How Anduril’s Palmer Luckey plans to take on Boeing and Lockheed Martin. We’ll see if Marc Andreessen’s theory that good software firms can learn hardware better than traditionals can do the other way around will work in defense. A slice: “Today, Anduril designs and builds drones as well as what it calls the Sentry Tower, a 32-foot tower outfitted with radars, cameras, and software capable of detecting and identifying motion within a two-mile radius. “
Air Force’s Inventory Listed Wrong Sites for 79 Nuclear Missiles. That’s about one-fifth of the fleet. Of course, the people actually doing the work probably knew exactly where those missiles were…
LCS gets a mission: The Navy has 2 new ships operating in the South China Sea to send a message to China. They probably are not carrying the Naval Strike Missile, which started LCS testing in October.
Russia Has A New Weapon To Kill America’s Abrams Tanks. But the 125mm amor piercing sabot shells with tungsten or depleted-uranium aren’t compatible with Russia’s own tank…
Recommended: Solutions, Garbage Cans, and Platforms: How to Drive Commercial Solutions into the Military.
Air Tractor Wants Another Shot at a Light Attack Contract. The firm is protesting the Air Force’s purchase of Textron’s AT-6 because it “improperly used its Other Transaction Authority to make a sole-source award for [the] AT-6.”
Report to Congress on Artificial Intelligence and National Security. An update of the earlier excellent report.
US Air Force, for the first time, develops in-house small expendable turbine engine. A slice: “AFRL hopes to lower the engine cost to approximately a quarter of the cheapest current alternative.” Glad to hear more in-house development/prototype effort. A bonus is that USAF gets to keep intellectual property rights.
SpaceX has lost its first Starship prototype—is this a big deal?. Subtitle states the obvious: Iterative design is faster and arguably better. But you have to be willing to fail. Good news: “NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said he welcomed SpaceX’s design philosophy.”
CSBA says the US is investing in the wrong jammers to counter Russia and China’s powerful Electronic Warfare forces. A slice: “How would that work? “It is essentially like Uber… A commander inputs the task…and the system comes back with some proposed courses of action. To develop the courses of action, the system runs an auction across all the units available.”
GSA promises to figure out why transition from FedBizOpps struggled. Wasn’t shut down, but load time delays of 2-4 minutes. Nice chart of systems decommissioned, in progress of decommissioning, and future.
The Two Things Every Senior Pentagon Leader Is Worried About. First, a perceived peak of military spending, and second, underestimating the Chinese threat.
POGO: Most former officials advocating for Space Force had ties—often financial—to space industry. 39 out of 42 signing an open letter had industry ties, that is.
Leave a Reply