Acquisition Headlines

“We had one underlying element of comfort and reassurance during the war,” Lockheed’s president wrote. “We knew we’d get paid for anything we built.”

The Pentagon wants to retire an aircraft carrier decades early, but Congress says that’s not going to happen. Here’s some analysis on that. And Navy-Matters piles on. From the last (it’s always about the budget): “You’ll recall that the Navy made exactly this ‘threat’ just prior to the Washington’s 2016 (delayed until 2017) RCOH.  The result?  Congress allocated more money for the Navy.  What a surprise.”

“”Deciding to think about and make those tradeoffs now is almost most certainly a lot more cost-effective than being forced to make them 10 or 20 years from now,” Acton said.” That was from an interesting USNI report, Navy, Experts Make Case For More Than 12 Columbia-Class Boomers. It’s amazing that the Navy thinks that the future is basically fixed, 10, 20, even 30 years or more years into the future. That’s actually what you’d expect with a program budget, the agencies have to fully cost systems over many decades and change is very difficult.

A new stealth bomber, better drones and hypersonic missiles are some of the new projects being developed in conjunction with defense companies.

Rare WWII color photos bring history to life. 

“There is a logistics system that supports the F-35 called ALIS. It cannot scale. It has got huge problems. It drives the maintainers nuts. And so we put together a team of Lockheed Martin, Air Force programmers and maintainers on the flight line,” she said. “They named themselves. The new program is called Mad Hatter, rather than ALIS. It is always the young techies that come up with something.” Link is here. This article reminds me that the cost of the F-35 and other programs is not in their budget, because you have support coming from all sorts of funding pools. Military programs are never completely compartmentalized, their tentacles can spread far.

SpaceX and NASA Launch Is First Step to Renewed Human Spaceflight.

Related: Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV) Market to see exponential growth by 2024

Intel’s neuro guru slams deep learning: ‘it’s not actually learning’. Here’s some more: “Backpropogation doesn’t correlate to the brain,” insists Mike Davies, head of Intel’s neuromorphic computing unit, dismissing one of the key tools of the species of A.I. In vogue today, deep learning. “For that reason, “it’s really an optimizations procedure, it’s not actually learning.” 

Former Secretary of the Army says: “For the Army to measure up to the demands of a rapidly changing world, we must also draw on the Army ethos of critical thinking and self-examination. It may be underappreciated outside the national security community but no organization, public or private, matches the Army for its culture of relentless self-review that is borne from the experience of ground combat, where mistakes are measured in lives.” Good article from back in 2016. Now if only that diversity spread into weapon systems R&D…

“Without a consistent Army-wide approach to intellectual property, you are left with this inconsistent, kind of ad-hoc methodology,” Ross said.