Acquisition headlines (3/21 – 3/27/2021)

SpaceX reducing booster production in recent years. (Reddit SpaceX Lounge) Boosters produced increased from two in 2012 to 13 in 2017, then declined to 15, 7, and 5 in 2018-2020. Boosters launched, however, was highest it has been in 2020 with 26 launches. “This clearly demonstrates why spending about billion on reusability was worth it. Without that billion they would had had to increase their production facilities and workforce accordingly. They would have spent more than that by now, and there would be no perspective on cutting that ongoing cost down.”

China shipbuilding volume up 54.7% for Jan-Feb. (Seatrade Maritime) “China’s shipbuilding output for January to February 2021 was 7.23m dwt, an increase of 54.7% year-on-year, while the volume of newly received orders was 6.81m dwt, an increase of 105%… Fifteen major ship repair companies completed a repairing volume of 510 vessels for the first two months, an increase of 13.3%.”

Hypersonic Weapons:DOD Should Clarify Roles and Responsibilities to Ensure Coordination across Development Efforts. (GAO) “GAO identified 70 efforts to develop hypersonic weapons and related technologies that are estimated to cost almost $15 billion from fiscal years 2015 through 2024.” $14.5B from DoD with Navy in the lead with $6.2B, AF at $3.6B, R&E and Army both at $1.5B, and DARPA at $1.15B. DoE and NASA are smaller players. 65 efforts in tech development, 5 in product development, 0 in production. Here’s the GAO finding: “DOD Lacks a Cohesive, Overarching Management and Oversight Structure with Clearly Defined Roles and Responsibilities.”

Collaborative air combat autonomy program makes strides. (DARPA) “APL has continued to design and extend the simulation environment for this phase of the ACE program. Teams demonstrated 2-v-1 simulated engagements with two friendly “blue” F-16s fighting as a team against an enemy “red” aircraft. This marked the first AI scrimmage following the AlphaDogfight Trials and introduced more weapons into the mix – a gun for precise, shorter-range shots, and a missile for longer-range targets… The ACE program is also researching two independent frameworks for an AI Battle Manager in what has been deemed the AlphaMosaic agent for BVR and campaign scale command and control.”

JAIC’s AI development platform ‘up and running.‘ (Breaking Defense) “The JCF is a set of cloud-based tools that enable JAIC customers to develop AI, share data to train machine learning algorithms, and to work in a common environment guided by secure development operations (DevSecOps).” Built on Deloitte’s recent $106M contract for AI toolkits. Hopefully that works out better than Deloitte’s $44M boondoggle on Covid-19 vaccination tool for the CDC.

F-35 program moves too slowly in deploying software, saying government watchdog. (Defense News) “Lockheed also had trouble identifying software deficiencies before new code was released to operational F-35s, with one analysis by a third party finding that 23 percent of all defects (656 bugs total) were discovered after delivery from December 2017 to September 2020…  “Software changes, intended to introduce new capabilities or fix deficiencies, often introduced stability problems and adversely affected other functionality.””

The F-35 may be unsalvageable. (The Hill) “Although it has an extraordinarily poor track record, killing off the JSF entirely will prove difficult. According to a map showing the economic impact across the country on Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II website, the only states that do not have at least one supplier for the aircraft are Hawaii and North Dakota. This gives all but two representatives and four senators more than enough incentive to not only keep greasing the wheels, but also to add 32 earmarks for the JSF program, costing $10.6 billion, since FY 2001. There has also been significant investment in the program by North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and other allies. The best taxpayers can likely hope for, barring an uncharacteristic recalibration with reality from the Pentagon, is that the program gets significantly scaled back.”

One of America’s $135.8 million fighter jets shot itself. (Vice) “This particular F-35 has an externally mounted gatling gun that fires a 25mm armor piercing high explosive round. Sometime during the training, the gun discharged and the round exploded, damaging the underside of the jet.” Caused $2.5M in damage to the jet, the incident is still under investigation.

Goodbye, tanks. How the Marine Corps will change, and what it will lose, by ditching its armor. (MarineTimes) “At the time of the initial overhaul announcement, the Corps had 452 tanks at its disposal. By December 2020, 323 had been transferred to the Army. The ­remaining tanks were scheduled for transfer by 2023, which included tanks in overseas storage and aboard maritime prepositioning ships… “So, what, is the Army the Marine Corps’ 911 now?” Spencer said… “We can kill armor formations at ­longer ranges using additional and ­other resources without incurring a 74-ton challenge trying to get that to a shore, or to get it from the United States into the fight,” Smith said. “You simply can’t be there in time.””

Israelis worry about CH-53K king stallion engines. (Breaking Defense) “The US Director of Operational Test and Evaluation’s annual report says the CH-53K engine’s performance degrades below the accepted minimum after 21 minutes of dust exposure. This is causing great concern in the IAF as it eyes buying the first batch of 20 helicopters.” FMS is usually a good indication of a weapon’s worth, but sometimes it’s hard to tell given political-economy issues.

AFRL completes second Golden Horde demonstration, shifts focus to colosseum digital weapon ‘ecosystem’. (Janes) “Golden Horde is an Air Force Vanguard programme that integrates datalink radios and collaborative behaviours to allow guided weapon systems to work together dynamically in real time to prioritise and defeat targets. This shared data is used to improve information across an entire group or ‘swarm’ of weapons to defeat adversary defences and improve overall effectiveness.”

Interesting ideas exist to shorten “DoD-created valley of death” and fuel innovation, says DIU director. (Government Matters) “40% of the office’s contracts have made it to production in its first five years… Over the next five years, DIU would like to scale further, increase its transition rate and hopefully shorten the two-year, DoD-created “valley of death” during which they don’t have the necessary funds for a vendor prototype, said Brown.”

US Navy wants ‘drone control features’ on AWACS; awards contract to Northrop Grumman for upgrades. (Eurasian Times) “The experiment for flying E-2D along with UAVs was announced on March 17. Earlier, the US Navy said it wanted to move some command-and-control activities of future carrier-based drones, off-ship through manned-unmanned teaming technologies.”

SPA awarded DoD contract to assess US industrial base; William Vantine quoted. (Executive Gov) “Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. (SPA) has been awarded an approximately $32 million five-year contract to support the assessments and investment program office within the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Policy (DASD INDPOL).”

Battle heats up over Pentagon spending plans. (The Hill) “Pentagon officials are reportedly crafting a fiscal 2022 budget between $704 billion and $708 billion that is essentially flat compared with this year’s funding… [Rep.] Pocan shot back, accusing Republicans of “fearmongering.” “If we literally cut our defense budget in half, we’d still spend: $100,000,000,000 more on defense than China.” … “Making room for new capabilities will require difficult choices where the nation’s security needs are no longer being met,” Hicks said in a speech to the National War College, her first public remarks as deputy Defense secretary. “The department will work closely with Congress to phase out systems and approaches optimized for an earlier era.”

Why machine learning struggles with causality. (Venture Beat) “…the majority of current successes of machine learning boil down to large scale pattern recognition on suitably collected independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data.” A common machine learning term, “i.i.d.” supposes that random observations in a problem space are not dependent on each other and have a constant probability of occurring. The simplest example of i.i.d. is flipping a coin or tossing a die… But in the real world, distributions often change due to factors that cannot be considered and controlled in the training data… Causality can also be crucial to dealing with adversarial attacks, subtle manipulations that force machine learning systems to fail in unexpected ways. “These attacks clearly constitute violations of the i.i.d. assumption that underlies statistical machine learning,””

Combat drones in China are coming to a conflict near you. (Intelligent Aerospace) “The United Arab Emirates has used AVIC drones in Libya’s civil war, Egypt has attacked rebels in Sinai with them, and Saudi-led troops have deployed them in Yemen. The company’s drones “are now battle-tested,” says Heather Penney, a fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, a think tank in Arlington, Va. “They’ve been able to feed lessons learned back into their manufacturing.””

Report to Congress on joint all-domain command and control. (USNI News) “The following list highlights selected organizations and projects associated with JADC2 development: DOD Chief Information Officer: Fifth Generation (5G) Information Communications Technologies —  Office of the Secretary of Defense (Research & Engineering): Fully Networked Command, Control, and Communications (FNC3) — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Mosaic Warfare — Air Force: Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) — Army: Project Convergence — Navy: Project Overmatch.”

Navy’s unmanned ships and drones to team with Zumwalts. (Breaking Defense) “Established in 2019, SURFDEVRON 1 [surface development squadron one] has been one of the more innovative commands in the Navy, bringing together the service’s first unmanned ships and working to integrate them with the first two of three eventual Zumwalt destroyers — a ship which has struggled to find a role or real mission within the fleet… The exercise will include the Super Swarm project, a secretive Office of Naval Research experimental effort to operate swarms of small drones, and the MQ-8B Fire Scout UAV launched from a Littoral Combat Ship, as well as the MQ-9 Sea Guardian UAV.”