Time is running out for DoD with Silicon Valley
To those at Reagan National Defense Forum #RNDF, if there’s one BLUF you take away from the weekend, you should know: Time is running out […]
Industry
DoD provides some relief for small/nontraditional contractors
Effective immediately, the list of exceptions to certified cost or pricing data requirements at Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) 15.403-1(b) is expanded to include contracts, subcontracts, […]
UK’s Ajax program in trouble, and industry’s perverse incentives
The UK Army’s Ajax program is an armored fighting vehicle developed by General Dynamic’s European Land Systems. The program has spent more than $4.6 billion, […]
How Saab uses agile principles to develop the Gripen fighter
Agile has virtually taken over IT departments, themselves the source of countless innovations. At last count, 85 percent of software developers use agile techniques in […]
How can the SBIR/STTR process be more welcoming to startups?
Here are some good recommendations from USAF contracting officers Steven Groenheim and John Diekel, Restructuring the SBIR/STTR process: First, we should consider overhauling the application […]
There are 50 single-points of failure in the microchip supply chain — Challenges of industrial policy
I am a fan of the way interdependency makes war between great powers illogical — because the supply chain for microchips are many, many countries […]
Flyvbjerg forcefully explains why megaprojects should be more modular
I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects for more than 30 years, and I’ve found that two factors play a critical role in determining whether an […]
Resolving the cognitive dissonance in naval planning
The U.S. Navy now faces contradictory demands. On the one hand, Congress and others are telling it to heed the lessons of recent catastrophes and […]
Reverse innovation, allied partners, and getting more bang for the buck
Consider an American company with a good-better-best product lineup with 80-90-100% performance at 80-90-100% pricing. When seeking to sell in an emerging economy, like India, […]
Peter Theil talks defense industry consolidation
Robert O’Brien: One of the things we’ve seen that’s happened faster than the experts thought — particularly over the last decade — is that the […]
What makes SpaceX different?
Imagine if you had gone to work at Space X in 2005 and gotten in the ground floor of the Falcon 1 program, or imagine […]
Did SpaceX and Palantir transform government contracting? A VC’s view
The DoD is starting to run commercial-like procurement processes as opposed to purely cost-plus contracting. In traditional government contracting, the government comes up with a […]
IP and CMMC — two issues that could derail defense innovation efforts
… there are two thorny issues that need to be effectively addressed on this innovation journey: intellectual property (IP) and security. Both issues have seen […]
The future of DoD’s Future Years Defense Program
Here’s Jeff Jordan on the a16z podcast: Back when I was at Disney I started in the strategic planning group, and one of the tasks […]
Navy’s plan for managing it’s family of autonomous maritime systems
The Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab (RAIL) is an effort out of the service’s unmanned maritime systems program office… “The vision for the RAIL is that […]