US Air Force entertains new design to replace F-16. (Aviation Week) “Any decision about the future of the Air Force’s tactical aircraft fleet will require buy-in from Capitol Hill and elsewhere in the Pentagon, Brown says. He wants the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office to be part of the future tactical aircraft study that will inform the fiscal 2023 budget, Brown said.”
Israel carriers out first-ever worldwide drone test without GPS, succeeds. (Jerusalem Post) “The current test sought to examine the usability of Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) navigation solutions… Called NavSight, the system is camera-based and allows for artificial intelligence to assess the visual situation for autonomous day and night missions. Essentially, it lets the drone understand the surrounding environment like a human pilot.”
The tiny tech lab that put AI on a spyplane has another secret project. (Defense News) Sequence of events: 5-person team creates solution to update U-2 software during flight within 3 days. Roper then asks the team to create an AI copilot on the U-2, Artuμ, and the team did it in one month. They’ve got a new challenge cooking and looking to deploy Artuμ in summer 2021. “Nobody helped us with this; there was no big company that rolled in. We didn’t outsource any work, it was literally and organically done by a team of five.”
Barriers to Entry in Government Markets Symposium. (Public Spend Forum) Register for Feb 25 at 1pm EST, with opening remarks by Gen. Cameron Holt.
Enthusiasm growing at Pentagon for OTAs. (National Defense Magazine) ““I definitely don’t think the [current] growth rate is sustainable … but I think we’re going to continue to see growth in OTAs in the coming years,” McCormick said. “It just won’t be at that crazy rate that we saw” after the 2016 NDAA was passed.” The article failed to note that the jump from $7.7B to $16.3B between FY19 and FY20 was pretty much all due to Operation Warp Speed being contracting out of Army CBRND. Some DoD components and Navy grew OTA spending, but the bigger spenders DARPA, Air Force, and Army all flatlined in FY20.
The Air Force finally has its first new AT-6E wolverine light attack aircraft. (The Warzone) “The most immediately visible difference between the AT-6E, which Beechcraft has marketed in the past as the AT-6B, AT-6C, or simply the AT-6, and standard Texan II trainers are its six underwing pylons. These can accommodate various precision-guided bombs and missiles, as well as rocket and gun pods, among other stores. It has an additional station under the fuselage, which is typically occupied by a sensor turret containing electro-optical and infrared cameras.”
Former 18F official returns to lead next phase of technology transformation services. (Next Gov) “So, 18F, working with the 10x program, put out a program called the De-risking Government Technology Guide, and that has had profound impacts. It’s worked with agencies who are trying to figure out how they can adopt modular procurement methods, really specific tactical advice about how they can buy better, and has had a lot of profound influence.” Supposedly helping agencies from problem to contract in 60 days.
Two tech titans take on 18F and USDS. (FCW) “What they had going for them was political wannabes up the line who wanted to claim they made the government innovative and cool. They ran up deficits and wrote articles claiming to transforming government. It’s easier to claim it. Doing it is hard… Agencies are not going to pay $325 per hour for web designers who don’t know how to spell their name.”
SDA preps plans for Tranche One satellites. (Air Force Magazine) “We’ll also be able to take cues from those systems [e.g., Next Gen OPIR], and then use that to cue, for example, our medium field-of-view [missile tracking] systems,” Tournear said. “But yeah, there’ll be no direct satellite-to-satellite [communications].” … “We’re planning on tying our national defense space architecture into their planned demonstrations and exercises, so that we can essentially demonstrate that we can close that kill chain on the order of single-digit seconds.”
Special Forces Command seeks key data aggregation, cyber tools. (SIGNAL Magazine) “So, we’re trying to employ what is called the ‘naked man’ concept where we send someone overseas with absolutely no electronic signature on them and then they can procure local indigenous equipment and then blend into the information environment, while still communicating back to their higher headquarters without raising a signature.”
DARPA, Linux foundation partner to advance 5G. (Next Gov) “The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization that hosts open-source efforts including Kubernetes and the O-RAN Alliance’s software community, signed a cooperative research and development agreement, or CRADA, with DARPA to create a “broad collaboration umbrella” called US Government Open Programmable and Secure, or US GOV OPS.”
Lessons from Special Operations Command: Cyber training for the multidomain forces. (Fifth Domain) “Training for Cyber Mission Forces has operated largely independently from training for the conventional force. For instance, the United States has developed realistic, closed network cyber ranges, like the nascent Persistent Cyber Training Environment, to train cyberwarriors in a range of tactics, techniques and procedures for offensive and defensive computer network operations.”
There’ll be fewer F-35 stealth jets in air shows due to engine shortages. (Interesting Engineering) “The main issue is that the F-35 jets’ engines have been running to the limits of their designs, and getting too hot. The heat led to premature cracks of turbine blade coatings, which has meant more engines have been removed or repaired sooner than typically required — adding more delays in the already-backlogged depot system… In the most extreme case, up to 20 percent of F35s will be missing engines by 2025, explained the Pentagon’s F-35 program office.”
The China threat is being inflated to justify more spending. (Defense News) “A quick search through the C-SPAN transcripts for the Austin and Hicks hearings show at least 70 mentions of China between the two Senate hearings. For example, Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., referring to China and Russia, said: “I believe that we’re in the most dangerous time arguably in our lifetime.””
DARPA hacks its secure hardware, fends off most attacks. (IEEE) ” After 13,000 hours of hacking by 580 cybersecurity researchers, the results are finally in: just 10 vulnerabilities. Darpa is calling it a win… Of the 10 vulnerabilities discovered, four were fixed during the bug bounty, which ran from July to October 2020. Seven of those 10 were deemed critical, according to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System 3.0 standards. Most of those resulted from weaknesses introduced by interactions between the hardware, firmware, and the operating system software.”
Why Palantir Stock soared today. (Motley Fool) “Merwin was also pleased by management’s projection of greater than 30% revenue growth in fiscal 2021, as well as its long-term goal of $4 billion in revenue by fiscal 2025. He argued that Palantir’s $2.8 billion backlog of total deal value at the end of 2020 suggests that the company is well on its way to hitting its expansion targets. “
US government acts to reduce dependence on China for rare-earth magnets. (Physics Today) Good overview. “At 8%, Mountain Pass’s ore-bearing rock has one of the world’s highest RE ore concentrations. But all of its output is shipped to China for processing and separation into individual REs. With help from a $9.6 million grant last year from the Department of Defense, mine owner MP Materials plans to open a plant in 2022 to separate lighter-atomic-weight REs, primarily Nd and Pr, on site. It would be the first separation facility in the Western Hemisphere.”
Army CIO wants new governance council to drive discipline in IT spending. (Federal News Network) “If the Army’s incoming leadership approves the new governance structure, one of its major functions will be to deliver more agency-level budget oversight to programs the Army is already spending money on. As of now, Iyer said, the decentralized nature of Army IT spending means many different programs wind up spending more money than was budgeted when it comes time to actually obligate dollars on contracts. And collectively, those individual decisions cause the Army to overspend its IT budget by about $2 billion each year.”
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