Australia looks towards space with force restructure, investment and training
Australia is looking to improve its presence in space with a focus on communications and creating a dedicated segment of its defence forces committed to the domain.
An Airbus-led industrial consortium has received the RIFAN 2.1 contract from the French defence procurement agency, the company announced on 4 March.
The €150 million contract will run for up to eight years. The consortium also includes Naval Group and Rohde & Schwarz.
The contract covers work to maintain and adapt the French naval forces' existing IP network, RIFAN 2, to the needs of the navy, to integrate new ships and address hardware and software obsolescence.
The work will also enable future front-line frigates and replenishment tankers to be integrated into the RIFAN 2 network. The network adaptations will involve both its central architecture and an update of the cybersecurity incident monitoring and detection system.
A total of 63 ships are equipped with the RIFAN 2 network, which is designed for the exchange of data of various classification levels between ships at sea and on-shore command centres. The network transmits data from applications specific to the coordination of carrier group operations and those dedicated to the daily and logistical management of life on board. The system uses satellite connections, such as Comcept or Syracuse, and also the radio communication systems allowing all-Internet Protocol exchanges between ships, with a range of several dozen nautical miles.
RIFAN 2 also provides overall network management and cybersecurity incident monitoring capability.
Australia is looking to improve its presence in space with a focus on communications and creating a dedicated segment of its defence forces committed to the domain.
The Portuguese company’s naval communications system is in service across more than a dozen countries. It has turned to its home nation for support in developing a new vehicle based C2 system.
The Vision4ce Deep Embedded Feature Tracking (DEFT) technology software is designed to process video and images by blending traditional computer vision with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to present actionable information from complex environments.
Persistent Systems has been cleared by National Security Agency (NSA) to transmit sensitive data on commercial networks. The devices are added to the NSA’s Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) component list which also includes other companies’ products providing the same security.
The release of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) has been long promised as mid-year. It is possible it could be as early as 2 June although the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) continues to play its cards close to its chest.
Intelsat outlines how its multi-orbit SATCOM architecture is enhancing connectivity and resilience for special operations forces operating in degraded and contested environments.