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29 Nov 18. AOC 2018: US military eyes small, distributed EW systems. The US Department of Defense (DoD) wants to develop small, distributed electronic warfare (EW) platforms that can safely operate closer to contested areas than large, manned EW systems can, according to a Pentagon official. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and some service laboratories are doing work that could pave the way for such new platforms, said US Air Force Brig Gen Lance Landrum, the Joint Staff’s deputy director for requirements and capability development.
Such small EW systems would need ‘robust networks’ to allow them to work together as a ‘distributed, large mass’, Landrum said on 27 November at the Association of the Old Crows’ 55th International Symposium & Convention in Washington, DC.
Landrum said that the DoD also seeks advances in cognitive EW to allow personnel to quickly detect, assess and react to adversary capabilities.
Last summer, about 80 experts from academia, industry and military labs met to help define cognitive EW requirements and identify roadblocks to fielding such technology. The results of that meeting have been presented to DoD’s Joint Requirements Oversight Council, or JROC, for its consideration.
The department also aims to improve its situational awareness to ensure its EW capabilities do not cause fratricide, Landrum said. Specific programmes that are addressing this topic include the army’s EW Planning and Management Tool and the navy’s Real Time Spectrum Operations.
Without significant technological advances, US military officials fear the nation could lose its EW advantage over potential adversaries, especially China and Russia. (Source: Shephard)
28 Nov 18. AOC 2018: Pentagon creates entity to promote artificial intelligence. The US Department of Defense (DoD) has stood up a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) to spur the rapid development and fielding of new AI capabilities, a Pentagon official said on 27 November.
Dana Deasy, the DoD’s chief information officer, said the JAIC will be discussed in detail at a ‘very large’ AI industry day that the department is scheduled to hold on 28 November in Silver Spring, Maryland.
In June, the DoD announced plans to form the JAIC, saying the centre will enable teams across the department to swiftly deliver new AI-enabled capabilities and experiment with new operating concepts. For example, the JAIC will seek to use AI to improve predictive maintenance.
‘The JAIC will help the department communicate critical needs to industry partners and to foster advances that can be shared across the federal government and private sector, to include non-traditional innovators,’ a DoD spokesperson explained.
‘The JAIC will assist with attracting and cultivating AI talent and demonstrating the successful intersections of human ingenuity and advanced computing.’
Deputy defence secretary Patrick Shanahan tapped Deasy, a former financial services industry CIO, to oversee the establishment of the centre, which is slated to receive $1.75 billion over six years.
‘This department will lead in this arena,’ Shanahan wrote in a message to DoD employees. ‘Plenty of people talk about the threat from AI; we want to be the threat.’
In a further sign of the Pentagon’s growing interest in AI, Deasy, who spoke at the Association of the Old Crows’ 55th International Symposium & Convention in Washington, DC, said DoD plans to release an unclassified AI strategy document ‘in the coming weeks.’
He told the electronic warfare conference that AI will help EW planners and operators sort through massive amounts of data collected on the battlefield.
Artificial intelligence has also become a hot topic with defence policymakers in Congress. The fiscal year 2019 defence authorisation act calls for creating a 15-member commission to review how the US can advance the development of AI to enhance national security. Commissioners appointed so far include Eric Schmidt, former chairman and CEO of Google, and Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research Labs. (Source: Shephard)
28 Nov 18. Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) has teamed with Harris Corporation and Comtech PST for the U.S. Navy’s Next Generation Jammer–Low Band (NJG-LB) Demonstration of Existing Technologies (DET).
The U.S. Navy selected Northrop Grumman, teamed with Harris Corporation and Comtech PST, to demonstrate existing technologies for the Next Generation Jammer Low Band, which will fly on the EA-18G Growler to provide advanced airborne electronic attack capabilities. The NGJ system will give Growlers – including this aircraft assigned to the Cougars of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 139 – the ability to defeat increasingly advanced and capable threats, making the carrier strike group more survivable. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Bill M. Sanders/Released)
The Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) awarded Northrop Grumman a $35m, 20-month contract Oct. 25 to demonstrate existing jammer capability for the NJG-LB program. Northrop Grumman is the airborne electronic attack integrator for the Navy’s current EA-18G Growler electronic warfare (EW) system.
Harris Corporation is providing cutting-edge electronic attack equipment developed at its North Amityville, New York, operation to Northrop Grumman for NGJ-LB DET. Comtech PST, a subsidiary of Comtech Telecommunications based in Melville, New York, is providing high-power radio frequency (RF) amplifier systems.
“The Northrop Grumman team brings extensive electronic warfare expertise and a long history of building and deploying systems that support the challenging carrier-based aviation environment. We are proud to be working with Comtech and Harris to help the Navy maintain its warfighting edge,” said Paul Kalafos, vice president, surveillance and electromagnetic maneuver warfare, Northrop Grumman.
Harris’ equipment is integrated within Northrop Grumman’s NGJ-LB pod system to provide a modular, scalable and reconfigurable capability that will allow the Navy to stay current with rapidly evolving threats. Harris draws on its expertise in coherent electronic attack technologies and deployed jamming techniques.
“Harris is a leader in EW solutions worldwide and has extensive experience with the EA-18G Growler. Our significant investments in open architecture systems are ready made for the U.S. Navy NGJ-LB DET,” said Ed Zoiss, president, Harris Electronic Systems. “Our work on NGJ-LB also advances the company’s strategy to extend into new EW markets through pods and unmanned systems.”
“Comtech is very pleased to be part of the Northrop Grumman team. Our long standing relationship and position as a premier provider of high power RF systems positions the team well to support the Next Generation Jammer program for years to come. We look forward to a very successful partnership,” said Michael Hrybenko, president, Comtech PST.
The NGJ system will augment, and ultimately replace the EA-18G Growler aircraft’s legacy ALQ-99 tactical jammer system with advanced airborne electronic attack capabilities for defeating increasingly advanced and capable threats. Developed in three frequency-focused increments – high-, mid- and low-band – NGJ will bring a significant increase in airborne electronic attack capability to counter complex air defense and communications systems.
28 Nov 18. IIoT Technologies Integration Creates Growth Opportunities in the Industrial Cybersecurity Industry. Customer needs require scalable, flexible cybersecurity solutions, finds Frost & Sullivan. High penetration of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology in critical infrastructure and the manufacturing sector has resulted in a growing number of potential cyber-attack surfaces. According to a recent analysis from Frost & Sullivan, cyber-attacks within the energy and utilities industries alone cost an average of $13.2m per year. These rising incidences of cyber-attacks, coupled with evolving compliance regulations by governments, and increased awareness among mature and less mature markets have accelerated the adoption of cybersecurity approaches. However, there is still a high level of ambiguity in addressing industrial cybersecurity, with existing cybersecurity services struggling to provide comprehensive visibility across both IT and OT networks.
“The industrial cybersecurity services market is at the high growth stage of its lifecycle, with rising awareness among end users, increased industrial control systems (ICS)-based attacks, and the rising need for cybersecurity skills,” said Riti Newa, Industrials Research Analyst. “Many end users have labor-intensive security practices and lack strong cybersecurity policies. Service providers can help automate cybersecurity services and provide a more holistic approach by offering joint solutions that provide a consolidated view of the IT and OT environment.”
Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Global Industrial Cybersecurity Services Market, Forecast to 2022, explores market adoption rates, requirements, and trends across the market. It also covers emerging service models and their usages, as well as monetization strategies for those models.
For further information on this analysis, please visit: http://frost.ly/2yn
Companies that are eager to grow within the industrial cybersecurity market can find opportunities through:
- Providing integrated platforms that can deploy a range of services to enhance the security posture of end users while incorporating the best security practices.
- Using automated management services and advanced analytics to develop a comprehensive service portfolio that can be adapted for all types of end users.
- Offering flexible pricing models, such as Cybersecurity-as-a-Service (CSaaS), and lifetime services to increase accessibility across industries at a lower cost.
“Despite the growing frequency of cyber-attacks, industries still have very low cyber resilience, struggling to ensure cybersecurity in the OT environment,” said Newa. “With complexity and sophistication of the attacks, service providers will need to focus on advanced services that can address the threat landscape and automate cybersecurity.”
Global Industrial Cybersecurity Services Market, Forecast to 2022 is the latest addition to Frost & Sullivan’s Industrials research and analyses available through the Frost & Sullivan Leadership Council, which helps organizations identify a continuous flow of growth opportunities to succeed in an unpredictable future.
27 Nov 18. Defense officials taking advantage of new cyber authorities. Department of Defense officials say new authorities and policies have allowed cyber operators to move faster and execute new operations in recent months.
“Over the last six months we’ve been given sufficient authorities that allow us to implement the approach of defending forward,” Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, deputy commander of Cyber Command, said during a presentation at the CyCon conference in Washington Nov. 14. “We can no longer have policy that runs all the way to the very senior levels of our organizations before we can take action. We need the flexibility to act as we see emerging threats and opportunities in this space.”
U.S. Cyber Command say they must be persistently engaged in cyberspace providing constant contact against adversaries on a daily basis. Part of this approach involves what officials are also deeming “defend forward,” or fighting the cyber battle on someone else’s turf as opposed to fighting it at home by gaining access to adversary networks or infrastructure to get insights into what they might be planning.
Traditionally, cyber authorities and operations have required approval at the highest level of government, leading, in many cases to limited use and even the stymieing time-sensitive operations.
“I would say authorities have been delegated down to the appropriate levels … the interagency process has really been streamlined,” Maj. Gen. Robert Skinner, commander of 24th Air Force/Air Forces Cyber, told Fifth Domain in a November interview. He added that forces, in conjunction with Cyber Command, have been executing these authorities and are “very happy with the progress we’ve made in the last year.”
Clark Cully, cyber adviser within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, said Nov. 1, that new authorities have been effective and allowed the Defense Department to move at what is commonly described as the speed of relevance.
“This is a new learning process that we’re just working through but the signs are encouraging and we think we have what we need to be able to respond in a much more effective manner,” he said.
Others officials echo that sentiment.
“We’re seeing those authorities are giving us a lot more agility to go on target but a lot more persistent ability as well so we can, as the adversary tries to maneuver, we can actually stay with the adversary,” Gregg Kendrick, executive director at Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command, said Nov. 1.
Help from Congress
While much of the attention to new authorities has surrounded the White House’s revocation of an Obama administration-era policy directive known as Presidential Policy Directive 20, Congress also gave the Pentagon specific authorities that make cyber operations easier to plan and execute.
Specifically, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2019, clarifies what qualifies as an exemption to the covert action statue, listing “clandestine” cyber operations as a traditional military activity and excluding it from this restriction. According to a joint explanatory statement from the Senate Armed Services Committee. lawmakers appeared concerned that DoD faced difficulties in obtaining mission approval from other agencies.
“One of the challenges routinely confronted by the Department is the perceived ambiguity as to whether clandestine military activities and operations, even those short of cyber attacks, qualify as traditional military activities as distinct from covert actions requiring a Presidential Finding,” according to the statement.
Actions that fall within DoD’s scope in cyber include those conducted for the purpose of preparation of the environment, force protection, deterrence of hostilities, advancing counterterrorism operations and in support of information operations or information-related capabilities.
Stewart told Fifth Domain that this better postures Cyber Command to make necessary preparations prior to some operations.
“It recognizes the fact that there [are] certain things you must do in order to prepare for operations and you can’t wait until the operations begin,” he said. “That’s freed us up to do some of the things, the operational preparation of the environment, that we were limited from doing outside of the counterterrorism mission and now can do much more broadly against all of our peers and competitors.”
By clarifying that most of the actions DoD ― and by extension Cyber Command ― take in cyberspace going forward is a traditional military activity will make approval processes faster, a U.S. government official, speaking under a non-attribution agreement, said.
Congress also provided DoD broad authorization for use of force in cyberspace, albeit limiting it to four specific countries. The new law authorizes the Secretary of Defense “to take appropriate and proportional action in foreign cyberspace to disrupt, defeat, and deter … active, systematic, and ongoing campaign of attacks against the Government or people of the United States” by Russia, China, North Korea or Iran.
This includes cyber operations and information operations.
The New York Times recently reported that Cyber Command had individually targeted Russian cyber operators ahead of the 2018 midterm elections to deter them from spreading misinformation a la the 2016 presidential election. (Source: Fifth Domain)
27 Nov 18. The US Army’s new approach for developing electronic warfare systems. The Army — looking to get away from sometimes-antiquated acquisition processes — is using existing events to better inform new electronic warfare programs and systems.
The Terrestrial Layer System is an integrated EW and signals intelligence system that will provide a much-needed jamming capability to formations. Assessments, exercises and even deployments of quick-reaction capabilities are informing how the service will move forward on prototyping and providing much-needed capabilities such as this one to units.
The Army has directed the requisite capabilities offices to execute experimentation and demonstration of integrated SIGINT/EW/cyber at the brigade level to inform TLS requirements, Col. Jennifer McAfee, director of the Training and Doctrine Command’s capabilities manager for terrestrial and identity at the Intelligence Center of Excellence, told C4ISRNET in a November interview.
The experimentation, McAfee said, will include a variety of quick-reaction ground and dismounted capabilities currently being provided to forces in Europe and at home station. Overall, she said, the effort is three-fold.
The Army is going to validate how it thinks the force should be organized and integrated, working to get the right tactics and procedures.
The Army will also leverage several events — such as combat-training center rotations, the Joint Warfighter Assessment and the Joint Operational Integration Assessment — to give soldiers capabilities and assess how they’re used.
Upon providing forces capabilities during these events, the assessors will be looking to see what tactics and techniques soldiers use, Col. Mark Dotson, director of the Training and Doctrine Command’s capabilities manager for electronic warfare at the Cyber Center of Excellence, said when interviewed alongside McAfee.
“We’re also going to look at some units that haven’t yet integrated equipment so that we can see how they do at some of the training centers and what some of their challenges are,” he added.
“When I say we’re going to take a look at these units … we don’t want to push a whole bunch of observers on them that just kind of smother the unit, but we do want to learn about how … training is going to work, how materiel is working so we can really get the right answers as we go forward with developing capability requirements, not just materiel requirements for the Army.”
Lastly, McAfee said the Army will be preparing an acquisition strategy fully approving requirements by the end of next summer.
Dotson said industry has not been fully briefed on these opportunities yet, but that’s forthcoming.
He said he anticipates a briefing to industry in the second quarter of fiscal 2019 to tell them what the Army is doing so they can understand their insertion points.
Taken together, the Army will be examining how soldiers have used the quick-reaction capabilities and how they view some prototypes that industry might bring to bear after they’ve been briefed, using that as a means of doing risk reduction to the program and better informing requirements.
McAfee said this is not the traditional acquisition path.
“We hope to go faster, but with the authorities granted by Congress … we think this rapid prototyping using the buy, try, decide method is going to be great for this rapid acquisition process,” she said. “Are we going to field this next week? Not necessarily, but we’re talking fielding to the force in the next two to three years, not seven to 10 years.” (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
27 Nov 18. The US Army is rapidly regrowing electronic warfare. Following intense focus on building its cyber force for the last several years, the Army now wants to ensure every level of battlefield leadership has electronic warfare capabilities at their disposal.
“We have really focused on … bringing cyber, electronic warfare and information operations capabilities across all echelons of the Army,” Brig. Gen. Jennifer Buckner, director of cyber within the Army’s G-3/5/7, told reporters during a media roundtable at the CyCon conference in Washington Nov. 15.
The growth of the electronic warfare force will include planners on staffs at all echelons who will provide commanders both cyber and EW plans as well as electronic warfare operators.
“This imperative that we have to really provide organic forces and capabilities to every echelon has been our primary focus,” Buckner said. “We look to actually accelerate the growth of our electronic warfare force.”
Russia’s advancements in electronic warfare – on display in Ukraine – have forced the Army to reevaluate its investments in the area.
At a strategic level, the Army recently finalized its own electronic warfare strategy.
“The electronic warfare strategy reflects significant work by Army Cyber Command, by the Cyber Center of Excellence just to assess how we’ve been fighting for the last decade and a half and really how we want to evolve our force of the future,” Buckner told C4ISRNET in a November interview. “I think it accurately describes the kind of operational force we want, how we might train and educate that force and, most importantly, the echeloning of those forces. [In other words,] what we would want organic to our brigade combat teams and at every echelon across the Army and how we would want them to work together.”
In terms of electronic warfare operators, Buckner said the Army is looking an organic electronic warfare platoon in every military intelligence company with every brigade combat team.
The Army wants to begin experimenting with these electronic warfare platoons quickly. Those teams will integrate with the Army’s multidomain task force in the Pacific to support I Corps in fiscal 2019, Buckner said. Part of the work with I Corps will involve capability experimentation. The experimentation will also allow for rapid prototyping from three perspectives, Maj. Gen. John Morrison, commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, told C4ISRNET in August. It will enable the service to assess if the organizational structure is right, it will prototype the training for electronic warfare professionals to better maneuver in cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum and it will prototype capability these forces will use. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
27 Nov 18. Three ways artificial intelligence can improve cybersecurity. This past summer, the Internal Revenue Service issued a request for information to learn more about how artificial intelligence can improve cyber security. The request went beyond just using machine-learning technologies to improve cyber operations. The agency wanted to know how to create a system that continuously learns its environment, triages alerts, identifies previously unknown trends and analyzes data to provide actionable context for officials. Artificial intelligence has been one of the most prominent buzzwords in the federal government over the past year. The federal government has made strides to bring artificial intelligence into agencies, but it has only begun to scratch the surface of its capabilities and use cases. One of the most important potential use cases for artificial intelligence in government is cyber security. Most cyber security solutions use rules-based or signature-based methodology that requires too much human intervention and institutional knowledge. These systems require constant updates to those rules – taking up employee time – and typically forcing analysts to only look at a single part of the enterprise, failing to get a holistic picture of the environment. Artificial intelligence can augment that human element to make the time spent on cyber security more productive.
At its core, artificial intelligence is the science of training systems to emulate human intelligence through continuous learning. Although the role of the human will always be an important component for cyber security, the ability for a system to learn about the environment it must protect, automatically handling tasks and searching for anomalies in user behavior, is critical. Artificial intelligence can analyze large volumes of data, recognizing complex patterns of malicious behavior, and drive rapid detection of incidents and automated response.
Artificial intelligence can also help eliminate visibility gaps within an enterprise. To date, the federal government has largely pieced together its cyber security systems, resulting in a fragmented approach to protecting systems. Analytics help close those gaps that are a result of this approach, analyzing the data generated in a system to identify malicious activity in areas that human analysts might miss.
Artificial intelligence relies on the security analytics lifecycle, which is made up of three pillars: data, discovery and deployment. For artificial intelligence to be successful, it must be able to flow through these three pillars quickly and successfully. This lifecycle provides the ability for agencies to gain insight into their security ecosystem to quickly identify incidents and gain an understanding of their posture. Let’s look at each area:
Data – For artificial intelligence to work, it first needs data to analyze, either stored or streaming data. Both types of data sources can be valuable in analyzing a cyber environment. The federal government has long produced large amounts of data and with the right streams, the key will be to identify the right pieces of data to get the best results. Additionally, better information sharing between the private sector and federal government can enhance this data inventory, increasing the data available to get a more comprehensive understanding of the threat landscape, as well as best practices for mitigating those threats.
Discovery – This is the process of taking data and using technology to provide insights into security networks. With machine learning and artificial intelligence, agency personnel will build models for supervised and unsupervised purposes. Supervised models take advantage of datasets with known outcomes and build a model to predict or classify the behavior that drove that outcome. Unsupervised models do the same thing, except it works with data where there is no known outcome. It looks for outliers in the data that can show anomalies that are indicative of security incidents and finds areas of concern that human analysts would have a difficult time finding. That said, there is not a lot of labeled data in the cyber domain, so a combination of these approaches – or a semi-supervised learning approach – is often used to bridge the gap.
Deployment – This is where the value of analytics is realized. Organizations take the findings from the discovery phase and make changes to their system to combat these issues. This could include patching a commonly attacked area or increasing the monitoring of a specific network. It is important to reemphasize, however, that better data collection, sharing and utilization is needed to adopt more advanced capabilities like artificial intelligence.
These three steps work in concert to provide valuable insights across a government enterprise.
The IRS and other federal agencies are taking the right steps by first investing in advanced data analytics solutions and looking at artificial intelligence to strengthen their security posture. The technology has proven to help organizations in all industries in a myriad of ways, cyber being chief among them. Federal agencies should look for analytics solutions that help them better understand their environment and drive actionable change. Artificial intelligence enhances an agency’s visibility into its systems, offering a continuously “learned” capability that works to identify and remediate suspicious activity that would otherwise go unnoticed. (Source: Fifth Domain)
27 Nov 18. BAE Systems Wins DARPA Contract to Apply Machine Learning to the Radio Frequency Spectrum. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded BAE Systems a contract valued at $9.2m for its Radio Frequency Machine Learning System (RFMLS) program. As part of the program, the company aims to develop new, data-driven machine learning algorithms that will help to decipher the ever-growing number of RF signals, providing commercial or military users with greater situational understanding of an operating environment. Modern data-driven machine learning research has enabled revolutionary advances in image and speech recognition and autonomous vehicles. At a time when adversaries have built capabilities to disrupt the RF spectrum, it has become critical to explore how machine learning could be applied to traditional RF signal processing. Through the explosive growth of RF devices and the Internet of Things, the number of connected devices such as phones, sensors, and drones makes it even more important to be able to identify signals intended to hack, spoof, or disrupt RF spectrum usage.
“The inability to uniquely identify signals in an environment creates operational risk due to the lack of situational awareness, inability to target threats, and vulnerability of communications to malicious attack,” said Dr. John Hogan, product line director of the Sensor Processing and Exploitation product line at BAE Systems. “Our goal for the RFMLS program is to create algorithms that will enable a whole new level of understanding of the RF spectrum so users can identify and react to any signals that could be putting them in harm’s way.”
Under this Phase 1 contract, BAE Systems’ scientists intend to create machine learning algorithms, using cognitive approaches, that will use feature learning techniques to differentiate signals. In addition, researchers aim to create algorithms that can learn to differentiate important versus unimportant signals in real-time scenarios through a deep learning approach. The technology being developed for the RFMLS program is part of the machine learning and artificial intelligence research focus area within the company’s autonomy technology portfolio, and adds to previous work in this area, including the DARPA Communications Under Extreme RF Spectrum Conditions (CommEX) and Adaptive Radar Countermeasures (ARC) programs. BAE Systems has also advanced to the second round of another major DARPA effort to bring machine learning and artificial intelligence to the RF domain called the Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2). Work for the RFMLS program is being done by the research and development team at BAE Systems’ facilities in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Durham, North Carolina. (Source: BUSINESS WIRE)
27 Nov 18. AOC 2018: Lockheed’s eyes set on digi over analogue contract. Lockheed Martin this month successfully completed a system requirement review of the digital AN/ALQ-217 ESM system. The company is targeting an EMD contract in 2022 which will see the system replace analogue variants which are currently being manufactured and installed. Speaking at the Association of Old Crows in Washington DC on 27 November, Max Pelifian programme manager for A2EW systems at Lockheed Martin, said 28 analogue variants have been delivered for E-2C aircraft and 46 of the 75 ordered for E-2D aircraft have been delivered. The company has been under contract since June for the digital systems and is now planning to transition to preliminary design phase and, if the programme advances rapidly enough, digital systems may be installed instead of analogue, Pelifian said.
‘The plan is to deliver all analogue and then digital but if development accelerates then there is a discussion to be had,’ he said.
The digital conversion will see five of the platforms’ eight weapon systems replaced with the heart of the programme being the replacement of the digital receiver.
Separately, earlier this month the company received a contract award for Lot 2-6 of its AN/APR-52 Radar Warning Receiver for the USAF Combat Rescue Helicopter programme which will see HH-60W helicopters will replace its aging HH-60G Pave Hawks.
‘We have completed quality testing and the hardware is EMI qualified and [before the end of 2018] we expect to have completed software quality and system acceptance testing before moving to achieve TRL7 and then flight testing and fielding. We would then expect to be under LRIP and [before the end of March 2019] have funding for long lead items on LRIP 1,’ Pelifian said.
The company also outlined progress on its GPS Spatial Temporal Anti-Jam Receiver (GSTAR) system which combats efforts to jam or deny GPS signal. GSTAR is being provided for National Guard A-10 aircraft in support of a contract awarded in September 2017.
According to a company official, testing of units is expected to be completed in March 2019 for installation onto aircraft in mid-2019. Discussions are underway for full rate production and also with the US Army and navy about installation of the system on other aircraft.
‘When it comes to the F-35, as we come under contract, we will go through pre-EMD and EMD and we would probably start fielding that in early 2021 and [before the end of February 2019] we would expect to come under contract for the GSTAR on U2.
‘The GSTAR has three modes nulling, beam steering and M-Code [an improved GPS]. The U2 have selected beam steering, which gives you greater accuracy and assurances of good positive signal receipt, and will then go to M-code,’ he said. (Source: Shephard)
27 Nov 18. Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) today announced a $1.5m contribution to the University of Central Florida (UCF) for the development of a new cyber innovation lab that will foster the next generation of cyber talent. The Lockheed Martin Cyber Innovation Lab ensures UCF remains on the forefront of educating and empowering our nation’s future cyber experts. UCF provides more graduates to aerospace and defense companies than any other university in the country, and UCF’s Cyber Defense Club is a three-time national champion in the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.
“Our contribution is an investment in the future of students at UCF, the city of Orlando and the broader aerospace community,” said Tom Warner, director of Lockheed Martin’s Cyber Defense, Range and Resilience organization. “The nation is facing a challenge filling the pipeline of cyber talent, and we see it as our duty to partner with communities, our customers and academia to create resources that inspire and prepare young people for a career in this critical field.”
“This state-of-the-art space will help better prepare our students to safeguard and strengthen our country’s systems and networks,” said UCF President Dale Whittaker. “We are grateful for Lockheed Martin’s vision and partnership as we work together to meet the cyber security workforce demands of the future.”
The innovation lab will open its doors in early 2019 to more than 350 students participating in cyber programs at UCF, expanding the pipeline for the nation’s future cyber talent. The 970-foot lab, which will be located in the atrium of UCF’s Engineering I building, will serve as a learning hub, classroom and the practice center for UCF’s Cyber Defense Club. A public ribbon cutting ceremony and associated Cyber Security Summit is planned for February 2019.
According to a recent study published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, there’s a dangerous shortage of cybersecurity workers in the United States, with more than 13,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in Florida alone. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics expects jobs for information security analysts to grow by 28 percent by 2026, four times greater than average job growth. Florida is one of the top five states in the country for information security employment.
Lockheed Martin’s Cyber Solutions business in Orlando has grown by 400 percent over the past five years and continues to grow in response to the nation’s critical need for offensive and defensive cyber security capabilities in today’s evolving threat environment.
Lockheed Martin provides paid work experience to approximately 650 UCF students a year and hires more graduates from UCF than any other university in the country.
27 Nov 18. General Dynamics expands its family of TACLANE encryptors. General Dynamics has added a new mobile encryptor capability to its family of TACLANE Type 1 encryptors, to meet the size, weight, and power (SWaP) needs of dismounted forces and unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations. The TACLANE-Nano (KG-175N) measures 3 cm high x 8.8 cm wide x 5.7 cm deep and has a 1U weight of less than 226 g. It operates on a coin-cell battery (CR2450HR) and military standard (MIL-STD) 461F compliant USB power supply; is designed to protect information classified TS/SCI and below; and can process voice, video, and data applications, including real-time video and data analytics. (Source: IHS Jane’s)
26 Nov 18. Rockwell Collins grows its SecureOne family of network security systems. Rockwell Collins has developed a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that enables secure data transfer and helps to meet cyber security requirements in military training environments. The SecureOne User-defined Cross Domain Guard supports live, virtual, constructive training, and other scenarios across cyber security boundaries, Rockwell Collins said.
“Today’s training ranges need a solution that supports secure and simultaneous sharing of data across networks of different classification levels – Top Secret through Unclassified – to provide greater interoperability,” Troy Brunk, vice-president and general manager of Communication, Navigation, and Electronic Warfare Solutions for Rockwell Collins said in a statement.
The new solution builds on Rockwell Collins’ history of providing cross domain solutions (CDS) founded on Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS). (Source: IHS Jane’s)
26 Nov 18. The US Army’s ‘new’ network isn’t actually new. Army leaders are stressing that the service’s latest network modernization effort will not lead to the creation of a new network or should even be thought of as a physical entity in and of itself. Rather, the modernization effort, known as the integrated tactical network, is a concept that looks to use a series of existing systems – including radios, tablets and satellite communications capabilities – to enable greater connectivity to units battalion and below.
“What we’re doing, this isn’t a new network. We’re not replacing anything. What we’re doing is we’re basically taking program of record and we’re looking at injecting commercial off the shelf items to see where we can enhance or improve our capabilities,” Lt. Col. Brandon Baer, product manager, told reporters at the Army’s Network Integration Evaluation at Fort Bliss in late October.
Baer, as well as other officials have said the ITN’s goals include a more simplified network for general purpose soldiers and being able to field this simpler construct faster than the current procurement timeline.
What problem is the ITN solving?
Officials said the ITN will help the Army become more lethal and faster, a critical attribute for future conflicts against near peer adversaries.
Through an Android device strapped to soldiers’ chests, troops in the field can access a shared photo or map with data and imagery providing unprecedented situational awareness. This not only allows these soldiers to know where others in the field are, but also allows those in the command post to know where the soldiers are and creates a shared understanding throughout the unit.
Improved synchronization also allows for faster mission command. A battalion executive officer, Maj. John Intile, of the 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, told reporters the ITN provides a single graphic that is shared across the force allowing him to talk to battalion commanders and company commanders. His company commanders can also share information for the entire force to see.
This allows the force to solve multiple problems simultaneously, Intile said.
“This is one of the biggest capabilities that it gives me because I can chat, because I can talk on two different radios, I can bounce from one channel to the next so my force can, if we talk about the enemy providing you with multiple dilemmas, I can manage and counter numerous dilemmas time and time and time again,” he said, referencing the Army’s new two-channel radios that enable forces to access two waveforms on the same box in the event that the enemy jams one.
How is the ITN different?
Across the entire Army, top service leaders have charged organizations to do things differently and to do it faster.
In the past, the military would put a program out to bid in a long drawn out process that could take years in some cases, in most cases wedding the military to a vendor or family of vendors for the duration of the contract.
Not anymore. Army leaders hope the ITN construct will allow for continuous innovation and rapid insertion of new technologies and systems from a variety of vendors as a way to stay ahead of technology trends.
Officials said they expect to rely on a steady stream of experiments to test the network’s new concepts and systems.
“It helps us keep pace with technology … because it gives us an opportunity to keep up with industry and tweak things as we go, with user feedback and also inject capabilities depending on what the unit has [and] what the unit’s missions are,” Baer said.
The vision is the Army won’t be wedded to a single vendor, but rather rely on multiple vendors for the programs and systems that make up the ITN.
Once the Army has an established baseline based on what it learns from continuous experimentation, officials said the that product won’t go to the entire Army.
“We’ve seen when we’ve purchased radios and we say ‘Okay, to get them out to the whole Army based on resource constraints it takes a long time to field everything to the Army,’ and obviously technology is changing very quickly,” Baer said. “By doing this, we’re making sure we can continue to look at where industry’s going, where technology’s going and injecting it into our process.”
Top Army officials in charge of the network modernization have said while the current ITN effort has focused on battalion and below, the goal is to eventually scale to a brigade.
“The first kind of goal post … over the next 12-18 months is defining what this integrated tactical network capability set should look like in the various formations and then begin fielding. We want to start fielding units, like first units equipped on a conveyor belt, starting in ’20,” Maj. Gen. Peter Gallagher, director of the Network Cross Functional Team told reporters Oct. 9. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
26 Nov 18. AOC 2018: Next Generation Jammer-Low Band eyes new ground target sets. The US Navy’s new multi-billion dollar airborne electronic warfare programme – the Next Generation Jammer-Low Band – will give the US military the ability to target ground forces and disrupt the sort of innovative and effective tactics Russia employed in 2014 with devastating effect against Ukrainian forces, according a defence analyst.
Brad Curran, electronic warfare expert at the research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, said the NGJ-Low Band programme, which the navy launched last month, aims to give the EA-18G Growler ability to do much more than of enemy air defences.
‘Seeing how effective Russian electronic warfare information operations was combined with their artillery against the Ukrainian forces, I think they want to develop a better capability to shut down ground-based adversary’s electronic warfare systems too, not just focus on the suppression of enemy air defences but other target sets as well,’ Curran, based in San Antonio, Texas, told Shephard.
Last month, the US Navy has selected Northrop Grumman and L3 Technologies to compete for the Next Generation Jammer Increment 2 programme after US government auditors upheld the navy’s decision to drop Raytheon, prime contractor for the NGJ Increment 1 programme, from the estimated multi-billion dollar competition to develop a low-band variant of the airborne system. On 25 October, the navy awarded Northrop Grumman and L3 Technologies each a $35m, 20-month contract to provide the demonstration and test of existing technologies ‘that may potentially provide a solution for an airborne wide-band low frequency band jamming application in support of NGJ Low Band Increment 2 programme,’ according to the US Defense Department. That announcement came days after the US Government Accountability Office on 22 October backed the navy’s decision to eliminate Raytheon – which the company formally protested – from this round of the NGJ-Low Band competition.
The NGJ-Low Band, which the navy wants fielded as soon as 2024, reflects a desire to expand the target electronic warfare target set.
‘The more traditional route was operational wise was to go after adversary air defence systems, to go after their antiaircraft missiles and their tracking radars and things like that,’ Curran said. ‘And now with the emphasis on counter-terror, they are trying to reach out to also get more of an airborne-based counter-terror capability – counter-cellular, counter-information operations capability – more than what the air force can provide with EC-130H Compass Call platform,’ he said.
The Next Generation Jammer is the navy’s main effort to recapitalise its airborne electronic attack capability. The new system will augment and eventually replace the ALQ-99 tactical jamming system currently integrated on EA-18G Growler aircraft.
The navy plans to field the Next Generation Jammer in evolutionary phases, each focused on a different frequency band. Increment 1, an estimated $8.7bn acquisition led by Raytheon, will have mid-band capability and will be outfitted on the EA-18G Growler aircraft as soon as 2022 – a recently disclosed one-year delay. Increment 2 is the low-band effort and Increment 3 will focus high-band frequencies; both will also fly on the EA-18G. In February, the US Navy estimated a $3.6bn price tag for development alone of an NJG Increment 2 capability. For comparison, the service estimates the NGJ Increment 1 will be a $4bn development programme followed by a $4.7bn procurement plan. (Source: Shephard)
26 Nov 18. Adelaide joins national cyber battle with launch of Joint Cyber Security Centre. Australia’s cyber security apparatus and capabilities have been strengthened following the official opening of the Joint Cyber Security Centre (JCSC) in Adelaide on Friday.
Defence Minister Christopher Pyne officially opened the JCSC and welcomed representatives from federal and state governments, the academic community and business, including critical defence and energy industries, in Adelaide on Friday. The new facility expands the footprint of the government’s $47m national Joint Cyber Security Program and Australia’s Cyber Security Strategy. The JCSC is part of Australia’s lead cyber security agency, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), and its Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC).
“South Australia hosts some of the nation’s most important energy, infrastructure and defence assets,” Minister Pyne said.
The centre will support bilateral partnerships with state and territory governments through an Australian Cyber Security Growth Network (AustCyber) Cyber Security Innovation Node located on the premises.
Minister for Industry, Science and Technology Karen Andrews said the partnership enhanced AustCyber’s goal of giving state and territory governments the remit and tools they needed to partner together and innovate in their own jurisdictions.
“AustCyber’s partnership with the Marshall government will help improve cyber defences, develop skills, grow jobs and increase Australia’s export opportunities in the booming global cyber security market,” Minister Andrews said.
The JCSC program is a partnership between business, government, academia and other key partners to enhance collaboration on cyber security.
JCSC is a central initiative of the Australian government’s Cyber Security Strategy to bring together business and the research community along with state, territory and Commonwealth agencies in an open and co-operative environment, with the following key objectives:
- Sensitive information, including actionable cyber threat intelligence, is shared quickly between and among partners;
- Solutions to cyber security risks and issues are developed through collaboration and without commercial bias;
- A common understanding of the cyber security environment and optimal mitigation options is achieved through sharing and analysis of incidents, threats and risks;
- Organisations – at all levels – have access to practical tools and resources to improve their cyber security; and
- Consistent education and awareness messages are promoted with and among partners.
Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton reiterated the importance of government and industry working together to protect Australian businesses and the community from the increasing threat of cyber crime, including interference from malicious actors and criminal groups.
ACSC is the Australian government’s lead on national cyber security. It brings together cyber security capabilities from across the Australian government to improve the cyber resilience of the Australian community and support the economic and social prosperity of Australia in the digital age.
“The ACSC’s continuing expansion supports this government’s national security agenda by giving Australians, be it small business owners and operators or large corporate and critical infrastructure companies, access to a broad range of services from cyber security experts around the country,” Minister Dutton said.
In July 2018, the ACSC became part of the ASD, which became a statutory agency. Australian government cyber security expertise from CERT Australia and the Digital Transformation Agency moved into the ACSC.
These changes are part of the government’s national security reform package to enhance the cyber security support and services the government provides to industry, government and the community. (Source: Defence Connect)
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Spectra has a proven record of accomplishment – with over 15 years of experience in delivering secure communications and cybersecurity solutions for governments around the globe; elite militaries; and private enterprises of all sizes.
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