to monitor entire lots. You'll see this equipment at airports and at the gates of military installations. But active RFID isn't an ideal solution. “It consists of a dome-shaped reader on a pole, connected to power and ethernet. So you are running power lines and communication lines, and if the reader goes down someone has to go out and physically service it,” said Rosemary Johnston, senior vice president of government at solutions provider Savi. The company is sole provider for the DoD's RFID-IV contract, which has a $102 million ceiling. “Each reader costs a couple of thousand dollars, plus the cost of hooking it up, running wires via trenches. It becomes a major construction investment project,” said Johnston, a former chief master sergeant with the U.S. Air Force. In addition, active RFID equipment isn't necessarily well-suited to today's highly agile expeditionary fighting style. “The military doesn't know where the next fight is going to be, so they use portable deployment kits rather than do this massive construction, but even those are heavy ― the lightest weighs 25 pounds ― and they require good satellite coverage. It becomes very resource constrained,” she said. With the next-gen RFID contract, the military envisions a better way of doing business. A cellular solution Satellite-readable RFID tags offer some relief, as they expand the military's reach without requiring extensive additional overhead. But satellite time is costly. Savi's emerging solution would leverage widely available cellular signals as a new means to capture and communicate RFID information. Johnston describes early trials of cellular RFID in Africa, where materials tracking has been a perennial problem. U.S. and European forces have just six fixed RFID readers on the entire continent, making supplemental coverage an urgent need, she said. “We have used cellular technology in Africa with a commercial company very successfully for the past three or four years. The networks we would use on the military side would be very similar to what this commercial customer uses, so we believe that represents a great opportunity for Africa Command,” she said. The switch to cellular isn't technically complicated: military planners would need to add a cellular module to the existing RFID tag. That module could then be programmed to automatically report location status to the military's in-transit visibility server. High-value cargo might report hourly, whereas more mundane supplies could be set to check in daily or every couple of days, in order to conserve battery life in the RFID tag. At PEO-EIS, Alexander said he sees strong potential in the technology. With a cellular system, “you could get a much more granular look, a more detailed look at where my stuff is,” as compared to relying on fixed checkpoints, he said. “If you have sensitive cargo you can know where it is every hour on the hour, as opposed to waiting for that cargo to pass by a fixed site.” Some technical details still need to be worked out in order to implement a commercial-grade cellular solution within the military. For example, “you don't want to have anything in the device that would trigger a static charge if you are working around ammunition,” Johnston noted. “We are working through that process right now.” https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/09/04/next-gen-rfid-could-improve-how-vehicles-get-to-the-battlefield

ORLANDO, Fla., Sept. 4, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Navy awarded Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) a seven-year contract worth up to more than $500 million to build and deliver more than 200+ electronic Consolidated Automated Support Systems (eCASS) to maximize aircraft readiness. The previous Navy CASS contract awarded in 2000 to Lockheed Martin was worth $287 million. According to Navy Naval Air Systems Command, eCASS saves the Navy money by averting the repair of avionics at the next level of maintenance or sending the parts back to the original equipment manufacturer. Sailors use eCASS to troubleshoot and repair aircraft electronics ashore and at sea, allowing them to return aircraft such as the F/A-18 and E-2D to operational status quickly and efficiently. "Lockheed Martin's partnership with the Navy on Automated Test Equipment began more than 30 years ago with the production and sustainment of the legacy CASS family of products," said Amy Gowder, general manager and vice president, Lockheed Martin Training and Logistics Solutions. "Our technology is always evolving and now can support F-35 advanced avionics and other fifth-generation platforms. Our goal remains the same – keep aircraft mission ready at the most affordable lifecycle cost now and for the future." Since 2010, Lockheed Martin has delivered more than 80 eCASS stations to the Navy, as part of its transition from the legacy CASS testing stations to the smaller, faster and more reliable eCASS. For additional information, visit www.lockheedmartin.com/eCASS. About Lockheed Martin Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 100,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. This year the company received three Edison Awards for ground-breaking innovations in autonomy, satellite technology and directed energy. SOURCE Lockheed Martin https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2018-09-04-Lockheed-Martin-Secures-Automated-Test-Equipment-Contract

By: Adam Stone As Navy Cyber Security Division director, Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett casts a wary eye over the rising importance of data as a weapon of war. Data is an ever-more-critical battlefield asset, given the rising internet of things, including a rapidly growing inventory of unmanned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets across the Navy. Protecting all that data from enemy exploitation represents a potentially massive cyber challenge. This spring, the Navy announced “Compile to Combat in 24 Hours,” a pilot project to leverage web services and a new cloud architecture in the service of data security. C4ISRNET's Adam Stone spoke to Barrett about the potential there, and about the emerging IT security landscape in a data-centric military. C4ISRNET: Data has become increasingly valuable, especially in terms of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. How valuable is it? How do you describe the significance of data these days? REAR ADM. DANELLE BARRETT: If you look at what goes on in industry and how they use big data for decision making, to be predictive and proactive: that's exactly the kind of environment that we want to get to. Being able to trust those data, to access the data, expose the data, reuse the data — that becomes actually the hardest part. C4ISRNET: Let's talk about that. Sharing data involves risk. Talk about that risk landscape. BARRETT: The more data that you have out there and the more places you have it, obviously you have an increased attack surface. Adversaries will go after your data to try to get an advantage. So, you want to protect data down to the lowest layer and you want to make sure that you have defense in depth built in, and resiliency to be able to work through any kind of attack or interruption in your data flow. We build our architectures around being resilient using the NIST [National Institute of Standards and Technology] model of “detect, react and restore.” You build in as much resiliency as you can. C4ISRNET: Can you say, specifically, how that's done? BARRETT: I'll give you an example of something that we're testing in our architecture to try to improve the data down to the data element layer. We have an effort called “Compile to Combat in 24 Hours.” We're looking at modernizing our afloat architecture and, as we do that, we're decomposing big monolithic applications, if you will, into web services similar to what you'd get on an iPhone: smaller capabilities, smaller web services as opposed to these big monolithic applications. As you do that, you can ensure that you're using standard ports and protocols, so you don't have applications on the ship that are reaching back over nonstandard ports, which would present an increased attack surface. If you can standardize on your ports, you can sense those better and monitor those better. Then you then go down to the data element layer. Say you standardize on extensible markup language, XML, you can then apply the SAML protocol that is inherent to that to protect your data at that lowest layer. We're testing that concept in an architecture now. Full article: https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/08/31/the-rising-importance-of-data-as-a-weapon-of-war/

By: Kelsey Atherton Drones are everywhere in the Pentagon today. While unpeopled vehicles are most closely associated with the Air Force and targeted killing campaigns, remotely controlled robots are in every branch of the military and used across all combatant commands. The fiscal year 2018 defense authorization contained the largest budget for drones and robots across the services ever, a sign of just how much of modern warfare involves these machines. Which is perhaps why, when the Department of Defense released its latest roadmap for unmanned systems, the map came in at a punchy 60 pages, far shy of the 160-page tome released in 2013. This is a document less about a military imagining a future of flying robots and more about managing a present that includes them. The normalization of battlefield robots Promised since at least spring 2017, the new roadmap focuses on interoperability, autonomy, network security and human-machine collaboration. The future of drones, and of unpeopled ground vehicles or water vehicles, is as tools that anyone can use, that can do most of what is asked of them on their own, that communicate without giving away the information they are sharing, and that will work to make the humans using the machines function as more-than-human. This is about a normalization of battlefield robots, the same way that mechanized warfare moved from a theoretical approach to the standard style of fighting by nations a few generations ago. Network security isn't as flashy a highlight as “unprecedented battlefield surveillance by flying robot,” but it's part of making sure that those flying cameras don't, say, transmit easily intercepted data over an open channel. “Future warfare will hinge on critical and efficient interactions between war-fighting systems,” states the roadmap. “This interoperable foundation will transmit timely information between information gatherers, decision makers, planners and war fighters.” A network is nothing without its nodes, and the nodes that need to be interoperable here are a vast web of sensors and weapons, distributed among people and machines, that will have to work in concert in order to be worth the networking at all. The very nature of war trends toward pulling apart networks, toward isolation. Those nodes each become a point at which a network can be broken, unless they are redundant or autonomous. Where will the lethal decision lie? Nestled in the section on autonomy, the other signpost feature of the Pentagon's roadmap, is a small chart about the way forward. In that chart is a little box labeled “weaponization,” and in that box it says the near-term goals are DoD strategy assessment and lethal autonomous weapon systems assessment. Lethal autonomous weapon systems are of such international concern that there is a meeting of state dignitaries and humanitarian officials in Geneva happening at the exact moment this roadmap was released. That intergovernmental body is hoping to decide whether or not militaries will develop robots that can kill of their own volition, according to however they've been programmed. The Pentagon, at least in the roadmap, seems content to wait for its own assessment and the verdict of the international community before developing thinking weapons. Hedging on this, the same chart lists “Armed Wingman/Teammate (Human decision to engage)” as the goal for somewhere between 2029 and 2042. “Unmanned systems with integrated AI, acting as a wingman or teammate with lethal armament could perform the vast majority of the actions associated with target identification,tracking, threat prioritization, and post-attack assessment," reads the report. "This level of automation will alleviate the human operator of task-level activities associated with the engagement of a target, allowing the operator to focus on the identified threat and the decision to engage.” The roadmap sketches out a vision of future war that hands off many decisions to autonomous machines, everything from detection to targeting, then loops the lethal decision back to a human responsible for making the call on whether or not the robot should use its weapons on the targets it selected. Humans as battlefield bot-shepards, guiding autonomous machines into combat and signing off on the exact attacks, is a possible future for robots in war, one that likely skirts within the boundaries of still-unsettled international law. Like its predecessor, this drone roadmap is plotting a rough path through newly charted territory. While it leans heavily on the lessons of the present, the roadmap doesn't attempt to answer on its own the biggest questions of what robots will be doing on the battlefields of tomorrow. That is, fundamentally, a political question, and one that much of the American public itself doesn't yet have strong feelings about. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/08/31/new-military-drone-roadmap-ambivalent-on-killer-robots