Defense Operations

International partners and allies are showing interest in the U.S. Army’s Synthetic Training Environment, or STE, which will combine an array of technologies such as gaming, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality to converge live, virtual and constructive training.

The second revolution in training for the Army environment is underway with the Synthetic Training Environment (STE) (see video below), which will be the first holistic training strategy for the Army, according to Maj. Gen. Maria Gervais, USA, STE cross-functional team director, Army Futures Command. The first revolution occurred in the 1980s with the live combat training centers, she said during a keynote address at the AFCEA TechNet Augusta conference.

The future Army signal soldier will possess a more well-rounded skillset and be better able to solve problems for warfighters, according to Brig. Gen. Christopher Eubank, USA, commandant, Army Signal School and 39th chief of signal.

Gen. Eubank made the comments while serving on two panels and in a short interview with SIGNAL Magazine during the AFCEA TechNet Augusta 2019 conference in Augusta, Georgia.

The U.S. Navy is creating a new position emphasizing a cultural and operational change in cybersecurity to deal with increasing online threats that have already plagued the service and its contractors. The new position, special assistant to the secretary of the Navy for information management, will be established and filled in the next couple of weeks with a cyber expert from private industry, says Undersecretary of the Navy Thomas Modly.

For more than a decade, the U.S. Army has been improving the Logistics Information Systems Network, which is specifically designed to sustain and maintain warfighters deployed across the globe. However, although the technology has far exceeded the service’s goals, today’s management practices are almost identical to those used when the network was created in 2004. With the increase in cybersecurity policies and advances in capabilities, the need for highly trained, designated network and systems administration personnel has become abundantly clear, and the requirement for better management processes even more evident.

The U.S. Air Force’s role in the Indo-Pacific region of the world is complex given the current atmosphere and threat environment. The region is host to 44 percent of the world’s trade and 60 percent of the world’s population. And for the United States, four of the five major challenges and threats identified by the National Defense Strategy and the National Security Strategy are in the Indo-Pacific region, including revisionist powers China and Russia, said the commander of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces, Gen. Charles Brown. The four-star general, whose area of responsibility is the Indo-Pacific, is also air component commander for the U.S.

With Russia and China pursuing “rapid and comprehensive” nuclear weapon modernization efforts, instead of denuclearization, the United States must remain vigilant in its commitment to update its defensive tools to protect the nation, said Gen. David Goldfein, USAF, chief of staff of the Air Force.

The chief of staff spoke at the Mitchell Institute’s Strategic Deterrence Breakfast Series on June 26. He confirmed the necessity of the United States’ nuclear deterrence triad, the combination of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), ballistic missile submarines and the aircraft bomber fleet, which serve as the backbone of our national security.

On Friday, the Defense Department released its DOD Digital Modernization Strategy, aiming to greatly improve the military’s digital environment. The strategy aims to modernize the DOD’s joint information enterprise environment by advancing its fixed and mobile networking capabilities,; DOD-wide enterprise information technology (IT) services, coordinated technology refresh efforts, joint cybersecurity capability and access to data.

Just about everybody who has worked for the Defense Department has encountered this: A new technology is deployed—a software application, new hardware, a piece of gear or a tool—and after using it, people discover it falls short of expectations. Perhaps it was difficult to operate. Or maybe it didn’t do what was needed. Or it might have done what was needed but did it poorly. Or it worked well enough for some use cases and not others.