It’s been said before that the best plans tend to be the simple ones. While it’s not clear whether that’s ever been said about digital transformation, the Air Force’s recently released interim Chief Information Officer (CIO) strategy could serve as an example of this truism, focusing on straightforward goals to modernize and secure the organization’s information technology environment.

Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day.

The newly enacted CHIPS Act (signed into law August 9, 2022) represents a potential boost in U.S. semiconductor fabrication by providing subsidies to U.S. chip manufacturers and funding for technology and research development. At a high level, the CHIPS Act is set to revitalize domestic manufacturing, lower sourcing costs, and increase job creation, all while strengthening the overall global supply chain.

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG. If you have been a fervent reader of these Kill Web articles, you know that the Army has been connecting their sensors and weapons together into a tactical network under their IBCS initiative (Integrated Battle Command System). The Navy has been secretly connecting their ships and planes together with their CEC program (Cooperative Engagement Capability). The same goes for the Air Force’s planes under their ABMS initiative (Advanced Battle Management System) and the Space Force’s satellites (SF-ABMS).

The Abaco Systems' FMC172 FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) is a product aimed at military customers who want to expand bandwidth for analog receivers and transmitters.

The VITA 47 standard describes the boundary of the module as a maximum, with different values depending on the class. 

Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day.

Computer data exists in different states at different times: data in transit (information flowing through a network); data in use (active data that is being accessed and manipulated by a computer program); and data-at-rest, known as DAR, or data that is physically housed in a storage device like a solid-state drive. Many cybersecurity solutions focus on securing data in transit and data in use, but neglect securing DAR.

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG. So far, we have covered the Army (IBCS), the Navy (CEC), and the Space Force (SF-ABMS) programs. So now it’s time to explore what the Air Force is doing to join the Kill Web. Their primary effort is called ABMS (Advanced Battle Management System), that seeks to connect all their aircraft, weapons, and sensors together into a tactical mesh network where they can talk to each other in real time. Maybe the best way to present this information is by comparison to what the other services have been doing. That might be more informative.

Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day.

In March 2022, Deputy Defense Secre­tary Kathleen Hicks signed the Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) Implementation Plan, noting that JADC2 will be critical as the military works to keep pace with the volume and complexity of data in modern warfare.

Each issue, the editorial staff of Military Embedded Systems will highlight a different charitable organization that benefits the military, veterans, and their families. We are honored to cover the technology that protects those who protect us every day.

By Jeff Lessner, Vice President, Defense and Intelligence Systems Division, Hughes Network Systems.

Walking the floors and attending the sessions at the Satellite 2022 show I found that the buzz within the military satellite industry continues to be the deep need for greater resilience in the Department of Defense (DoD) communications architecture. But discussion these days isn’t just about the need for it, it’s about technologies that can deliver it.

WARFARE EVOLUTION BLOG. So far, we have studied how the U.S. Army (IBCS) and Navy (CEC) programs have been conducting experiments, to integrate their weapons and ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) systems into the Kill Web mesh network. Now, let’s take a look at what the Space Force is doing. The Space Force was formed as the fourth armed service in 2019 and operates under the Air Force.

For most of the last decade, both the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the U.S. Congress have bemoaned the slow pace of weapons-systems acquisition for equipping the country’s warfighters. A 2020 study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found the average cycle time for a major defense acquisition program (MDAP) – defined as the time it takes from Milestone B (the official start of a program) to the declaration of Initial Operational Capability (IOC) – to be nearly seven years.