Acquisition headlines

“The Pentagon is seeking $696 million in fiscal year 2021 for a series of [eight] pilot programs designed to fund software through a single budget activity.” That would make the DIB’s colorless appropriation so you didn’t have to distinguish between RDT&E, and Operations & Maintenance. Is 2020 the year of budget reform?

Why the US Air Force chose hypersonic ARRW over HCSW. “The reason that we went with ARRW was not that HCSW was bad, but ARRW is smaller. You can carry twice as many on the B-52,” says Roper.

Fixing the Navy’s Software. “Industry, the intelligence community, and the Air Force have all found much better ways of delivering value to servicemembers and civilian staff who use the applications. The Navy can do better by copying these entities’ successful development pipelines, expanding user influence on product development, and tackling software challenges with permanent teams instead of as one-off projects.”

Boeing acknowledges “gaps” in its Starliner software testing. Boeing VP Mulholand: “Cost has never been in any way a key factor in how we need to test and verify our systems.”

Mission Update: Northrop Grumman hard at work on newest bomber. And then there’s this factoid: “We deliver an F-35 center fuselage every 36 hours and I am very proud to say we have made all our deliveries since the inception of the program,” said Frank Carus.

A low-key Dutch company has cornered a critical link in the global electronics supply chain.

The Pentagon May Finally Get The Fighter-Sized Stealth Aerial Target Drone It Badly Needs. “It would probably go supersonic without much trouble, but none of the structure was analyzed or designed for supersonic [flight], nor were the inlet lips.” A related article from 2016: U.S. Air Force Cadets Just Invented a Stealth Fighter. “In 2003, the U.S. Air Force started a series of design studies to explore the concept of developing an aerial target aircraft with stealth capabilities. But a funny thing happened on the way to building this target. It turns out that designing a full-scale fifth-generation target airplane is nearly the same thing as designing an actual fifth-generation fighter.”

US Defense Agency Notifies Users of Serious Breach.

Special Operations as an Innovation Laboratory.

The Cult of Mediocrity. “At one point, some of us were under an O-6 directed social media “gag order” while a certain community attempted to reallocate budgetary line items to personnel bonuses and wanted to do so without drawing attention from Congressional Representatives.”

The Collision of Product Management and Product Ownership.

Air Force To Pump New Tech Startups With $10M Awards.

Building a Culture of Experimentation.