Acquisition headlines

“The BLADE can detect, track, identify, and take down drones with electronic attack, according to the U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center.” Recommend that you watch a longer video on the BLADE from US Military Notes. I can imagine a back-and-forth development effort as drones are hardened, and then EW overcoming it again, etc. This might be one example of how the more agile DevOps team is the winner.

Top House Armed Services Republican Mac Thornberry won’t seek reelection.

Lockheed Martin Offers To Shoulder Risks On F-35 Maintenance With Fixed-Price, Performance-Based Contract. Guarantees 80 percent readiness by 2025. First, long timeline, a lot can happen. Second, unintended consequences, what does that 80 percent measure and what doesn’t it measure? Third, with several years of inflated historical costs on F-35 maintenance, that will be priced in plus some into the fixed price contract — creating an easy target for performance. A better “shouldering” of risk would be to guarantee that the fixed price equate to something no more than 50 percent greater than an F-16.

Experimental German radar ‘tracked two U.S. F-35 stealth jet for 100 MILES‘ after lying in wait on a pony farm to catch them flying home from airshow.

Lockheed Martin has submitted a proposal evincing preliminary interest to supply F-21 fighter jets to [India’s] Air Force and winning the bid may result in it working with 400 local companies, a senior official has said.

The Strange Career of ‘National Security’. A slice: “…historian Andrew Preston has counted sitting U.S. presidents publicly mentioning “national security” a mere four times between 1918 and 1931.”

The Navy’s FY2020 30-year (FY2020-FY2049) shipbuilding plan includes 304 ships, or an average of about 10 per year.

Report to Congress on U.S. Navy Destroyer Programs. “The Navy estimates the combined procurement cost of the three DDG-51s requested for procurement in FY2020 at $5,463.0 million, or an average of $1,821.0 million each.”

Pentagon’s Former Top Hacker Wants His Startup to Inject Some Silicon Valley into the Defense Industry. I think he actually means it too: “We self-fund all of our own products. We have capitalized and built Rebellion in such a way that we can choose what we work on and what we build. That gives us a lot of opportunity to create things that are impactful to the mission.” That could be important for many types of purchases, but is it plausible for major platforms? Perhaps in some form…

The market test for US missile defense: “Russia has offered to sell Saudi Arabia the same missile defense it sold Iran and Turkey after U.S. systems failed to detect or intercept a recent attack on key oil sites in the kingdom.”

Scott Sumner is not so sure that there are policies available that can accelerate the pace of innovation.

I don’t buy it: “One of the most senior officials tasked with protecting U.S. critical infrastructure says that the lack of security professionals in the U.S. is one of the leading threats to national cybersecurity.”