Accelerating DoD systems fielding while avoiding a new ‘valley of death’. A slice: “The new valley of death is created when a middle tier acquisition prototyping effort reaches the legal five-year deadline and is not fully supportable or fielded in enough quantities to have warfighting significance.” Next-Gen OPIR, for example?
10 things you should (already) know about Col John Boyd.
Five Reasons Why Silicon Valley Won’t Partner With The Pentagon. Margins are lousy; IP at risk; the regulatory burden; bureaucrats don’t trust market forces; the real customer is a political system.
Relativity is developing the first and only aerospace factory to integrate machine learning, software, and robotics with metal 3D printing technology to build and launch rockets in days instead of years.
CDR Salamander is skeptically optimistic about the LCS: “Good people have been working very hard to make it work, and the next 12 months are so will tell us how this reset – a decade after commissioning of Hull-1 – has succeeded.”
China’s first nuclear ballistic submarine: “The sub undertook a single patrol and then never sailed again, staying pierside for so long there were rumors it had caught fire and sank in 1985.”
“The Navy successfully demonstrated what’s known as single-sortie mine hunting, which sends out an autonomous boat to sweep for mines with a sonar system, detect a mine-like object, classify it and then deploy another system that destroys the mine.” The link is here. A good example of narrow AI making itself useful. Doubt the same algorithm can do its own logistics. Question is how survivable it is in a contested environment.
A new defense entrant valued over $1 billion?
“And while Russia pioneered development of systems for hacking and attacking U.S. space systems, it is China that is continually increasing it outlays for counterspace technologies.” Here’s the link.
Air Force space consortium funding could grow to $12 billion over the next decade. Consortiums definitely seem to be driving the increase in OTAs, seems like a safer route for a contracting officer than divvying them out individually.
Commentary: Future wars will be won with open mission systems.
“We’ve gone from, no kidding, like 77 percent supply availability with these parts two years ago to now this year we are currently at 90 percent and we’re going to finish this fiscal year at 93 percent supply availability. Transformational.”
The growing pains of the Pentagon’s new space acquisition arm. The Space Development Agency seems to be coming under fire: “The House has already voted to withhold $150 million in requested funding for fiscal year 2020 until the Pentagon delivers a clear work plan and cost estimate for the nascent agency, which began operating in March. Vested interests in industry and within the Air Force are said to be working to stifle or kill it.”
DOD releases unified cybersecurity standard for contractors.
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