Two Different DARPA Hypersonic Vehicles 'On Track' to Fly in 2019

Two hypersonic vehicle prototypes developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Air Force are due to fly by the end of the year, the agency’s director said May 1.

One vehicle is part of the hypersonic air-breathing weapon concept, or HAWC, program. The other is the tactical boost glide, or TBG, effort, said Steven Walker.

“We're on track for both to have flights … before the calendar year ends,” he told reporters during a breakfast meeting in Washington, D.C. However, that might be questionable because once "you actually get into the building of these things and qualifying the hardware, … things tend to slip.”

Walker said there is a chance the vehicles could fly in early 2020, but was hopeful that that would not be the case. DARPA has been working on both efforts alongside the Air Force since 2012, he noted.

“These [efforts] were focused on more tactical theater-level operations,” he said.

TBG is meant to develop an advanced boost-glide system that can be launched from a rocket, he said. The HAWC concept takes advantage of work DARPA has previously done in scramjet technology to create a system that can be self-powered after being launched from an aircraft such as a B-52. According to the agency, HAWC focuses on three technology challenge areas including air-vehicle feasibility, effectiveness and affordability.

“Two very different concepts but when you're talking hypersonics it's good to have what I consider intended redundancy because it's a hard technology making materials and propulsion systems that last in 3,000-degree Fahrenheit temperatures,” he said.

Walker said he is still unsure of which vehicle will fly first. “It's really a race between HAWC and TBG to see which one goes first,” he said.

However, a number of hurdles could potentially delay the flights, he noted. Both systems are currently in the early stages of their assembly, integration and test phases.

“You have to qualify all the hardware components [and] sometimes you run into issues with qual tests,” he said. “You got to re-qualify things, put that all together and [then] you test the whole system and you hope it all works and has been done correctly. … [There are] all sorts of things once you get into testing real hardware that you have to face down every day and beat back.”

Hypersonic vehicles — which can fly at speeds in excess of Mach 5 — have become increasingly important technology areas to the Defense Department writ large.

“It’s an area that I believe the U.S. really needs to make progress in and be a leader in,” Walker said. “From a technology standpoint, … we have led the way in hypersonics. I think some of our peer competitors though have taken that technology and turned it into capability faster than we have.”

The advantage of hypersonic vehicles is not just time of flight, but also the range that would be achieved by the high-speed vehicle just because of physics, he said.

“You also get a lot of potential maneuverability that we don't have today,” he said. It’s “a combination of all those factors [that] make it an attractive technology, which is why our adversaries are working on them.”

Walker noted that DARPA is also engaged with the Army and Navy on hypersonic-related activities.

It is currently working with the Army on a program that takes advantage of technology leveraged from the tactical boost glide effort, he said. The system — known as Operational Fires, or OpFires — is a 50/50 cost share and will give the service a ground-launched capability to penetrate modern enemy air defenses.

“It's a brand-new booster,” he said. “This new booster would allow a lot more controllability, mobility for the Army and an ability to really use the system in the most effective way versus any other existing booster that's out there.”

DAPRA is also engaged with the Navy on a study about whether or not the agency’s HAWC vehicle would be a good fit for the sea service, Walker said.

However, “that study I believe is still underway,” he said. “They have not committed to moving forward with that system.”

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/5/1/just-in-darpa-hypersonic-vehicle-prototypes-to-fly-in-2019

Pence Vows Space Force Will Become a Reality

5/6/2019

By Stew Magnuson

Vice President Mike Pence promised that the controversial proposal to create a separate but equal new branch of the military — a U.S. space force — will soon come to pass.

“We are working as we speak with Congress to stand up a sixth branch of our armed forces. The United States space force will soon be a reality,” Pence said May 6 at the Satellite 2019 conference in Washington, D.C.

Pence cited renewed threats to U.S. dominance in space including adversaries such as China, Russia and North Korea jamming GPS signals and communication satellites as well as launching electronic attacks from the ground.

“And recently we have even seen nations bringing new weapons of war into space itself,” he said.

The Trump administration has used existing authorities to announce a unified space command that would be similar to Special Operations Command. However, creating a new military branch will require Congress to pass legislation.

Prior to the conference, 43 former military and intelligence leaders sent an open letter to Congress expressing support for the space force, according to industry publication Space News. Signees included former Defense Secretary William Perry, former Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert O. Work and retired Gen. Larry Welch, former chief of staff of the Air Force.

“Our competitors and our adversaries have been aggressively deploying technologies that put our prosperity and our security at risk,” Pence said. “We recognize that space is a warfighting domain just like the land, air and sea and America is going to be as dominant for our security in space as we are here on Earth,” said Pence, who also chairs the National Space Council.

Pence touted the Trump administration’s progress in improving space situational awareness, which benefits commercial providers and the government alike. It has brought space traffic management under the Department of Commerce.

“We know this policy will encourage companies like yours to develop data sharing systems, technical guidelines ands safety standards,” he said. This will mitigate the possibility of accidents in space during launches and while satellites are in operation, he said.

“We are bringing the data together so companies just like yours have the best, real-time information to navigate space and give the engineers and entrepreneurs here today the tools you need to continue thriving,” he said.

Pence said the Trump administration has worked hard to eliminate red tape and regulations while also streamlining launch licensing requirements that have gotten in the way of innovation in the space industry.

Pence also promised to free up scarce wireless spectrum as the world switches to 5G technology, which he said will revolutionize the way Americans work, run businesses and communicate. “President Trump has made it clear that the race to 5G is a race that America will win,” Pence said.

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/5/6/news-from-satellite-2019-pence-vows-space-force-will-become-a-reality

Written by Shannon Vavra

MAY 7, 2019 | CYBERSCOOP

U.S. Cyber Command is still working overseas with allies to try preventing election interference, Brig. Gen. Timothy Haugh, the commander of Cyber Command’s cyber national mission force said Tuesday.

As part of the military’s operation to defend the U.S. midterm elections in 2018, an operation known internally in the Department of Defense as “Synthetic Theology,” Cyber Command deployed cyberwarriors to Ukraine, North Macedonia, and Montenegro to help defend those countries’ networks, and to collect intelligence on adversaries. Cyber Command has since “redeployed” out of “some of those” countries, Haugh said during a reporters’ roundtable at the Integrated Cyber Center and Joint Operations Center in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Haugh did not specify in which countries Cyber Command has ongoing operations right now in preparation for 2020, but said these kinds of partnerships will continue to grow.

“When we look to do partnerships overseas … we want to do that anywhere where there’s a potential adversary that would also target our electoral systems,” Haugh said.

The effort is meant to complicate possible election interference originating in countries like Russia, which the U.S. intelligence community has determined sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Investigators also found that hackers infiltrated state election infrastructure ahead of last year’s midterm elections, and a steady stream of account takedowns have demonstrated how suspected government propagandists still are using social media to manipulate public opinion. By working with the countries affected by this problem now, the logic goes, Cyber Command can gain an insight into what the U.S. might expect next year.

“We recognize and understand the importance of being in constant contact with the enemy in this space especially below the level of armed conflict so we can defend ourselves and we can impose costs,” said Maj. Gen. Charles Moore, Cyber Command’s director of operations.

Haugh told reporters he felt Cyber Command “did a good job” in the operations the command has launched in years past to counter adversaries in their attempts to meddle in U.S. elections.

It is only in recent years that Cyber Command has been able to defend against adversaries overseas.

Haugh credited the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 for some of Cyber Command’s successes in protecting U.S. elections in that it freed up the command to move off the Department of Defense networks to defend the U.S. from outposts overseas.

“That allowed us to gain insights in a way we hadn’t in years past,” Haugh said. As a result, “defensive missions that we did overseas were clearly intended for us to be able to gain insights into how adversaries operate in areas that we believe that, in this case, one of the NDS [National Defense Strategy] competitors was operating. Our approach to that was different.”

The Pentagon’s NDS of 2018 names Russia, in addition to China, as a principal priority among strategic competitors.

Prior to the new offensive authorizations, Cyber Command was “a maturing force,” Haugh said, referring to the way it handled the 2018 midterm elections. As an example of that maturing process, Haugh pointed out that in 2018 Cyber Command was still focused on building relationships between agencies to handle election interference attempts.

“We had to build new relationships, whether that was with DHS, whether that was with FBI, or our teammates in the Department of State,” Haugh said. “All of those we had to build together in a really short timeframe.”

One of the ways Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential elections included an attempt to sow discord and misinformation online through social media platforms. As part of operation Synthetic Theology in 2018, Cyber Command worked to prevent election interference by interrupting the Russian-backed Internet Research Agency’s internet access, an operation The Washington Post first reported.

This was the first publicly reported example demonstrating how Cyber Command would be “defending forward” with its new authorizations.

And yet, the National Security Agency’s David Hogue, the senior technical director of the Cybersecurity Threat Operations Center, said last month he thinks there is still much interagency work to be done to push forward the U.S.’s approach to information warfare. International governments are exploiting social media to push their own message, and divide global populations, he said.

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https://www.cyberscoop.com/cyber-command-redeployed-overseas-effort-protect-2020-elections/

Written by Greg Otto

MAY 6, 2019 | CYBERSCOOP

A hacking group with ties to Chinese intelligence has been using tools linked to the National Security Agency as far back as March 2016, according to research from security firm Symantec.

The tools include some released by the Shadow Brokers, a mysterious group that dumped computer exploits once used by the NSA on the open internet in April 2017. Symantec’s research suggests that the Chinese-linked group, which the company calls “Buckeye,” was using the same NSA-linked tools at least a year before they were publicly leaked.

According to Symantec, one of the tools used by Buckeye was DoublePulsar, a backdoor implant that allows attackers to stealthily collect information and run malicious code on a target’s machine. DoublePulsar was used in conjunction with another tool, which Symantec calls Trojan.Bemstour, that took advantage of various Microsoft Windows vulnerabilities in order to secretly siphon information off targeted computers.

The Trojan.Bemstour exploit allowed attackers to remotely manipulate a machine’s kernel, the core part of a computer’s operating system that manages resources such as memory. When put into action, the exploit can pull sensitive information from a targeted machine or can be combined in conjunction with other vulnerabilities to take control of the kernel.

One of the vulnerabilities was patched in March 2017. The other was reported by Symantec to Microsoft in September 2018 and patched in March 2019.

Buckeye used the tools in attacks that hit telecommunications companies, firms dedicated to scientific research and education institutions from March 2016 to the middle of 2017, according to Symantec. The group hit organizations in Belgium, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, the Philippines and Vietnam.

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https://www.cyberscoop.com/china-nsa-hacking-tools-symantec-doublepulsar/