By OLIVIA GAZIS, ELEANOR WATSON

SEPTEMBER 16, 2021 / 1:03 PM / CBS NEWS

A new memo issued Wednesday by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin urges all Pentagon employees and contractors to report suspected cases of “Havana Syndrome,” the mysterious neurological illness that emerged years ago among U.S. personnel in Cuba.

The memo, which refers to the cases as “Anomalous Health Incidents,” said that over the past several years, numerous department of defense employees had reported “a series of sudden and troubling sensory events” whose symptoms include headaches, nausea and loss of equilibrium.

The cases occurred “predominantly overseas,” according to the memo, which urges those experiencing symptoms to “immediately” leave the area.  

“If you believe you have experienced a sensory event with the new onset of such symptoms, immediately remove yourself, coworkers, and/or family members from the area and report the incident and symptoms to your chain of command, security officer, and medical provider,” Austin wrote.

Each incident will be investigated in order to help fully understand the nature of the incidents, according to the memo.

Read the complete article at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/havana-syndrome-defense-department-pentagon-employees/

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By Nathan Strout

WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense is looking to industry for nuclear-powered propulsion technology to drive its spacecraft, freeing them from the low-energy limitations of current electric and solar-based propulsion systems.

Those traditional systems have largely served government space systems well. Once they reach their intended orbit, most satellites don’t need to move very much. Propulsion systems are generally used to readjust satellite positions when they drift out of their assigned position or to avoid collisions, while occasionally transporting those satellites to new orbits to continue their mission.

However, future U.S. military missions may require much more maneuverability and power. Future U.S. missions will need more electrical power to more frequently change orbits, transfer other objects to new orbits and operate beyond Earth’s orbit, according to a Sept. 9 solicitation from the Defense Innovation Unit, a DoD organization that helps match mature, commercial solutions to military needs.

Moreover, the shrinking size of many space systems driven by the increased capabilities of small satellites and cubesats imposes volume constraints on future propulsion systems. In other words, the military wants more power, but not by simply building bigger propulsion systems or adding more solar panels.

To that end, DIU’s government customers are looking for lightweight, long-lasting commercial nuclear power solutions that can provide greater propulsion and electric power for small and medium-sized spacecraft. Interested companies that can show a plan for prototype development within three to five years could be awarded other transaction authority contracts to support laboratory-based prototyping of such systems, followed by a path to flight-based testing. Responses to the solicitation are due no later than 11:59 p.m. ET on Sept. 23.

This isn’t the military’s first time dipping its toe into developing nuclear-powered spacecraft. Most recently, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency issued contracts to three companies in April to design a nuclear thermal propulsion system for space. The program, known as the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations, seeks to build nuclear thermal propulsion that can enable rapid maneuver in space, particularly for cislunar operations.

Read the complete article at: https://tinyurl.com/7p3p4v3a

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by Sandra Erwin — May 30, 2021

Technologies developed by SDA, MDA and DARPA are expected to transition into larger Space Force programs

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration’s defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2022 seeks more than $1.2 billion  for military space systems in low-Earth orbit. 

According to budget documents released May 28, nearly $900 million of that investment is for the Space Development Agency’s communications network in low-Earth orbit (LEO) known as the Transport Layer. The Missile Defense Agency is seeking about $300 million for space sensors, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is requesting $42 million to deploy experimental satellites in LEO under the Blackjack program. 

These agencies report to the Office of the Secretary of Defense and are not part of the U.S. Space Force, which has its own budget for research, development and procurement of new systems. But many of the LEO technologies developed by SDA, MDA and DARPA are expected to transition into larger Space Force programs. 

Space Development Agency 

The Pentagon is seeking $936.7 million in 2022 for the SDA, about a $600 million increase from 2021. That includes $808.8 million for research, development, testing and evaluation (RDT&E), $53.8 million for operations and maintenance, and $74 million for procurement. 

This is the first time that SDA gets a separate funding line for procurement. 

The agency’s large spending boost was expected for 2022 as SDA prepares to launch the first batch of its Transport Layer satellites and moves ahead with the procurement of up to 150 satellites that would launch in 2024. 

The 2022 request funds the demonstration of SDA’s first 28 satellites — 20 Transport Layer Tranche 0 satellites and eight wide-field-of-view space sensors to detect and track ballistic and hypersonic missiles known as Tracking Layer Tranche 0.

The funds also would allow SDA to start acquiring Transport Layer Tranche 1 satellites. Tracking Layer Tranche 1 satellites are not funded in the 2022 request.

Read more at https://spacenews.com/dod-agencies-to-invest-more-than-1-billion-in-low-earth-orbit-space-technology/

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BY BRANDI VINCENT, STAFF CORRESPONDENT, APRIL 22, 2021

A scientist from the Army Research Lab gave a glimpse into its early work with biohybrid robotics.

Looking to pave the way for the production of nimble robots that can move more like living creatures than bulky androids, Army Research Laboratory scientists are embarking on fresh, high-risk studies in biohybrid robotics that could eventually fuse organic tissue with machines.

“This is wholly new to the lab, and the field itself is still relatively young. The publications associated with the first idea of successfully integrating muscle tissue or cells into some larger architecture to control motion with that same biological device didn’t really start until after 2000—and really spooled up in the early 2010s. So it’s very young, even as a discipline,” explained Dr. Dean Culver, a research scientist at the laboratory. “And that kind of gave us an opportunity to see how we could help move it forward and what expertise that we had that we could levy in that direction to really make an impact.”

In a recent interview, he briefed Nextgov on this future-facing research and the breathtaking applications it could spur.

A Potential Huge Step Forward

Culver studied mechanical engineering, and while in graduate school at Duke University, he became increasingly interested in energy management, and what he deemed the complicated ways beings get motion out of stored energy.

“After I graduated, one of the natural extensions of that is ‘Hey, how exactly do muscles work? How do organisms store energy and turn that into motion?’” he noted. “And it turns out that we knew less about the answer to that question than I had originally anticipated. So, there are obvious applications of that in robotics, and the design of mechanisms and new vehicles, for the Army. That brings us to today—I’m still working on that problem.”

It’s a complex pursuit that Culver has been tackling with the lab since about 2017. Ultimately, he envisions being able to give engineers the capability to design devices that last a long time, are really resilient, quiet—and don’t run hot. 

“And those are all things that biological systems offer,” Culver explained.

Some existing, state-of-the-art robots that the Army uses can carry things across various locations, or record what their surrounding environments look like. They typically have four wheels, are a foot or two in height, and move over paved terrain at about two miles per hour. But there’s an issue, according to Culver, who noted that researchers are reaching a point where they’re experiencing diminishing returns in the design of these robots with wheels as their primary locomotor, and batteries as their centralized power system.

“We look at a wolf in nature: It probably weighs about the same, can pull much more and can travel hundreds of miles without really eating, take a nap and do the same thing the next day,” he said. “There’s a huge performance disparity between those two things. And if we can offer the ability for robots to go out on these long missions, based on these design principles that we can understand from observing nature—that’s a huge step forward.”

Read more at: https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/04/army-explores-equipping-robots-living-muscle-tissue/173559/

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March 16, 2021

By Dawn M.K. Zoldi (USAF, Ret.)

When most were focused on the transition of power in the White House, the day before the Inauguration and the very last day in office for the outgoing party, the FCC denied a petition to stay (delay) the Ligado Networks deployment of a low-power nationwide network interfering with the GPS signal.

On January 19, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) issued an order denying the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) Stay Petition in the Ligado Networks LLC (Ligado) matter.

That petition had requested that the FCC stop Ligado from continuing work in furtherance of its April 2020 authorization allowing the deployment of a low-power terrestrial nationwide network in the L-band. This latest allows Ligado to press on, as they have already been doing. What it did not do was address the NTIA’s Petition for Reconsideration which seeks a relook at the original approval.

The big deal is that the FCC addressed the merits of NTIA’s recon arguments in this latest smackdown, and wasn’t buying what other branches of the government were selling.

How does this bode for NTIA and others, including the Department of Defense (DOD), who assert Ligado’s net will interfere with mission-critical GPS and have petitioned for a Ligado redo? Hard to tell, particularly with a new executive team at the helm and Congressionally-directed interference studies pending.

Excerpt

The Beat Goes On

A new team’s forming up. The day after the election, President Biden appointed Democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel as acting Chair to bridge the gap at the Federal Communications Commission. About thirty days into her new role, the Chairwoman shared a draft Order that would make 100 megahertz of mid-band spectrum (3.45-3.55 GHz band) available for auction and 5G deployment. While this move was in furtherance of Congress’ end-of-year Consolidated Appropriations Act and its provision, the Beat CHINA for 5G Act, the public statements accompanying the release are informative of intent.

Rosenworcel said, “We need to deliver the 5G that the American people were promised. That means a 5G that is fast, secure, resilient, and—most importantly—available across the country.”

Ligado’s network will enable 5G.

But at what cost?

That’s the big question, the answer to which should ultimately inform FCC action.

Read more at: https://insidegnss.com/ligado-cleared-to-press-on-for-now/

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By BRANDI VINCENT JANUARY 8, 2021

The aim would be to accelerate the production of an “open 5G stack ecosystem.”

The Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration wants feedback on the potential of a new “5G Challenge” it may create to promote interoperability in the burgeoning realm—and support the Defense Department’s ongoing military networking modernization efforts. 

Accelerating the development of an “open 5G stack ecosystem” to help push forward DOD missions would be the ultimate aim of the challenge activity NTIA is exploring, according to a notice of inquiry set to be published in the Federal Register Monday. 

“Recognizing the vital importance of fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications to U.S. economic and security interests, [NTIA] has made it a top priority to engage in 5G across a broad spectrum of topics,” the agency wrote. It added that the Pentagon established its own 5G Initiative in 2019, which NTIA is working in this case “under sponsorship of and in collaboration with.” 

That year, Defense unveiled plans to strategically launch 5G experimentations at a number of military bases.  

The document’s description of the technical motivation behind the challenge explains that open-source implementations aimed across many components of a 5G system—including the protocol stack—are gaining traction. Such stacks are essentially layers of elements enabling capabilities. Currently, the open 5G stack community is “diverse,” NTIA notes, but “different open 5G stack organizations are focused on different portions of the stack, with no clear division among the multiple implementations currently available,” and interoperability between those various implementations isn’t always a given.

5G offers supermodern capabilities like network slicing and mobile edge compute that can be used to create a secure wireless network for emerging solutions, like the smart warehouse the Pentagon is already prototyping as part of that broader initiative, which the National Spectrum Consortium also more recently became involved in.

“However the challenge the DOD is now facing is that these new 5G capabilities require interoperability between all the vendors that go into a specific solution,” 5G Security Advisor to the NSC Junaid Islam, told Nextgov over email Friday. “For example, a smart warehouse solution for asset tracking can easily involve 20 different products from beamforming antennas, asset tags, mobile compute, battery back-up, routers, application gateways, etc.” 

Read more at: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2021/01/ntia-pentagon-move-tackle-5g-interoperability-complexities/171291/

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By: Valerie Insinna and Aaron Mehta, December 21 at 5:00 AM

WASHINGTON — As part of a broader move to boost the 5G industry in the United States, the Federal Communications Commission on Dec. 8 began auctioning a portion of C-band electromagnetic spectrum, a move the committee’s chairman, Ajit Pai, celebrated as “a big day for American consumers and U.S. leadership in 5G.”

But, in the weeks leading up to the auction, more than a dozen commercial aviation groups warned the sale could, as one study put it, lead to “catastrophic failures” with the potential for “multiple fatalities.”

At the core of the concerns are radar altimeters, a critical piece of aviation technology used by military, commercial and civil aircraft of all types — including helicopters and unmanned aerial systems — to measure the distance between an aircraft and the ground.

The aviation groups worry that 5G operations on the spectrum sold by the FCC could cause interference that would provide inaccurate readings on altimeters or cause their failure outright, in essence leaving pilots unaware of how far they are from the ground and potentially leading to crashes over the United States.

Read more at: https://www.defensenews.com/2020/12/21/the-military-is-scrambling-to-understand-the-aviation-crash-risk-from-a-new-5g-sale/

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News Analysis MIKE DANO, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies 12/18/2020

US military officials are in the early stages of developing a unified, comprehensive, interoperable wireless networking system that would basically connect everything owned and operated by the Pentagon.

Commanders envision the system connecting “sensors with shooters across all domains, commands and services.” In military parlance, doing so would “increase lethality.”

The system is called JADC2 (Joint All-Domain Command and Control). And it’s apparently going to run on 5G.

5G “can enhance something as simple as virtual reality training or as ambitious as the connectivity of systems for JADC2,” said Mark Esper in September, according to National Defense, a publication run by the National Defense Industrial Association trade group. Esper is the former US Secretary of Defense, having been fired by President Trump last month.

Esper’s views on 5G – that it’s the linchpin to hold together the JADC2 system – appear to be widely held across the military. “The DoD CIO [Dana Deasy] has stated it plans to use 5G technologies to enable JADC2,” wrote the Congressional Research Service (CRS) earlier this month. The publication serves as a nonpartisan information source for Congress.

Internet of military things

The breadth of the Pentagon’s JADC2 vision cannot be overstated.

“Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) concept to connect sensors from all of the military services – Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Space Force – into a single network,” wrote the CRS, explaining that traditionally each branch of the US military operates its own communication network, and as a result they often can’t communicate directly with each other.

Indeed, this is the exact problem – unearthed by communications problems among police, firefighters and others during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks – that led to the creation of the FirstNet network for public-safety workers.

Read more at: https://www.lightreading.com/aiautomation/pentagon-puts-5g-at-center-of-us-militarys-communications-future/d/d-id/766232

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Source: https://breakingdefense.com/2020/11/army-wants-smaller-brigades-stronger-divisions-lots-of-robots/

By  SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on November 06, 2020

WASHINGTON: The Army wants the first casualty of the next war to be a robot, not a human being. But no amount of high technology will allow a bloodless victory, warned the new commander of the service’s Maneuver Center at Fort Benning, which runs tank and infantry training. So instead of devising some futuristic all-new force, Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe and his staff are reviving battle-tested Cold War concepts – like tank-infantry teamwork and robust division-level formations  – and updating them with a large dash of unmanned systems.

Read more at: https://breakingdefense.com/2020/11/army-wants-smaller-brigades-stronger-divisions-lots-of-robots/

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NOV. 3, 2020 | BY C. TODD LOPEZ, DOD NEWS

Short of face-to-face conversation, wired internet or telephone land lines — a mystery to many young Americans — nearly every form of communication the Defense Department uses today, especially on the battlefield, is wireless. Some U.S. adversaries are working very hard to cut off that form of communication.

Last week, the Defense Department released the “2020 Department of Defense Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy.” This document not only lays out how the military will guarantee its continued and unfettered access to the airwaves, or spectrum, which facilitates GPS, radio, satellite and cell phone communications. This document also shows how the military plans to master that spectrum while on the battlefield.

“The rise of mobile systems and digital technology across the globe has placed enormous strain on the available spectrum for DOD’s command, control and communication needs,” said Dana Deasy, the department’s chief information officer. “This strategy will help set the conditions needed to ensure our warfighters have freedom of action within the electromagnetic spectrum to successfully conduct operations and training in congested, contested and constrained multi-domain environments across the globe.”

Read more at: https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2404027/new-spectrum-strategy-reveals-dod

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