Category Archives: tech

Defense Department, tech

Air Force, Army leaders lay out joint UAS future

The Air Force and Army try to get their large UAS acts together with “Task 11”, a concept of how to go forward with unmanned aerial systems in both services.

The Army has been hot to get its own UASs dedicated to frontline units, to forward deploy them for both C4ISR missions and as potential supporting weapons platforms. The Air Force recently created a whole UAV pilot career track, as Air Force leaders see UAVs as a rapidly growing part of the Air Force mission–and are putting rated pilots in charge of them.

The new “concept” unifies how the Air Force and Army TRADOC look at UASs, which means that there should be a bit less confusion about whose Raptor or Predator is dropping what on who.

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Defense Department, tech

It's the cost, stupid, DOD's deputy asst. secretary for C3 says

[[update: be sure to look at the comments here for some sound defense of SCA.]]

Dr. Ronald Jost spoke this morning at the second day of the IDGA’s Software Radio Summit. The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for C3 Space and Spectrum said essentially that there was a major disconnect between what industry saw as the advantage of software defined radios — the programmable radios capable of being configured for multiple types of communications and being upgraded via software– and what DOD wanted them for. While industry is dazzled by the potential to program all varieties of new custom waveforms, the DOD, he said, just wanted to use SDRs to help consolidate its communications networks toward a single, IP-based topology–and save some money on maintenance of the equipment.
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