Category: Defense

In a data-dependent world, success belongs to the side with decision advantage: the ability to acquire data and make sense of a complex and adaptive environment, and act smarter and faster than the competition. Understanding global environments requires more than just more data – it requires live two- and three-dimensional maps, new support tools, improved processes, seamless connectivity, and better collaboration that can scale to the needs of the environment. This blog post explores how to address challenges of big data and accelerate time to data insights with machine learning with AWS Snowball Edge device deployment at the edge.

For countries like the UK, being at the forefront of innovation is vital to maintaining an agile, swift, and effective defence strategy. To support this need, AWS is launching its first Defence Accelerator for UK based startups, and startups from Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) doing business in the UK.

In 2020, the U.S. Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps embarked on a mission to become the Army’s data-centric Corps. Headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the XVIII Airborne Corps—also known as the “America’s Contingency Corps” — is the Army’s strategic response force and is at the ready to deploy anywhere in the world to defend the US and its Allies. To enable their data ambitions, the XVIII Airborne Corps sought to establish the first enduring tactical cloud presence for the conventional Army and leveraged the AWS Cloud to support their journey.

The Uniformed Services University Health System (USUHS) is the nation’s federal health professions academy, offering a curriculum and educational experience that emphasizes military healthcare, leadership, readiness, and public health. Each year, USUHS holds a training exercise called Operation Gunpowder to help prepare third-year medical students for varying field-care challenges they may encounter during their service. Over the course of the eight weeks prior to the training exercise, AWS collaborated with Deloitte to deliver ancillary system and operational medicine telemedicine best practice training to the participating students. “This is the first time telemed has truly delivered,” reported attending experts in special operations medicine.

AWS is committed to supporting the mission of our Department of Defense (DoD) customers by providing innovative, efficient, and effective solutions. In support of this commitment, we are announcing the availability of DoD Cloud Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for AWS – a baseline that uses a collection of templates to enable defense mission owners to quickly build out secure, scalable cloud environments. DoD Cloud IaC for AWS is designed to help DoD organizations accelerate cloud adoption and support the rapid delivery of capabilities to the warfighter.

The AWS Summit Washington, DC is back, May 23-25 at Walter E. Washington Convention Center. With a focus on public sector customers and innovation, the AWS Summit Washington, DC is a three-day event with more than 300 breakout sessions, chalk talks, customer lightning talks, builders’ sessions, and more, to help you learn how to accelerate innovation and deliver on your mission. Learn how to digitally transform to meet your organization’s dynamic needs, using the cloud. Register today for the no-cost event and read on for more about this year’s event.

May is Military Appreciation Month, providing an opportunity to recognize and show our appreciation for the US armed services and the important role they play in protecting and preserving our national security. The month includes celebrations and moments to recognize those in and out of uniform, as well as those that have and continue to serve. AWS is committed to supporting our veterans, active duty military, and military spouses. As we begin Military Appreciation Month, we are sharing progress made on our programs and efforts to support the military community.

AWS Top Secret-West is accredited to operate workloads at the Top Secret U.S. security classification level. The new Region adds multiple Availability Zones geographically separated from AWS Top Secret-East. With two Top Secret Regions, customers in the U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security communities can deploy multi-Region architectures to achieve the highest levels of resiliency and availability essential to their most critical national security missions.

Earlier this year, Amazon pledged to hire 100,000 veterans and military spouses by 2024. This is an increase of our previous commitment to hire 25,000 veterans and military spouses by 2021—a goal we’ve already surpassed, with about 40,000 currently working for Amazon. At AWS, we are committed to developing and hiring veterans and their spouses into roles focused on STEM. Check out the multiple programs, trainings, and resources available for veterans and spouses.

The second annual AWS DeepRacer Army-Navy Competition brings teams together to train a robotic vehicle to discover whose car can autonomously navigate a track with the fastest time, using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. The competition is for anyone affiliated with the Army or Navy, no matter their experience with AI, machine learning, or robotics. Novices can get started with machine learning quickly with hands-on tutorials. The second annual competition will happen on December 11 2021, prior to the Army-Navy football game. Registration is now open.