Military Embedded Systems

FALLS CHURCH, Virginia. Northrop Grumman and Aeronix launched a multimillion-dollar partnership to develop space-based cryptographic systems for secure defense communications, the company announced in a statement.

NASHUA, N.H. BAE Systems reports that its FAST Labs research, development and production organization has successfully completed Phase 1 of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Technologies for Heat Removal in Electronics at the Device Scale (THREADS) program and has been awarded continued support to move into Phase 2.

ARLINGTON, Virginia. Leonardo DRS demonstrated software updates enabling its fielded SGT STOUT air-defense system to defeat Group 1 and Group 2 small uncrewed aerial system (UAS) threats during a U.S. government test event, the company announced in a statement.

BERLIN, Germany. Patria and KNDS Deutschland Maintenance signed a framework agreement covering assembly and final integration of Patria 6x6 armored personnel carriers for Germany under the multinational Common Armoured Vehicles (CAVS) program, the company announced in a statement.

As mobile rugged computing systems for military use become ever more powerful and richly featured, capable of running complex and critically important applications, it is now clear that thermal management must become part of the criteria for evaluation right along with environmental certifications and drop resistance. The ability to balance performance, mobility, environmental durability, and thermal management will remain essential to ensuring mission success across land, sea, and air domains.

DUSSELDORF, Germany. Boeing and Rheinmetall are proposing the MQ-28 Ghost Bat as a platform for Germany to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) capabilities for air-to-ground and air-to-air operations, the company announced in a statement.

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama. Collins Aerospace received a U.S. Army contract worth up to $472 million to provide engineering services supporting modernization and sustainment of the CH-47 Chinook helicopter fleet, the company announced in a statement.

For artificial intelligence (AI) to be operationalized in mission-critical environments, it needs a trusted software substrate that does three things the enterprise cloud never had to do: It must connect nodes autonomously when the network is contested, isolate workloads by security domain, and let very different classes of software safely share the same hardware. In practice, that rests on three pillars: One, a trusted communication infrastructure that enables autonomous mesh networking between nodes; two, multilevel security domain isolation; and the third, mixed criticality, so that enterprise, agile, and autonomous workloads can coexist with safety-critical functions on a single platform.

The next generation of the U.S. military’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) systems will not be judged by how much data they collect. Sensors already generate more information than operators can absorb. The real differentiator will be how quickly those systems convert raw signals into actionable decisions. The force that achieves spectrum superiority will be the one that can process, prioritize, and act on sensor data first. In contested environments, that advantage begins at the edge.

The architecture surrounding edge artificial intelligence (AI) – including sensors, networks, hardware, software stacks and orchestration layers – is still being built in silos. Vendors build closed ecosystems, contracts reward vertical integration, and the warfighter ends up with tools that only function when everything lines up perfectly: the specific connectivity in the specific configuration using specific software, running on specific hardware. That perfect situation is not the reality at the tactical edge, however. Realistically, the edge in this case is often degraded, denied, intermittent, and limited. If one link in the chain requires a cloud connection, the whole chain breaks.