Guns Are Seized in U.S. Schools Each Day | Treating Satellites as Critical Infrastructure | The CIA’s Data-Challenged AI Imperative, and more

Army Moves Ahead on Ukraine-Style Bomber Drones  (Sam Skove, Defense One)
The U.S. Army has picked companies to demonstrate gear for arming small commercial drones, as Ukrainian and Russian forces are doing to dramatic effect in Ukraine.
Within eight to 12 months, two companies will demonstrate payload mechanisms for dropping a selection of munitions that troops would have readily available, such as 40mm or 60mm grenades, said Dan Hilty, portfolio manager for the Army Applications Laboratory. The mechanisms must also allow soldiers to safely attach and detach the munitions, Hilty said.
The companies, which Hilty declined to identify, are using drones from the Pentagon’s Blue UAS list, a roster of commercial drones cleared for military use. 

It’s Time to Treat Satellites as Critical Infrastructure  (Audra Simons, HSToday)
Last February, Russian hackers launched destructive malware against American satellite provider Viasat an hour before the country’s troops invaded Ukraine. The hack was the most substantial of the war, as the Ukrainian military (like the U.S. military) relies on Viasat for command and control. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite, requested by the Ukrainian government to alleviate internet connectivity disruptions, also faced interference from signal jamming, further limiting bandwidth.
While attacks on satellites might sound like the result of expensive and sophisticated military operations, a cybersecurity researcher was able to build a tool to hack into Starlink for just $25, as demonstrated at Black Hat last year. The ability to cost-effectively sabotage networks stands to become a new weapon in the cyberwar arsenal.
Because satellites underpin both military operations and everyday services, they are prime targets for foreign adversaries and other bad actors. China has been “aggressively pursuing” weapons to seize control of U.S. satellites – a capability that would exceed what Russia has deployed in Ukraine. And yet, satellites are not currently classified as critical infrastructure and are generally behind the curve when it comes to cybersecurity.

3 Ways DARPA Aims to Tame ‘Strategic Chaos’ with AI  (Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., Breaking Defense)
Chess is the world’s oldest wargame, and computers mastered it in 1997. Real war is vastly more complex, and machines still struggle to make sense of it. So while the machine-learning techniques that power today’s AI can crunch the numbers to win at chess — two identical armies of 16 pieces fighting over 64 squares — they cannot grapple with the ambiguity and chaos of actual combat.

That’s a problem for the Pentagon, which wants AI-driven “battle management” aides to help human commanders coordinate Joint All Domain Operations with dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and thousands of troops maneuvering across land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. So the Defense Department’s official agency for long-shot, high-payoff research, DARPA, contracted earlier this year with three companies to push past machine-learning to next generation of AI — something that could, at least in theory, help bring order to what DARPA calls “strategic chaos.”

The CIA’s Data-Challenged AI Imperative  (Lauren C. Williams, Defense One)
The Central Intelligence Agency is developing its own Chat-GPT-like tool, but the agency is still struggling to manage its data and quickly adopt commercially available solutions, said Dan Richard, the CIA’s chief cyber policy advisor.  
“One of the things that we are grappling with is data management. We assemble and review large amounts of data information and we are constantly looking for ways to be able to more effectively analyze, synthesize, and provide insights that we can get from that information out to the private sector,” Dan Richard, the CIA’s chief cyber policy advisor, said during a Billington Cybersecurity virtual event Thursday. “We are constantly on the outlook for better ways for us to manage our data, better ways for us to more efficiently and effectively use the data we have to get it to where it needs to more quickly and in a more efficient manner.”