Army chooses Bell V-280 to replace its black hawk helicopters. (Defense One) “Bell received a $232 million contract on Monday—the first installment of what could be a $7.1 billion deal for development and an initial batch of aircraft.” [Total program over $70 billion]
- Bell, which pitched the V-280, a tiltrotor aircraft similar to the V-22 Osprey, beat a Sikorsky-Boeing team that had proposed a coaxial helicopter, which uses two stack rotors that spin in opposite directions providing more stability than traditional helicopters.
DoD announces 2022 defense acquisition workforce award winners. (DoD) “The Defense Acquisition Workforce is comprised of nearly 187,000 civilian and military professionals from each of the military services, as well as defense agencies and field activities. Their work is critical to building enduring advantages for the warfighter as the Department continues to innovate and modernize. A total of 58 individuals [representing 25 separate categories] will be honored at the awards ceremony. “
US to turn middle east into huge testing ground for counter-drone tech. (The Warzone) “During a press briefing held on Wednesday, Schuyler Moore, who was hired as CENTCOM’s first-ever chief technology officer this October, told reporters that experimenting with capabilities at the command level, whether they originated in the commercial sector or the Defense Department (DOD), will be critical for innovation going forward.”
- In addition to the Navy’s Task Force 59, CENTCOM will be leveraging the Army’s Task Force 39 and the Air Force’s Task Force 99, which was recently activated this October.
- This is why Reeve’s platform-agnostic IMPACT tool [for counter-UAS] is expected to be so advantageous. Moore said that the software can be tailored to reflect a drone’s size, speed, and even payload. “The fact that folks outside of the AOR [CENTCOM’s area of responsibility] couldn’t quite come up with that solution but he could is such clear evidence that the people closest to the problem should be closely involved in the solution building,” Moore said.
The AI war and how to win it. (Alexandr Wang) “The future is clear—AI-powered targeting and autonomous drones will define warfare. AI applied to satellite imagery and other sensor data has already enabled targeting and tracking of Russian troops and generals. Our legacy military platforms, while still important, will be disrupted by cheaper autonomous drone fleets.”
- The pace of AI research is following its own Moore’s law—every 2 years, the number of AI papers published per month doubles.
- Fact 1: China considers AI as a “historic opportunity” for “leapfrog development” of national security technology, per China’s 2017 National AI Development Plan.
- Fact 2: China is spending between 1% and 1.5% of their military budget on AI while the United States is spending between 0.1% and 0.2%.
Kendall warns Congress: Continuing Resolution Stopping 61 new programs. (Air and Space Forces) “Kendall wrote that as long as the government continues to operate under a CR, 61 new programs and 28 military construction projects are unable to start, impacting more than $6 billion worth of efforts.”
- The number of new starts and military construction projects affected by the CR exceed what the department faced last year, when 16 new programs and seven construction projects were affected.
- Those military construction projects include facilities for some of the Air Force’s most important modernization efforts… Flight hours and weapons system sustainment are cut, decreasing aircraft fleets’ mission capable rates.
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democratic leaders threatened Dec. 8 to put forward a yearlong CR… All told, a yearlong CR could cost the Department of the Air Force up to $12 billion in buying power, Kendall wrote in the letter to members of Congress.
How the Space Development Agency ‘could have died any number of ways.’ (C4ISRNET) “While the agency has garnered praise from Space Force and Air Force leadership, its work over the next year could also have implications for its longevity as an independent acquisition organization. “I think the next budget request will be an interesting indicator of how SDA is doing in maintaining its vision and independence.”
- “Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., a leading advocate for space acquisition reform and one of the main proponents for creating the Space Force, told C4ISRNET he’s encouraged by SDA’s plan to disrupt the Pentagon’s status quo.”
- “There was no good reason to establish another departmental-level entity to do procurement of particular space systems,” Wilson, now the president of the University of Texas at El Paso, told C4ISRNET.
Army plans ‘dramatic’ ammo production boost as Ukraine drains stocks. (Defense News) ““Funding is already in place, contracts are underway to basically triple 155mm production,” Bush told Defense News. “There’s funding on the Hill, in the supplemental, to more than double that again. That would take a period of years.”
- Army Secretary Christine Wormuth separately told reporters that the U.S. will go from making 14,000 155mm shells each month to 20,000 by the spring and 40,000 by 2025.
- The push comes as the U.S. has supplied Ukraine with more than 1 million artillery rounds.
- The defense industry’s lack of robust production capacity for ammunition is a product of historically “lumpy” purchases by the military, Ellen Lord, a former Pentagon acquisitions chief, told reporters. “But industry [executives] can’t go to their board of directors and say: ‘Hey, I think there’s going to be a lot of orders out there, so let’s spend $50 million to build a plant and hope.’
Pentagon’s weapons buy on replenishing stockpiles and fortifying supply chains. (Market Place) LaPlante: “Thanks to a lot of action by the Congress, we’ve gotten billions of dollars in different categories. One is we’ve gotten $4 billion we put on contract to replenish our inventories of equipment we have sent to Ukraine. But the second piece of it is we’re looking at what equipment, and this happens every day, that would affect what the Ukrainians are needing in the fight. And that has changed since February.”
Fighting an winning in the electromagnetic spectrum. (War on the Rocks) “Gen. Mark Kelly, commander of Air Combat Command, said: “If we lose the war in the electromagnetic spectrum, we lose the war in the air, and we lose it quickly.””
- Both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have invested resources into challenging American advantages in the electromagnetic spectrum. These investments are designed to detect low-observable fighters and bombers and to disrupt the kill chains.
- … there is common Russian military saying that a third of the adversary will be destroyed by attrition, a third will be rendered ineffective through jamming, and the other third will fall apart as a result.
- As Mike Pietrucha wrote in these pages, “the Air Force dismantled a wildly successful ‘Electronic Combat triad’, consisting of the EF-111A, the F-4G, and the EC-130.” The Marine Corps also retired its EA-6B fleet without an offensive electromagnetic warfare replacement.
Bidscale connect: linking government and industry through an AI-powered platform. (Yahoo!) “Rules designed to promote fair and open competition make it difficult for the USG to buy quickly, rendering many procurement actions irrelevant upon delivery. The complexities of these Federal regulations intimidate and discourage participation by smaller vendors, causing further challenges in the Government’s mission to drive an open and equal playing field. On average, it takes over 18 months of pursuit and business development before a Government contractor wins their first contract.“
Making joint all domain command and control a reality. (War on the Rocks) David Deptula: “As a result, joint all domain command and control has partially stalled due to a cloudy department-wide vision that every service views slightly differently. To make this concept a reality, the Pentagon needs a straightforward, clear, and understandable description of what its vision entails. The focus should be on creating a global targeting system that can enable the find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess functions of the kill chain.”
- Making joint all domain command and control a reality will require changing an intelligence community culture that has historically been focused on indications and warning into one that can focus on direct support for real-time targeting operations.
Air Force chief: military must ‘pick some winners’ among startups. (Defense News) ““What we’ve got to do is actually pick some winners,” he said, pointing to rocket maker SpaceX as an example of an innovative company that has gained traction in the defense space.”
Air Force ‘building the airplane as we fly it’ on new operational concepts, wing commander says. (Air and Space Forces) “The virtual discussion focused on two of the Air Force’s main ideas for future warfare: agile combat employment (ACE), which is the ability to operate from distributed and sometimes austere airfields, and multi-capable Airmen (MCA), the notion that service members will have additional skills to support more dispersed operations.”
- In many ways, [agile combat employment] ACE is not a new concept. The Air Force’s predecessor, the Army Air Forces, used a similar model in the Pacific campaign in World War II… During World War II, the U.S. had an army of service members adapting on the fly. “
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