Army’s shark tank-style innovation competition is now open to other services. (Army Times) “Over the past year, the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps has held an innovation challenge dubbed “Dragon’s Lair.”… Of the 104 total submissions, 61 came from the Air Force, 11 from the Navy, three from Space Force and 29 from soldiers, said Col. Joe Buccino, XVIII Corps spokesman…. Walker, who is also a computer programmer, started working on a project called Ocean Augmented Reality using Google Glass as the platform. That project showed how virtual reality could be used to perform remote maintenance assistance on ships.
Analysis: Are better debriefings driving down protests? (FCW) “Fiscal 2021 saw 1,897 cases filed at GAO, down 12% compared to fiscal 2020 that saw 2,149 cases… It is important to note how GAO counts cases… The five-year decline (from 2017 to 2021) followed a rise in the number of cases from fiscal 2012 to 2016. That excludes fiscal 2013, which was down 2% from fiscal 2012… But it is worth noting that starting in 2018, the Defense Department started conducting what are called “enhanced” debriefings that allow for more dialogue with companies after they’ve lost a contract. Our own research in 2018 concluded that many companies filed protests simply to learn why they lost… A second reason that might be driving down the number of protests is limits on GAO’s jurisdiction over large, multiple-award indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts. Task orders under civilian IDIQS must be worth at least $10 million. For defense contracts, the task orders must be worth at least $25 million.”
State of the Space Industrial Base 2021. (Authors from USSF, DIU, and AFRL) “Attendee recommendations for the DOD: 11. Integrate JADC2 with the Hybrid Space Architecture; 12. Enable the Space Superhighway by Including Commercial Solutions for In-space Logistics; Infrastructure; 13. Mandate a Percentage of Commercial Services Buys Starting in 2022; 14. Expand Use and Management of Space Commercial Services within the Space Force; 15. Bolder Acquisition Reform Means a More Level Playing Field for All Business, Particularly Small Business; 16. Enable Rapid Innovation by Shifting Resources from SBIRs to OTAs.”
Another $25B boost, this time for shipyards, proposed for NDAA. (Breaking Defense) “The bill was originally introduced earlier this year by Wicker in the Senate and Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., in the House. It has since attracted almost three dozen cosponsors from Democratic and Republican lawmakers in both chambers largely hailing from shipbuilding states such as Virginia, Maine, Hawaii and Mississippi… If passed, the bill would provide $21 billion to the Navy’s four public shipyards and effectively accelerate the service’s existing plans for rebuilding those facilities, an effort now run by the Program Executive Office for Shipyard Infrastructure and Optimization (PEO SIOP). Another $4 billion would be distributed among private shipyards that have new construction or maintenance efforts underway for the Navy.”
The Defense Department fails its audit again, but officials have ‘no doubt’ it will eventually pass. (Government Executive) “On Monday, the Defense Department completed its annual audit required by the 1990 Chief Financial Officers Act for the fourth time… which covered the department’s more than $3.2 trillion in assets and $3 trillion in liabilities. About 1,200 auditors did 278 in-person and 1,069 virtual site visits… Last year, Thomas Harker, then-Navy top budget official who was also performing the duties of Defense Department comptroller, said he didn’t expect the Pentagon to achieve a clean audit until 2027… the approximately $207 million cost of the audit—which represents .03% of expenditures for the year— is a “highly positive investment in transparency, accountability and efficiency for the American people.””
For JADC2 to have a chance, DoD needs to get serious about data standards. (Breaking Defense) ” C4I capabilities are critical to JADC2 because they will function, in effect, as its central nervous system. However, the bulk of the spending has been concentrated on major service programs, such as the Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) and the Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Network and Enterprise Services (CANES), with 33% of all JADC2-related spending going to just five major C4I programs.”
Keeping Chinese funding out of US biotech. (National Defense Magazine) “The flexibility of OTA is a double-edge sword. While they are welcomed in the commercial sector, the business-oriented practices present a learning curve for the federal acquisition workforce, who now need to understand commercial R&D lifecycles, competitive intelligence, intellectual property and business strategy. Federal program managers are often rotated in and out of jobs and their career incentives are not aligned with the success of these programs. In the case of remdesivir, the program manager changed four times, creating complication in preserving best practices and communication.”
Senate NDAA draft includes study of budgeting process, other tech provisions. (Fed Scoop) “A summary published by the Senate Armed Services Committee includes a provision that would establish a commission to study the planning, programming, budget and execution process that forces acquisition programs to wait years before getting full funding from Congress. The budgeting process was created in the 1950s to ensure proper accounting for major industrial projects like buying tanks, but inhibits the kind of rapid iteration needed when buying software, experts have said.”
We need to bring innovation to the Department of Defense. Congress is Listening. (Medium) “The Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution (PPBE) was designed, under Secretary McNamara, with mid-20th century technology, geopolitical realities, and management philosophy in mind. It is decades overdue for a substantial review. We commend SASC in the strongest possible terms for committing to its reform. We hope, too, that the PPBE commission considers changes to the requirements process, i.e. the ways in which DoD determines which systems it wishes to purchase. Often the requirements process — which is lengthy, overly prescriptive, and biased towards the hardware components of new systems — does as much as the subsequent process of acquisitions to stunt innovation and keep innovative companies away from defense work.”
DoD’s commercial buying challenges. (Federal News Network) “As a first step toward attracting the most innovative U.S. commercial firms, the Amy should take a hard look at, and overhaul these laws and regulations to better align the rapid technology innovations and evolutions of today. Take for example the Truth in Negotiations Act (TINA). This law, first established in 1962, was first crafted in the industrial age of the 1960s, when manufacturing was king and the economics in industry were different than they are today.”
DoD picks Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle for multibillion dollar project to replace JEDI cloud. (Federal News Network) “Aside from being a multiple-award construct rather than single-award, it’s not yet clear how substantially the JWCC project will differ from the department’s initial vision from JEDI. The department on Friday declined to make public the solicitation documents it sent to vendors.”
Defense Innovation Unit publishes ‘responsible AI guidelines’. (DoD) “The guidelines provide examples of how responsible AI considerations can be put into practice in real-world programs, in an effort to create a user-friendly and more easily understood document that expedites the process, Dunnmon said.”
Stress-testing a space-based blockchain. (Space News) “Researchers from Villanova’s College of Engineering programmed a singleboard computer to serve as a node for the Ethereum Private blockchain on a cubesat scheduled to be launched in December with the educational nonprofit Teachers in Space on Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket… What are the space applications for blockchain? The first is intersatellite transactions. We see a lot of different institutions putting up their own satellites to take images or detect weather conditions. Other satellites may want access to some of that unique information. One satellite can request information from another satellite and even pay for it over blockchain. The receiving satellite can deliver that information to customers on Earth.”
B-21 Raider: The Air Force’s New $203 billion stealth bomber. (1945) “… the cost of the program to operate 100 Raiders over 30 years would be at least $203 billion… in 2019 dollars, $25.1 billion was for development, $64 billion was for the actual production of the aircraft, and $114 billion was to sustain and operate the fleet over three decades… At a Congressional hearing in June, Costello said that the first two B-21s have been completed at Plant 42 in Palmdale, California and those aircraft were ready for testing.”
CNO: First combining gear fix completed on Freedom-class LCS Minneapolis-Saint Paul. (USNI News) “In January, the Navy announced it would not take deliveries of the Lockheed Martin-built Freedom-class LCS until the class-wide issue with the under-engineered combining gear from German manufacturer RENK AG was repaired. The gear links the ships’ diesel engines and gas turbines. The determination followed two high-profile propulsion failures in USS Detroit (LCS-7) and USS Little Rock (LCS-9). In total, 13 ships required the repair to the gears.”
Navy finds fix for ‘unacceptable’ LCS issue; taxpayers likely to cover half of costs. (Breaking Defense) “Ironically, the issue may not impact operations greatly because of how slowly the Navy has deployed LCS. “In practical terms, [the delay] has almost zero impact because the LCS has, for the most part, not been deployed,” said Bryan Clark.”
In first, Army soldiers fight with and against robotic vehicles in training. (Breaking Defense) “… as the Army pivots to face near-peer competitors in China and Russia, the observation posts need to have low electronic and heat signatures so the vehicles can’t easily be identified. “They can’t have a generator going 24/7 because you need to be able to maintain the low signature associated with the human element in order for it to perform that mission,” Wallace said. “So in order for it not to have a generator going 24/7, we’re instituting a silent watch-desired characteristic within the RCVs, where it’s able to run off battery power and maintain an extremely low heat signature.”
How one airman fixed the Air Force’s night vision problem with a 4-cent chunk of plastic. (Task & Purpose) “… The PSQ-20Bs are really cool: they can merge night vision and thermal imaging into a single image that allows users to see in very low light and see far better than through the blotchy green view presented by the 20-year-old PVS-14s. “Despite the fact that we have both sets [of night vision goggles] in inventory, we’re not using the PSQ-20s because they don’t mount to our standardized security forces helmet,” Fulmer said… “At just four cents a part with a savings of $19,000 each, you just can’t beat it,” Fulmer said in his pitch video.”
Bernie Sanders announces he’s voting no on the $778 billion defense bill. (Truthout) “He also took issue with a portion of the bill that gives $10 billion to Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, calling it a “handout” and criticizing it as “unbelievable.” Congress had previously proposed a similar contract for the company earlier this year after the company lobbied hard to receive the money. “
Confessions of a B-52 stratofortress maintainer. (The Drive) “With the youngest B-52H now hitting 60 years old… the fact that they still fly so reliably — they are more dependable by a significant margin than their newer B-2 and B-1 brethren — is a testament to the guys and gals on flightlines and in hangars… “I would speculate that modern jets, like commercial jets, have fault sensors and can tell the mechanic what the issue is, or are small enough that one person can handle most tasks. Everything on the MX side of a B-52 is visual. You’re checking steam gauges and sight gauges in the wheel and flap wells for the six hydraulic systems.””
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