State Department approves $13B F-15EX sale to Indonesia, on heels of Rafale deal. (Breaking Defense) “… buy up to 36 Boeing F-15EX aircraft… just hours after Indonesia announced another major investment [for 42 of] the French-made Dassault Rafale… Often, FMS cases are approved but a deal never comes to fruition. In the cases where contracts are eventually signed, the cost of the package may differ than the original estimate.”
Acquisition and Sustainment Leadership transition. (DoD) “Mr. Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, assumed the duties of Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (USD(A&S)).”
Skydio wins US Army’s $100 million small drone recon contract. (Drone DJ) “The pitch for the contract involved 30 small-scale drone manufacturers, from which Skydio’s craft was judged the most ready to fulfill the US Army’s SRR operational requirements from day one… . Constructed with robust composites to withstand exacting operational environments, the X2D is outfitted with dual color optical thermal sensors, and GPS-based night flight and strobe lighting enabling day and night use of up to 35 minutes on a single charge.”
Pentagon’s AI center awards contracts to 79 companies in new test and evaluation. (Defense News) “[The JAIC] has awarded contracts 79 vendors to streamline the procurement and delivery of test and evaluation tools, with each contract worth up to $15 million… The test and evaluation blanket purchase agreement on behalf of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is intended to establish a decentralized mechanism for artificial intelligence test and evaluation, creating criteria, performance metrics, standards and best practices for automated testing of artificial intelligence-enabled systems.”
Marines Corps sees initial successes with restructure despite critics. (National Defense Magazine) ““Congress has given us some [authorities, but] we haven’t used all of it,” he said. “I’m convinced we haven’t squeezed all we can out of it in terms of rapid acquisition, rapid testing.” Berger said the current bureaucracy rewards inertia such as continuing existing programs of record. By the time the technology is developed it is already obsolete…. “as these cuts get deeper on the divest side, and the changes become more significant on the invest side, it will get harder and harder to continue to make that case,”[Bryan Clark] said.”
Pentagon has plan to fix its software development woes. (Federal News Network) “The scaled-up and better-integrated software factories are one of three major objectives in an ambitious new software modernization strategy Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks approved last week. The document also emphasizes the need to move the military to a well-designed cloud computing environment and to reform its acquisition and other bureaucratic processes to make them more amenable to software.”
Six B-21s in production, fuel control software already tested. (Air Force Magazine) ““There are now six of those in existence. The rollout will probably be some time this year. I’m not at liberty to give the likely date of that, but [it will be] quickly followed by first flight… the software for the fuel control system, which is a pretty complex thing, is completely done on an aircraft that hasn’t even flown yet as a test article, because of how we’re able to do models-based systems engineering. And they actually built a fuel systems model and tested the software, and the software is ready to go.””
Air Force officially looking for vendors to potentially replace E-3 AWACs. (Breaking Defense) “The service is now seeking information from industry about whether companies can deliver “at least two production representative prototype aircraft, including ground support and training systems, within five years starting in FY23,” when a contract is expected to be awarded… But a big question remains: Will the Air Force choose to sole source Boeing’s E-7 Wedgetail — an aircraft that has garnered support from top service leaders… or does the new solicitation signal a more open competition for the aircraft?… Saab CEO Micael Johansson told Breaking Defense that the company is ready to offer its GlobalEye airborne early warning and control plane to the United States.”
Department of Defense is prioritizing open source software. Here’s how open source projects can benefit. (Gradients) “Even though the DoD uses and creates a lot of open source software, it rarely funds OSS initiatives itself. In my opinion, there are two reasons for this: (1) OSS projects do not fit within the traditional acquisitions framework, therefore making it difficult for the DoD to give contracts to projects with no responsible entity. (2) DoD has no incentive to pay for services it is otherwise receiving for free. In my experience, government programs take free things for granted, whereas commercial products, even if terrible, get much more care and interest.”
Time-shifted computing could slash data center energy costs by up to 30%. (Ars Technica) “The “information battery” concept, fleshed out in a recent paper, would perform certain computations in advance when power is cheap—like when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing—and cache the results for later. The process could help data centers replace up to 30 percent of their energy use with surplus renewable power.”
M1 Abrams tank tested with new system that prevents it from being hacked. (The Warzone) “In the demonstration, an M1A2 Abrams tank was fitted with a 1553 Bus Defender system made by Peraton. The Bus Defender is an intrusion detection and prevention system that can defeat cyberattacks aimed at a platform’s data bus, a hardware subsystem that handles the transfer of data both in and out of associated systems. All transmissions between other military assets including satellites, off-board sensors, communication systems, weapons, unmanned vehicles, and more are handled by the data bus. The Department of Defense and NASA use the MIL-STD-1553 data bus, first developed in 1975.”
Huntington Ingalls considers industrial base investment, as sub construction lags. (Defense News) “Chief Financial Officer Tom Stiehle said during the call that the company this year plans to make capital expenditures of between 2.5% and 3% of sales — or “modest incremental capital expenditures above our prior guidance, related to investments in infrastructure and tooling to support the submarine industrial base. We are working with our Navy partner regarding the shared investment in capital infrastructure and believe these critical investments will have minimal impact on our overall free cash flow generation.”
For the first time, black hawk helicopter flies without anyone aboard. (Defense News) “A UH-60 Alpha-model Black Hawk helicopter flew for the first time entirely unmanned as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program… DARPA and Sikorsky have together invested roughly $160 million in the ALIAS program… “ALIAS aims to support execution of an entire mission from takeoff to landing, including autonomously handling contingency events such as aircraft system failures.”
Experimental Marine unit deploys ‘hunter wolf’ unmanned ground vehicles for mountain training. (The Warzone) “HDT Global, which is headquartered in Ohio, began development of the Hunter WOLF in 2012. The WOLF part of the name stands for Wheeled Offload Logistics Follower. “Follower” in this case reflects one of the unmanned vehicle’s primary modes of operation, in which it automatically trails behind an operator holding a hand-held wireless controller.The relatively small 6×6 vehicle, which weighs around 3,600 pounds, is a modular design capable of carrying various payloads weighing up to 2,200 pounds. It has a hybrid-electric propulsion system that allows it to travel as far as 200 miles or otherwise operate for up to 120 hours on a single tank of gas – either JP-8 jet fuel or diesel… The Hunter WOLF itself had competed for the Army’s Squad Multipurpose Equipment Transport (SMET) contract, initially losing out to General Dynamics Land Systems’ Multi-Utility Tactical Transport (MUTT). However, a subsequent protest by another competitor, Howe and Howe, led to the Army cancel that deal and reboot the competition, inviting all of the original participants to resubmit their designs.”
CMMC program moved to the office of DoD chief information officer. (Fed Scoop) “The change comes as the office that created and oversaw CMMC from its outset, the chief information security officer for acquisition and sustainment, has been dissolved… While an acquisition problem, the management of cybersecurity policy and controls drifted into the CIO’s traditional remit… “While I think there should be collaboration with CIO, I do not support the moving of billets to CIO or handing of overall leadership,” former head of acquisition and sustainment Ellen Lord, told this publication in an interview last year.
Defense Innovation Unit partners with orbital insight to take on satellite spoofing. (C4ISRNET) “
“Orbital Insight’s platform will leverage its multisensory data stack, artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to alert analysts and operators to potential jamming and spoofing events, techniques commonly used by adversarial actors to cover up activities or sabotage operations,” the company said.”
Space Development Agency experiment demonstrates on-orbit data processing. (Space News) “
SDA’s satellites will be used by the U.S. military to detect and track targets on the ground, at sea or in the air. Raw data collected by satellites typically is sent to ground stations and crunched by human analysts before it’s routed to commanders in the field. SDA wants to move more data processing to orbit and shorten the cycle so data is more timely.”
New Chinese diesel-electric submarine breaks cover. (The Warzone) “The emergence of this submarine comes after a new subclass of a conventionally-powered type broke cover last year and the reveal of a highly intriguing “sail-less” design three years before that… Overall, very little is known about the new Chinese submarine, but it does yet again reinforce the fact that Beijing is investing heavily in smaller conventional submarines as well as larger nuclear-powered designs.”
Destinus plans to fly a hydrogen-powered, hypersonic cargo craft with $29M seed round. (Tech Crunch) “The Jungfrau, as the prototype craft being designed by Destinus is called, would be an entirely autonomous “hyperplane,” as it doesn’t quite go to space, staying well below the Karman line but for aerodynamic purposes quite close to vacuum. They are aiming for speeds as high as mach 15 at 60 kilometers up.”
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