Sponsored by Spectra Group
https://tacs.at/Spectra
———————————————————————–
20 Aug 20. DOD Partners With Agencies to Use AI for Disaster, Humanitarian Relief. The Defense Department is partnering with other agencies to develop deep-learning artificial intelligence algorithms to provide near-real-time data to improve the decision-making of first responders engaged in natural disasters and humanitarian assistance efforts.
Representatives from DOD and its partners — the Energy Department and Microsoft — along with a White House official, spoke yesterday during a virtual meeting.
Michael J. Kratsios, DOD’s chief technology officer, said five consortiums have been launched to accomplish this goal, using the best AI technology talent from industry to respond to humanitarian assistance and to mitigate natural disasters by protecting property and lives, including those of first responders.
Cheryl Ingstad, director of the Energy Department’s AI and technology office, said one of the most important aspects of this work is understanding first responders’ needs and developing AI in such a way that they can easily understand and use it. She said she’s confident the work will save lives and that additional partners may be added to the effort.
Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said DOD is working on this collaborative project because the department devotes significant time and manpower to responding to disasters and humanitarian assistance relief operations, and this work can contribute to that effort in a big way.
Research and development, he said, has been progressing for about a year, and it has progressed from being a concept to become something that can be used. “Software has unique and powerful properties,” he said. “If you build it well with the right customer focus and architecture, the more you build, the cheaper it gets.”
Susie Adams, Microsoft’s chief federal technology officer, said the work not only will help first responders in the United States, but also will be shared with global partners.
“AI and machine learning enable solutions never thought possible,” she said. “AI is a tool to augment human intelligence, not replace it. It’s about getting data to the right people at the right time as quickly as possible so they can make better-informed decisions.”
Adams noted that Microsoft has been working on AI for about 25 years and now has 1,000 researchers engaged in AI work.
Chris Liddell, White House deputy chief of staff, said the administration is excited about government and private partners using AI to save lives and fully supports the effort. (Source: US DoD)
20 Aug 20. Australian Industry support program launched, seeking cyber bids. Defence has launched a new industry support program, looking to recruit small businesses to “join the fight against cyber threats”.
Under the Defence Industry Competitive Evaluation Research Agreement (ICERA), Australian small businesses will receive funding to develop “ambitious, game-changing” capabilities for the ADF.
Support of up to $300,000 per proposal will be provided for projects for up to 18 months.
Minister for Defence Industry Melissa Price said ICERA is being funded through Defence’s Next Generation Technologies Fund, in a new scheme that will provide $36m over six years.
“Australia’s strategic context is changing significantly and our defence strategy is responding to these changes,” said Minister Price.
“This change is something which has been clearly highlighted in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update that was released recently.
“Our small business sector has a more important role than ever in contributing to Defence’s science and technology research priorities that support ADF capability needs.
“Which is why I welcome that the first focus of the ICERA initiative is targeting on cyber defence and cyber security.”
Later rounds of ICERA are expected to focus on a range of other priority areas, including integrated intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, medical countermeasures, space, and trusted autonomous systems.
Defence adds that successful projects may be considered for further funding or opportunities through other avenues and mechanisms. (Source: Defence Connect)
17 Aug 20. Boeing & Lockheed Vie For Cyber/EW/SIGINT System, TLS. The US Army has big ambitions for the Terrestrial Layer System, meant to detect, decrypt, and disrupt enemy communications. We spoke to the companies that actually have to build it.
Army jargon can be notoriously bland, but Terrestrial Layer System may take the cake. Behind the nondescript name, however, is an ambitious program that will challenge the high-tech titans now competing to manufacture it: Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Boeing subsidiary DRT got a $7.6m Other Transaction Authority contract in April to build TLS prototypes; Lockheed got its $6m OTA in May. Both firms are now busily integrating their electronics onto Army-provided 8×8 Stryker armored vehicles.
“The advancement of the state of the art is really in two areas,” Boeing executive Paul Turczynski told me. “You hear a lot about ‘convergence,’ but this is really the first program that brings together the SIGINT, the EW and the cyber. And the second major difference from other programs is the open architecture.”
TLS won’t just be a long-range ground-based jammer, the first such system to enter widespread service in the US in decades. That would be a big deal by itself, since – aside from a handful of urgently fielded experimental systems – the US has for decades got by with a mix of high-powered aerial systems and short-range ground systems, the latter specifically designed to disable radio-controlled IEDs.
But TLS is also supposed to be a cyber weapon and a signals intelligence collector. That means TLS will have three very different options once it detects an transmission: keep listening and try to decrypt it (SIGINT), try to connect to the enemy wireless network and hack into it (cyber), or transmit a jamming signal to disrupt the enemy’s communications (electronic warfare).
The US has never before built such a hybrid. While Lockheed Martin is also developing a drone-borne jammer for the Army, MFEW-Air-Large, that cyber/EW system does not include the SIGINT capability.
What’s more, it’s not enough for a single TLS vehicle or MFEW drone to operate alone. Each must share data nigh-instantaneously across a network of Army systems, all united by common standards for data, software, and hardware. This unified approach, called modular open systems architecture, should also allow the Army to plug-and-play upgrades from any company – not just whichever one wins the TLS contract – as long as their product meets the standards.
“We really like the CMOSS open architecture standards that were established by the Army,” Lockheed exec John Wojnar told me. “You can take out a vendor card A and put in a vendor card B, seamlessly….As new antennas come along, no matter if they’re from vendor A, B or C, you take the old one out, you put the new one in; as long as it has the modular open RF architecture compliance built into it, you’re good to go.”
The 2022 budget “probably looks to be flat,” Vic Mercado, assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans and capabilities, says. “We still have to look to the future, maybe take some risks in the near-term, and make some investments in those technologies that we’re going to need in the future like hypersonics, artificial intelligence.”
“It gives the Army a lot more flexibility down the road,” Wojnar said.
For TLS, Lockheed is offering a ground-based variant of its Silent Crow technology, which was also the basis of its winning bid for MFEW-Air-Large. But a ground-based system presents some very different technical challenges than an aerial one, Wojnar told me.
Airborne systems like MFEW, the Navy Growler, and the Air Force Compass Call can redeploy wherever they’re needed much faster than a ground vehicle. Their altitude lifts them above obstacles like hills and buildings that might block transmissions to and from the ground, giving them a clearer view over a wider area and open lines of fire for their electronic attacks.
But being up in the air also has its downsides. Transmitting over the longer distances involved requires a lot more power — and aircraft are already burning fuel every second of flight. Even a long-endurance drone can’t stay in position as long as a ground vehicle, and being above all obstacles means it’s easier for any enemy with radar to detect you and shoot you down.
By contrast, a TLS unit can park in a covered position, drape some camo netting over their vehicles, and keep silent watch for enemy signals as long as the commander requires.
Terrain that hides the TLS from the enemy can also mask the enemy’s transmissions from TLS, however. Even on open ground, you can’t see objects hidden by the horizon, which is much closer if you’re at ground level than if you’re in the air. That limits the range of even the most powerful ground-based system.
Being at ground level also potentially puts TLS amidst a welter of distracting signals, from friendly soldiers’ radios to civilian cell towers, that its algorithms must carefully sort through to find the enemy emitters. Fortunately, a ground vehicle also has a lot more room to carry computers, large-aperture sensors, and human analysts than an aerial system of comparable cost.
Not everything is easier to fit on a ground vehicle, however, said Boeing’s Turczynski, whose company helped build some of the experimental ground-based systems the Army has already fielded in small numbers, like the Electronic Warfare Tactical Vehicle. The superstructure of a Stryker or other armored vehicle is typically a lot more cluttered than the clean lines of a plane or drone, making it tricky to fit all the antennas needed without things getting in each others’ way.
“On aircraft, on ships, there’s a lot more real estate to do antenna placement,” he said. “[On ground systems], it’s going to be a little more difficult where you place it, what you do to mitigate the interference.”
The other tricky thing to fit into TLS is the mix of classified and unclassified systems required to do SIGINT and cyber/electronic warfare on the same platform, Turczynski told me. “You’re going to have multiple security domains within that confined space,” he said, “so how do you do that and keep everything separate, but have the information available to the systems and subsystems that need it?”
MFEW-Air-Large doesn’t have this particular problem, since the airborne system is for cyber/EW only.
To confront a high-tech threat like Russia or China, the Army needs both kind of system. Airborne systems can sweep wide areas and detect threats from a distance, then pass the data to ground-based units to move in and follow up at closer range and for a longer time. But in many ways, the Terrestrial Layer System is the bigger technical challenge. (Source: Breaking Defense.com)
18 Aug 20. Information Warfare. US Navy information warfare project received $400m funding boost. An information warfare project run by Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) recently received hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds after a successful first 18 months, NAVWAR announced Aug. 17.
NAVWAR’s Information Warfare Research Project (IWRP), which uses an agile acquisition tool known as an Other Transaction Authority to quickly contract for and deliver IW tools, recently received a $400m funding increase and two-year performance period extension after hitting its $100m funding ceiling a year before the project was set to expire next summer.
The massive bump was approved by Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition James Geurts. The project, which kicked off in October 2018, now has a $500m ceiling and a five-year performance period.
“IWRP has proven its effectiveness and successfulness as a streamlined approach to rapid prototyping,” said Jee Youn Fickling, IWRP program manager at Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic, in a statement. “As interest increases to do more prototyping in order to keep up with the pace of technology, IWRP OTA offers the flexibility and speed within 14 technology areas. The growth in interest from IWRP users across many Navy and Marine Corps commands and program offices and the growth in the size of the consortium, speaks volumes to the need to quickly make awards for prototypes.”
The project focuses on technology areas that include tools for cyber warfare, autonomous systems, cloud computing and data analytics.
IWRP partners with industry and academia through a consortium managed by Advanced Technology International, a non-profit that builds research and development partnerships. In the last 18 months, the IWRP has released more than 800 prototyping opportunities, according to the NAVWAR press release. The consortium has more than 580 partners.
IWRP users include NAVWAR, NIWC Atlantic, NIWC Pacific, Naval Sea Systems Command Logistics, Maintenance and Industrial Operations, Program Executive Office (PEO) for Digital Enterprise Services, PEO for Manpower, Logistics and Business Solutions, PEO Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence Space Systems, PEO Integrated Warfare Systems, Marine Corps Systems Command, Naval Analytics Office and Office of Naval Research.
“IWRP has been a game changer and has proven to be a key enabler in rapid delivery of IW capability to the warfighter,” said Nicole Stone, director of rapid prototyping – information warfare at NIWC Pacific, in a statement. “Collaboration with our partners in industry, small business and academia, with the flexibility necessary to adapt to evolving requirements, is critical to our success in winning the fight. IWRP provides that platform for us.” (Source: Defense News)
18 Aug 20. Airborne electronic warfare deal inked with US DoD. The US Department of Defense and Australian Department of Defence have established an international agreement concerning the co-operative development of Airborne Multi-Platform Electronic Warfare capabilities.
Under the AMPEW Project Arrangement, personnel from the US and Australia will continue to engage daily to develop technologies under the six-year agreement.
Head of Air Force Capability, Air Vice-Marshal Cath Roberts, AM, CSC, said the agreement builds upon the long history of close collaboration.
“The AMPEW Project Arrangement establishes a co-operative project to jointly design, develop, test, and demonstrate dynamic multi-platform electromagnetic manoeuvre warfare resource allocation management (EMW RAM) tools and decision aids,” said AVM Roberts.
“The primary objective is to decrease aircrew cognitive workload and automate command and control of manned and unmanned EW systems from stand-in to stand-off ranges.
“The Project Arrangement serves as the mechanism under which the United States Navy and Australia are executing the EMW RAM Coalition Warfare Program project and Future Naval Capability.
“This is a partnership between Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division Office of Naval Research; Naval Air Systems Command; Royal Australian Air Force; Australia’s Defence Science and Technology Group; and industry for both the US and Australia.”
The AMPEW deal will also see Defence capabilities collaborating with partners in the US DoD to jointly undertake studies to identify future co-operative development opportunities directed towards increased airborne multi-platform EW capabilities. (Source: Defence Connect)
17 Aug 20. Viasat Mobile Dynamic Defense Software Integrated into the Samsung Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition Solution Ecosystem. Viasat Cybersecurity Software Can Help Safeguard Sensitive Information Stored and Accessed on the Galaxy Device.
Viasat Inc. (NASDAQ: VSAT), a global communications company, announced today its Mobile Dynamic Defense (MDD) cybersecurity software is now available for the new Samsung Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition (TE) solution. The Viasat MDD platform will ensure sensitive Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. federal government and international Five Eye (FVEY) allied forces information, hosted on the Samsung Galaxy S20 TE device, is continually monitored and protected from compromise—even if the device is disconnected from the military or government operations center.
Viasat’s MDD solution provides advanced cyber protection, information assurance and enhanced mobile management. It works in environments with limited and no network connectivity and has the flexibility to adjust to mission needs at a moment’s notice. By integrating the Viasat MDD software into existing device ecosystems, like the Samsung Galaxy S20 TE, warfighters at the tactical edge will improve situational awareness and maintain mission effectiveness.
Ken Peterman, president, Government System at Viasat commented, “By embedding Viasat’s MDD cybersecurity platform into the Samsung Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition we are ensuring today’s military personnel, government leaders and high profile business executives are securely connected and ‘mission-ready.’ Our integrated mobile cyber-defense solution enables missions to be completed without the fear of jeopardizing confidential military or government policy, proprietary information or device integrity. Viasat MDD is a critical capability proven to protect device users—whether remote, local or connected to a live network—by allowing them to provision and configure their device as their mission changes.”
“Today’s operators need to make real-time decisions while processing an enormous amount of information across a variety of tactical environments,” said Chris Balcik, vice president of Sales, Federal Government, Samsung Electronics America. “We worked diligently with the industry’s most trusted companies, such as Viasat, to ensure best-in-class software, services and hardware solutions perform with our devices. Galaxy S20 Tactical Edition is a secure mobile device that integrates into advanced systems and enables operators to complete their missions—regardless of location.”
The MDD software is an integral component of Viasat’s comprehensive cybersecurity platform, which analyzes terabits of data across commercial and government networks on a daily basis to defend against some of the world’s most sophisticated cyber threats.
Availability of the MDD software on the Galaxy S20 TE
Viasat’s MDD software is now available for integration into the Samsung Galaxy S20 TE ecosystem. Viasat will be able to support the device across multiple carrier networks as well as private 5G SIMs, Wi-Fi 6 and CBRS (Citizens Broadband Radio Service) networks.
17 Aug 20. Lockheed develops electronic warfare tools with eye toward multinational interoperability. As Lockheed Martin works on the U.S. Army’s first ground-based integrated signals intelligence, electronic warfare and cyber system, the company is placing a heavy focus on coalition interoperability.
The Army awarded Lockheed a $6m other transaction authority contract — a highly flexible contracting tool — in May to build the first phase of the Terrestrial Layer System-Large. Boeing subsidiary Digital Receiver Technology also won an award for the program for $7.6m. The two companies will build and outfit their systems to Stryker vehicles during the 16-month-long phase one, while also participating in operational assessments, after which the Army will choose one company to move on.
John Wojnar, director for cyber and electronic warfare strategy at Lockheed, told C4ISRNET in a July interview that the company had a keen eye toward integrating its system with international partners as well as the Army, given the U.S. military doesn’t fight alone.
“Being able to bring in our coalition partners, maybe starting with the Five Eyes first and in particular the U.K., and aligning the architecture that we provided … really drove us to the architecture that we came up with,” he said.
He added that Lockheed examined the building blocks of the U.K.’s cyber and electromagnetic activities to help inform the offering. Being in close partnership with coalition members is key, he said, so whatever architectures the company designs should be interoperable with partners to maximize effectiveness on the battlefield.
Lockheed’s system was an internal research and development project that is a companion of sorts to its aerial cyber/electronic warfare system Silent Crow, which the Army awarded a year ago for its Multi-Function Electronic Warfare-Air Large system.
Wojnar said the ground system went through testing in September at the Army’s Cyber Blitz event, which helps the service understand how to mature cyber and electronic warfare operations with traditional units through actual experimentation with emerging technologies and soldiers at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst.
“Based on lessons learned from those tests as well as the other activities that have been underway tied to Silent Crow IRAD, we were able to leverage the best of the best to then come up with our TLS-Large system offering,” he said.
The work that will be ongoing between now and next summer when the first phase of TLS wraps up, Wojnar added, includes ensuring all the component parts developed internally and externally have been acquired and integrated into the ground vehicles, as well as conducting a variety of software drops. (Source: Defense News)
17 Aug 20. DOD Leaders Provide Digital Modernization Updates. Data will be the fuel and the engine for everything the Defense Department has to do to bring intelligence and operations together, DOD’s chief information officer told CIOs and technology leaders from across the department in a virtual global town hall meeting.
Dana Deasy said during the Aug. 12 event that quality data that is secure will also help to enable the development of artificial intelligence.
With AI, humans and machines are going to collaborate effectively and efficiently in an ethical manner, Deasy said, lauding the progress being made by the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s work over the last 18 months.
He then turned his attention to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The DOD COVID-19 Task Force, along with IT organizations across the department, have helped to protect DOD personnel, ensured continued execution of missions and supported the whole of government approach in combating the pandemic, the CIO said. The combatant commanders, leaders from across the services and the secretary of defense all have recognized that effort, he noted.
“It was there. It worked,” he said, speaking of the tools that service members and DOD civilian employees have used to work remotely. “Yes, we had our moments where we had to scramble and get things fixed, but if you kind of take the long view of this thing, it was a truly remarkable result by all of you, so a huge ‘thank you.'”
U.S. Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Joint Staff, the military services and National Guard Bureau, as well as the DOD CIO office, worked together to get the necessary equipment into the hands of the users, enabling hundreds of thousands of people to work remotely, Deasy said.
Navy Rear Adm. William Chase, senior military advisor for DOD Cyber Policy, noted that adversaries such as Russia and China attack the information space daily through cyber intrusions; intellectual property theft — including weapon systems from the defense industrial base — and, attempts to deny DOD’s use of command and control, networks and communications. As a result, he said, joint interoperability and all-domain command and control is a top priority for DOD.
An example, Chase said, is joint all-domain situational awareness, which involves integrating AI and secure cyber data enabled by machine learning as a tool for the combatant commanders to use in such things as target recognition and decision aids for use in long-range, precision fires.
Greg Garcia, the Army’s deputy CIO, said it’s important to have a workforce that is customer focused, communication strong, adept in technology management and structured to meet future demands.
Skills such as application software, data, information management, enterprise architecture, systems analysis and data analytics will increasingly help the department better prepare to improve mission outcomes in the digital future, he said.
Col. A.G. Hatcher, deputy Air Force CIO, noted that it’s critical that the joint force gain the needed 5G network access across different operating environments. Although innovation is taking place, it needs to move even faster, he said, not only to get to such goals as 5G, but to get to the post-5G network that inevitably will follow.
A 5G network would be particularly useful for telemedicine into remote areas such as Iraq or Afghanistan, he said, and work is being done on that at Joint Base San Antonio in Texas.
The next focus of 5G work will be on extending the range of the signals, particularly in the vast area of U.S. Pacific Command, Hatcher said, and work on that will occur soon at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.
Aaron Weis, the Navy’s CIO, said the challenge for his department is modernizing aging infrastructure and IT systems. The culture needs to change as well, he said.
“Today we have a culture that’s driven by security through compliance,” he said. “We need to get to a state where security is driven as a constant state of readiness.”
Navy Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, the DISA director, said her agency is working to get new collaboration tools that support cloud computing. The Defense Enterprise Office Solutions Program will lead that effort. These cloud collaboration tools will be made available first to the combatant commands in support of the warfighters, and it will eventually expand out across the department, she said. DISA also is working on ways to reduce bandwidth, improve cyber security and improve performance, Norton said. (Source: US DoD)
15 Aug 20. US Army gets prototype for cyber visualization tool. The U.S. Army now has a prototype for a new tool that allows commanders to visualize and understand the cyber terrain within their environment.
Just as commanders must understand the obstacles and forces — friendly or otherwise — in their battlespace to make informed decisions, so too must they understand their cyber terrain, which they are currently unable to do from the command post.
Cyber Situational Understanding, or Cyber SU, will ingest data and information from a variety of systems and sensors, such as Distributed Common Ground System-Army and the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool. The prototype will also transform that data into useful information.
The system will provide this integrated picture within the web-enabled Command Post Computing Environment, or CPCE, that will consolidate current mission systems and programs into a single user interface at the command post.
The system, ordered in a $21m contract in April with Research Innovation Inc., will allow the cyber and electromagnetic activities staff section to better visualize and plan cyber operations, which to date has been a heavily manual process.
This is different than tools for the cyber mission force that feed up to U.S. Cyber Command and conduct remote operations on behalf of combatant commanders or in defense of the nation. This tool is specifically for ground-based brigade commanders to assess their terrain and risk in cyberspace as well as on the electromagnetic spectrum.
“The goal is that the end user won’t see the actual Cyber SU product and will be able to work in their native environment on CPCE and see a cyber overlay of critical information in support of their mission,” said John Keenan, chief engineer for cyber with Product Manager Mission Command. “There’s a lot of work being done on the back end to make that happen, but from a user experience it doesn’t feel like we just threw another application at them.”
The official prototype was delivered to Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications-Tactical following several user tests, an Aug. 12 Army release said.
The Senate, in a recent provision accompanying the annual defense policy bill, is looking to minimize funding for the program, arguing the effort is redundant when compared to another program under development for Cyber Command and the joint cyber force called Project IKE. However, IKE is designed to help visualize and plan cyber operations as opposed to aid understanding and decision-making of brigade commanders on the ground.
Soldiers from the 915th Cyber Warfare Battalion provided feedback for the first time on the Cyber SU prototype. Created in 2019, the battalion will consist of 12 teams that support brigade combat teams or other tactical formations, helping to plan tactical cyber operations for commanders in theater and unilaterally conduct missions in coordination with forces in the field.
They conducted a three-day event on Fort Gordon, Georgia, at the end of June at the Cyber Battle Laboratory with remote participation from various personnel evaluating the software and providing feedback on how support the cyber and electromagnetic activities staff section and the commander.
For additional testing, Cyber SU will participate in Cyber Quest 2020, an annual technology experimentation at Fort Gordon that allows the Army to test technologies and concepts from industry to help solve anticipated problems.
During the experiment, soldiers in a brigade operations center will use the system to perform a mission, allowing personnel on the cyber and electromagnetic activities staff section to use it in the decision-making process. Feedback from the event will help inform engineering release development operations with 3rd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division in October for continued development of the system, the Army said.
Cyber SU is slated to reach initial operational capability in fiscal 2022. Delivery will begin on Tactical Server Infrastructure hardware along with the latest CPCE software baseline.
“Cyber Quest and follow-on DevOps with 3/101st in operational environments will prove out Cyber SU as a single [common operating picture] supporting commanders’ tactical decisions,” said Lt. Col. Scott Shaffer, product manager for Mission Command Cyber. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
14 Aug 20. USMC seeks new FINN gateway pod prototype. The US Marine Corps (USMC) is seeking solutions for a new prototype for the airborne pod variant of its Fused Integrated Naval Network (FINN) programme, designed to upgrade overall interoperability between US Navy (USN) and the marines’ tactical data links.
The FINN airborne pod prototype being sought by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory’s Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) directorate “will provide a persistent [network] gateway that receives, bridges, translates, processes, and distributes information between other FINN nodes and the end-user nodes connected to them”, according to a 10 August service solicitation.
Designed for deployment aboard the General Atomics’ MQ-9B Reaper unmanned aerial system (UAS), the FINN airborne pod must be capable of cross-banding Internet Protocol (IP) and non-IP based data transfers, transmitted on current and legacy data link technologies, the solicitation stated.
The pod technology aboard the new FINN prototype must also have beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) transmission capability. The prototype pod must also enable real-time data translations between users across Link-16, Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT), Bandwidth Efficient Common Data Link (BE-CDL), the Intelligence Broadcast System (IBN), and National Security Agency Type-1 certified TrellisWare Tactical Scalable MANET-X (TSM-X) waveforms, as well as the Next Generation Waveform (NGW) developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the document added. (Source: Jane’s)
————————————————————————-
Spectra Group Plc
Spectra Group (UK) Ltd, internationally renowned award-winning information security and communications specialist with a proven record of accomplishment.
Spectra is a dynamic, agile and security-accredited organisation that offers secure Hosted and Managed Solutions and Cyber Advisory Services with a track record of delivering on time, to spec and on budget.
With over 15 years of experience in delivering solutions for governments around the globe, elite militaries and private enterprises of all sizes, Spectra’s platinum and gold-level partnerships with third-party vendors ensure the supply of best value leading-edge technology.
Spectra was awarded the prestigious Queen’s Award for Enterprise (Innovation) in 2019 for SlingShot.
In November 2017, Spectra Group (UK) Ltd announced its listing as a Top 100 Government SME Supplier by the UK Crown Commercial Services.
Spectra’s CEO, Simon Davies, was awarded 2017 Businessman of the Year by Battlespace magazine.
Founded in 2002, the Company is based in Hereford, UK and holds ISO 9001:2015, ISO 27001:2013 and Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation.
————————————————————————-