The business of war is the business of deterrence. (Medium) Trae Stephens writes: “… if the Ukrainians had an arsenal of HIMARs, Howitzers, surface-to-air missiles, loitering munitions, and anti-radiation missiles in December of 2021, it is hard to believe the conflict would have even started. Putin invaded Ukraine because he believed he could win… Defense needs the type of Moore’s-Law-like innovation curve that we’ve seen across core technologies like semi-conductors, display tech transformation, optical systems, developer APIs, and battery science. “
New Space Force procurement shop subscribes to the space-as-a-service model. (Space News) “Jeremy Leader, a former U.S. Air Force space officer and procurement executive, was named director of COMSO in April. He said there is a push from the top to buy commercially available services — including satellite imagery, weather forecasting, space data analytics, inspace data relay and others that might emerge in the future.”
- The intelligence community is “a little bit ahead of us in this effort,” he said. “How the NRO structured their agreements is awesome. It allows the Space Force to actually use the contracts that are already there.”
- As COMSO works to get its house in order, an immediate task will be to set up a working capital fund where military customers will transfer money to pay for commercial services.
- A more grueling effort will be to realign funding in the Pentagon’s five-year budget plans. That will require shifting funds from “programs of record” that the Space Force traditionally would spend on new development or bespoke systems, to a separate funding line for commercial services. “We need a way to move the money so when commercial capabilities exist to meet requirements, program offices have the ability to move between the ‘buy’ and ‘build’ button,” Leader said.
Can the Army’s robotics programs build AI the Silicon Valley way? {Breaking Defense) Military robotics need the same kind of comprehensive development and sustainment pipeline that Tesla, for example, uses to suck in petabytes of data from the sensors on its vehicles, analyze it, and employ it to refine its algorithms — and do it over and over and over, day after day after day, throughout the service life of a program. “The DoD just hasn’t had that infrastructure in place,” Michelson said. “They don’t have good systems for harvesting that data, managing it, storing it, manipulating it, and sharing it.
- “When you’re fielding a tank, you’re thinking about the logistics tails and the maintenance for it, actually having parts on hand, and the training that goes into that… There’s no thought of software development pipelines, updating algorithms.”
China’s quad-tracked amphibious unmanned vehicle is fascinating. (The Warzone) At the core of CSGC’s amphibious uncrewed vehicle is a broadly boat-shaped hull. However, rather than four wheels, CSGC’s uncrewed vehicle has a quartet of triangle-shaped rubber-band-style tracks. The tracks could be particularly beneficial for helping CSGC’s uncrewed amphibious combat vehicle get out of the water on a beach, something that even purpose-built wheeled amphibious vehicles sometimes have difficulties with.”
HASC lawmaker Seth Moulton urges faster adoption – and more restraint – of military AI. (Defense Scoop) “The reality is that robots fly planes better in most cases. That’s why every time you go on a commercial flight, I don’t know — 90% of the flight is flown by a computer, not by the pilot,” Moulton said. “We literally live with that in the commercial sector every single day, and yet there’s this huge reluctance to adopt it in the military.”
Air Force looks to industry for a new, improved ABMS. (Federal News Network) ” Under the current system, data goes from sensors to a continental U.S.-based processing facility, and then the information gets sent back to commanders in the field. An interruption in the flow of information leaves commanders without the information they need to make decisions… The new ABMS digital infrastructure uses a cloud-based command and control application, and aerial edge network pods to deliver information to the five command and control nodes.”
- The ABMS model needs a computer-generated assignment of priorities to rank the possible choices that battle commanders use to make decisions. “
The next and most profound industrial revolution in human history is underway in Low Earth Orbit. (Space News) “In the 1990s, onboard a NASA platform in LEO called Wake-Shield Facility, University of Houston materials scientist Alex Ignatiev manufactured a semiconductor in the vacuum of space that was 10,000 times better in quality than ones made on Earth. In 2016, bioengineers used a 3-D printer to create a two-chambered structure of an infant’s heart from stem cells during a parabolic flight that simulated weightlessness. Microgravity quite simply revolutionizes the way we make things and will lead to advancements that benefit all of humanity.”
Lessons learned from Air Force’s ILS-S logistics system modernization. (Federal News Network) “BES’ Integrated Logistics System — Supply (ILS-S) has been in a state of near constant modernization since the early 1980s.”
- Harbison said BES had to divide up all of ILS-S’ functionalities, write test descriptions, and then decide what would be automated and what would be manual. The most critical functions, he said, were the best candidates for automated testing. They ended up with roughly 10,000 automated scripts that ran continually. Harbison credited that continuous testing for why the fielding was almost error free.
- Harbison also praised the decision to use open source code rather than a commercial-off-the-shelf solution. He said that 95% of the code in the ILS-S system is open source.
Russian shipyard and Defence Ministry tangle over ship price in court. (Defense News) “On Nov. 15, an arbitration court in Moscow held the first preliminary hearing for a lawsuit against Pella Shipyard in which the ministry is seeking 1.4 billion rubles (U.S. $23.1 million) over allegations the company was “failing to fulfill supply contacts.”
- In a separate case with Pella: “According to the contract for the Ladoga vessel, which was valued at around 1.5 billion rubles, Pella planned to provide the ship to the ministry by November 2016. The court’s decision noted that the ministry made changes to the design and provided them to Pella company in February 2016. Those changes, company officials said, increased the price of the vessel to more than 3.2 billion rubles. Due to adjustments to the ship’s size, among other features, the company was unable to deliver the vessel until September 2018.”
Why Dual-Use and Defense Technologies are the Next Growth Sectors. (Real Clear Defense) “The dual-use and defense investor ecosystem is expanding. First In, Shield Capital, Razor’s Edge, A16z, 8VC, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, Point72 and many more are raising and deploying funds into dual-use and defense-adjacent technologies. Such firms represent potential partners, co-investors, and follow-on capital, creating a sustainable capital market. So far this year, over $7 billion has been invested in VC-backed aerospace and defense companies, putting the sector on track to surpass its previous high.”
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