March 4, 2024 | International, Land
August 31, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR
Armaments consortium launches new path to field high-tech prototypes
By: Joe Gould
WASHINGTON ― The National Armaments Consortium, along with the DoD Ordnance Technology Consortium and Army Contracting Command-New Jersey, is taking steps to fast-track their armament prototyping efforts, it was announced Thursday.
A year after the Army's high-profile reorganization to more quickly field cutting-edge weapons technologies, the Charleston, South Carolina-based National Armaments Consortium ― made up of 900 companies and academic institutions ― wants to better sync with both the government's increased demand and its actual bandwidth for turning research into prototypes.
Pentagon modernization efforts have prioritized, in recent years, long-range precision fires, hypersonic and extended-range missiles, and anti-jam GPS devices ― all of which fall in the lane of the armaments consortium, said National Armaments Consortium Executive Director Charlie Zisette.
“Armaments is kind of where the rubber hits the road for our war fighter because we're dealing with everything in the kill chain, protection and survivability,” Zisette told Defense News. “All of these things created a fairly large demand signal for modernization of our systems and components.”
The 20-year-old NAC is one of a growing number of Pentagon-sponsored consortia that work to translate the government's notional requirements into technological breakthroughs and business opportunities.
Consortia members will work with the government through collective “other transaction agreements” or “other transaction authorities.” These OTAs have become a popular tool to allow the government to communicate more openly about its needs and to work with nontraditional defense contractors whose innovations the Department of Defense wants to harness.
According to Zisette, the NAC has 650 active projects at various stages to solve tough problems like developing a new heat-resistant composite material, new types of explosives and a complex long-range precision artillery system. So far this year, its efforts have led to 150 new-start acquisition programs, half awarded to “non-traditionals.”
Historically, the NAC would release one annual solicitation based on government requirements, and host one annual collaboration event for NAC members to tout their technologies and ask government representatives about requirements. NAC also hosts a members-only online collaboration portal along similar lines.
But something had to change. Amid the DoD's modernization efforts, the NAC has grown such that there would be 350 government solicitations and upward of 1,400 whitepapers, almost simultaneously. It was a “huge bow wave” that overwhelmed the procurement, legal and program staffs involved, Zisette said.
“It became too much for the Department of Defense, so we were seeing our award-cycle times getting stretched out,” he said. “We realized we had to level that workload out: put in more agreements officers and contracts specialists so we could ... get quickly through the process itself.”
The NAC unveiled Thursday it will initiate faster deadlines to develop prototypes, but it will also move to monthly solicitation releases and three virtual collaboration events per year instead of one.
Other consortia will often either deal with requirements on an annual or ad hoc basis, meaning they're emailed out as they're developed. To Zisette's knowledge, no other DoD-sponsored consortia have monthly solicitation releases like the NAC is planning, but the idea for tri-annual events was something Zisette borrowed.
“The total model will be a pathfinder,” he said, “but absolutely leveraging some of the best practices and input from across the department.”
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July 21, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security
Startups Need Free Data To Work With Army: Venture Capitalists
Because open-source software lacks the same kind of cyber certification that comes with more sensitive information, it is fertile ground for start-ups looking to work on military data, provided each service makes an open-source library available. By KELSEY ATHERTONon July 20, 2020 at 7:01 AM ALBUQUERQUE: Venture capitalists want the Pentagon to be a good market. But for an industry that makes many unsuccessful bets in the promise that just a few pan out spectacularly, marketing software exclusively to the Pentagon poses an almost unacceptable risk. To ease startups into contracting, investors suggest the Army should provide unclassified, open-source data as the Air Force already does. Near the top of his investors' wishlist, says Stu Solomon, CTO of intelligence provider Recorded Future, is removing “a lot of the friction necessary to get innovation into the government without having to be directly aligned or affiliated with the big solution integrators.” Hitching new technology to a company already firmly ingrained in the Pentagon's ecosystem is a popular way to shepherd new software through the acquisitions process. It is also partly explains how, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in military contracts going to Silicon Valley companies, tech adoption seems as slow from the Valley as elsewhere. Solomon's remarks came during a panel at AFCEA's 2020 AFCEA Army Signal conference. Recorded Future was founded in 2008, received early funding from IN-Q-TEL, received a contract from DIU in 2017, and a contract from Cyber Command in 2020. Much of Recorded Future's product is built on ingesting open-source information and offering analysis. As a feature, that meant the company could sustain itself in the commercial market, selling enterprise software, while still planning long-term to contract with the military, DHS, and intelligence services. “If you think this is eventually going to be a market that matters to you, you're not going to be able to wait four years for the procurement process to mature as your product matures,” said Elizabeth Lawler, founder of Founder of AppLand. If a startup's focus is solely on processing classified data, the capital investors need to be aligned directly with that goal to fund it since getting certified to handle classified material is one of the major sources of cost and friction. “My current startup, focused on providing real-time up-to-date software images, works on things that are less sensitive as a starting point,” said Lawler, “for example, some of the code bases in the Air Force's open source code repository.” Because open-source software lacks the same kind of cyber certification that comes with more sensitive information, it is fertile ground for start-ups looking to work on military data, provided the service makes an open-source library available. “When it comes to this Valley of Death, I really view what we do when we start companies as an awful lot like a really difficult special forces mission,” said Andy Palmer, co-founder and CEO of data management company Tamr. “When you go in, you drop onto the ground to start a company, with a small team of people, and limited resources, and what oftentimes feels like an unreasonable objective. It's hand to hand combat for much of it, it's not pretty. The goal is survival.” So, if the Army wants to bring new data tools to the battlefields of the future, it could start by creating open-source environments that allow companies to solve problems, at a smaller scale and without the hurdles of classification, suggested several panelists https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/startups-need-free-data-to-work-with-army-venture-capitalists
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March 15, 2021 | International, Aerospace
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Thales, Aeralis to Develop Advanced Modular Training Aircraft Simulator