Current Army budget may make modernizing more difficult. “… they talk about 31-plus-three initiatives that are moving along, and that will, at some point, produce systems that the Army might actually field, and that many of these employ cutting edge technologies, and would be useful in the kind of great power conflicts that the nation foresees.”
Google reveals major hidden weakness in machine learning. “The team goes on to show how underspecification occurs in a surprisingly wide range of real deep learning scenarios. These include medical image analysis, clinical diagnoses based on electronic health records and natural language processing.”
Oversight defense: Mike Rogers slated to be top House Armed Services Republican. “The Alabama Republican is slated to succeed current ranking member Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), who announced his retirement in September of last year.”
Defense Department seeks to achieve agile, adaptive acquisition. “The department also needs help from the modeling and simulation industry to accelerate acquisition.”
Navy will spend around $30 million to scrap dire-damaged USS Bonhomme Richard. “Scrapping the ship will cost $30 million over a nine- to 12-month timeline instead of a possible $2.5 -$3.2 billion renovation cost that could take as long as five to seven years.”
Blockchain attempts to secure the supply chain. Recommended. “A semiconductor chip will follow a particular tool flow, and the tools used, along with verification results, can be entered onto a ledger. Any individual unit could then incorporate that design ledger to attest to the completeness and correctness of the design. This might seem pedantic, but it could help in situations where an initial design is modified. A given unit would then be attributable to either the old or new design, which is useful information for failure analysis.”
Chinese team test jet engine ‘able to reach anywhere on Earth within 2 hours.’ “A Chinese-made “sodramjet” engine (short for “standing oblique detonation ramjet engine”) has reached nine times the speed of sound in a wind tunnel test.” … ““Jiang and colleagues said they were fed up with scramjets’ fatal design weakness… The key difference in the sodramjet is that the new design uses the sonic boom to add combustion, not blow it out. “Turning the shock wave from their enemy to their friend helped them sustain and stabilise combustion at hypersonic speed,” SCMP reports.”
Refresh market research to find top tech. “In this rapidly changing tech environment, expecting overworked acquisition staff to become experts in things like artificial intelligence is unrealistic.”
NGAD strategy faces Hill headwinds. “Lawmakers on both sides of Capitol Hill have complained that there isn’t enough detail about NGAD plans to justify the Air Force’s 2021 budget request, which includes $1.5 billion for fiscal year 2022 and some $7.3 billion over the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP).”
JAIC entering new phase of life, will create teams to help DoD adopt AI. “JAIC is creating “flyaway teams” that will work with different components of DoD “They will assist a potential AI consumer and help them understand their data environment, help them understand what kind of things that they’re going to have to do to create an environment that can support an artificial intelligence set of solutions,” Groen said.”
Discovery BPA evaluation process: how to operationalize this practice. “A whole lot of interest here. “One of the most successful market research activities our team utilized was using a draft RFQ as part of a RFI.”
The Army wants to launch drone swarms behind enemy lines. “… a network of high-altitude balloons that would fly in the stratosphere and be able to launch swarms of unmanned aircraft, including those configured as loitering munitions.”
Tankers Likely the First Aircraft to Receive ABMS Upgrades. “… integrating pods complete with advanced communications and data links to feed information, along with gas, to combat aircraft as early as next year.”
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