Acquisition headlines

Leaders at Navy’s innovation ‘super-connector’ give advice for getting in the door. A few people have been confused on this point: NavalX does not buy anything, has no contract shop. It’s not like DIU or AFWERX. They are a connector. “He said that a common question NavalX staff receive is, “’Can you check out our technology?’ … or, ‘Can you tell me… whether this is something that’s a good fit for the Navy?’””

Army Futures Command Establishes ‘Software Factory’. “We won’t necessarily be able to rely on a contracted presence or some kind of reach-back capability to higher echelons.” Good to see software factory growth, and…

US Navy wants to create a ‘hardware factory’. “The Navy wants to use the hardware factory and hardware pipeline concept to use agile development to accelerate the development of its computing infrastructure.”

Preventing fraud during times of desperate need. DOJ has trained over 2,000 “investigators, some data scientists, as well as procurement officials, in assisting them in trying to uncover bid rigging and fraud in procurement process.”

Army advances learning capabilities of drone swarms. Interesting throughout! “Reinforcement learning provides a way to optimally control uncertain agents to achieve multi-objective goals when the precise model for the agent is unavailable; however, the existing reinforcement learning schemes can only be applied in a centralized manner, which requires pooling the state information of the entire swarm at a central learner.”

Cyclical Acquisition Reform… Has enough been done this time? “It takes 16.5 years on average to deliver a new capability… it takes China only three,” said Mike Griffin.

The Pentagon is a shrine to antiquated technology where creative thinking goes to die. “Everything is awesome and there is absolutely no reason to rock the boat. This is how toxic leaders rise through the ranks.”

The Air Force is dropping Mattis’ 80% aircraft readiness goal. “Letting go of the Defense Department’s 80% standard may actually allow for units to apply their time and effort toward readiness.” i.e., the mission capable rate and others are not good metrics for readiness.

Acquisition chief to host AFVentures-focused Ask Me Anything. On Sep. 1.Viewers will be able to submit questions during the event, which will be streamed live via YouTube.

Japan’s ‘flying car’ gets off ground, with a person on board. “If they cost $10 million, no one is going to buy them. If they fly for 5 minutes, no one is going to buy them. If they fall out of the sky every so often, no one is going to buy them.”

Former TOPGUN instructor: AI that beat human pilot in simulated dogfight would have ‘crashed and burned’ in real world. “… if you give [AI] a very narrow, specific job to accomplish, once it’s been trained, once it has had exposure to a very static environment, it does phenomenally well.”

The US Navy plans to foil massive ‘super swarm’ drone attacks by using the swarm’s intelligence against itself. “The swarm can be defeated by taking advantage of its internal rules – if these can be figured out. For example, an entire swarm whose members all have a collision-avoidance rule can be ‘herded’ by a few outsider drones, or may be fooled into running into each other.”

Britain may halve fighter jet purchases. “Britain could buy only half its target of 138 F-35 Lightning II fighter jets.”

US Army’s ‘cloud in the sky’ should be on board by late 2024. “Those vendors are Elbit Systems of America, Mercury Systems, and Physical Optics Corp. The OTA contracts totaled roughly $3.3 million.”

Let Japan’s companies help. “The United States cannot stay ahead of or catch up with China on its own without tapping the expertise of allies.”

Surprise! The Chinese Navy just transformed this cargo ship into an instant helicopter carrier. ” A commercial heavy-load carrier flying a Hong Kong flag recently supported a Chinese naval exercise, functioning as a base for at least two army helicopters.”