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01 Feb 18. Turkey’s SSM signs R&D contracts to boost critical technology production. Turkey’s Defence Industries Undersecretariat (SSM) has taken further steps to boost its domestic technological gains in defence under a technology road map adopted earlier by signing agreements on 26 January with local organisations on several research and development (R&D) projects. The road map is based on an existing model of co-operation among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), industry, and universities. Consequently 11 universities and three institutes from the state-owned Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Board (TUBITAK) have been tasked to act as either main or subcontractors in the R&D agreements signed by the SSM. Out of a total of 22 R&D projects chosen to be initiated under the road map, 14 were signed on 26 January. (Source: IHS Jane’s)
31 Jan 18. DoD’s Network Defense Headquarters Achieves Full Operational Capability. The U.S. Cyber Command component responsible for securing, operating and defending the Defense Department’s complex infrastructure of roughly 15,000 networks with 3 million users has achieved full operational capability.
Joint Force Headquarters Department of Defense Information Network reached the milestone after three years of building capacity and capability to secure, operate and defend the DoDIN, a global network enabling military operations across all warfighting domains.
“The JFHQ-DoDIN team has worked hard since inception in 2014 to reach this milestone,” said Army Lt. Gen. Alan R. Lynn, commander of the joint force headquarters, who also serves as director of the Defense Information Systems Agency. “A highlight for me was to see the organization take the reins of actively defending the DoDIN in real-world threat and attack conditions.”
Lynn noted that the headquarters did this by organizing to operate as a joint force in the cyber domain, just as DoD does in other domains.
(Source: US DoD)
30 Jan 18. Selva: FY19 budget sees ‘increasing’ investments in AI, machine teaming. Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the Pentagon plans on “increasing” investments in artificial intelligence and man-machine teamingin the fiscal 2019 and 2020 budgets, but warns that department is far from achieving the full capability of those technologies.
Those investments will likely be “modest” in nature, Selva told a breakfast hosted by the Defense Writers Group on Tuesday. But they represent an important continuation of the so-called Third Offset Strategy that was pursued by Selva and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work through the last few years of the Obama administration.
While that phrase quickly fell out of use under Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, the ideas of the Third Offset remain alive, Selva said, and can be seen in the investment priority areas laid out in the National Defense Strategy.
“We’ve diminished, not the value of the words ‘Third Offset’ but the prominence of the words ‘Third Offset’ in our rhetoric,” Selva acknowledged. “We’re still fast at work on artificial intelligence, man-machine teaming, trying to figure out how to make sense of the things, the mountains of data that are around us and get at whether or not that effects our battlefield performance.”
Andrew Hunter, a former Pentagon official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that what the National Defense Strategy laid out seems very familiar to the ideas pushed by Work during his Pentagon days.
“It’s pretty clear when it gets into the capabilities they’re looking for, it does look very Third Offset-like, [with the] focus on peer competitors, high-end capabilities,” he said. “So I definitely see strong resonances, stated in a different way, of the Third Offset mindset.”
The vice chairman zeroed in on man-machine