Florida just had its busiest orbital rocket launch year in decades. (Florida Today) 31 successful launches, the most since 1966 with 54! SpaceX made up 25 of those launches.
How the Biden administration can make DoD an innovation powerhouse. (Federal News Network) Steve Blank: “That’s the innovation dilemma of DoD. They’re still operating under the McNamara era in 1960s: contained cost, lifecycle management, etc.”
Pentagon keeps $398 billion F-35s Full-Rate Production on Hold. (Bloomberg) With hundreds delivered and hundreds more on order for Lots 13 and 14, it’s not really clear that full-rate production has any significance.
Snakehead will be the largest underwater drone that the US nuclear submarines can deploy. (The Warzone) “Snakehead is a long-endurance, multi-mission UUV, deployed from submarine large open interfaces, with the capability to deploy reconfigurable payloads.”
DARPA’s contribution to JADC2: Mosaic warfare. (Federal News Network) “What we’re doing with Mosaic is trying to bust up monolithic architectures and make them into fluid dynamic types of warfighting constructs… We like to contrast that architecture with a jigsaw puzzle where all the different systems are carefully architected with well-defined interfaces that have to go together one particular way. The mosaic metaphor says I’ve got a collection of tiles, and they might be all different kinds of colors and shapes, but I can select the tiles that I want in a much more flexible way — not a predefined structure — to build that mosaic artwork.” That’s *really* where DoD needs to head.
Should we be delighted with Northrop Grumman Corporation’s ROE of 23%? (Yahoo! Finance) DoD focuses on profits on total sales, and so companies shift their strategies to maximize profits in other ways, such as by outsourcing a lot. “The ‘return’ is the profit over the last twelve months. So, this means that for every $1 of its shareholder’s investments, the company generates a profit of $0.23.”
The Pentagon wants small drones to be the future of networked warfare, but buying them hasn’t been easy. (FedScoop) “By 2024, the Army wants to have a single source of commands from a “Universal Robotic Controller Application” to control its flying systems and be able to ingest the data they send back.”
New in 2021: Advanced Battle Management System testing begins. (Air Force Times) “As early as March, the Air Force and Army could begin major experiments on their systems to allow aircraft, sensors and other weapons systems across services to share data instantaneously.”
Space Force delays deal to ‘further evaluate’ contractor found to have acted fraudulently. (Washington Post) This one is about OTAs. “The case has raised new questions about NSTXL’s fitness to manage billions of dollars in technology acquisitions for the Space Force… “The result is that the unfortunate actions of NSTXL in this case may very well cast shade on otherwise very successful firms and programs.”
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