August 23, 2018 | International, Land
By: Todd South
BETHESDA, Md. — The explosive ordnance disposal community has played a key role in operations in recent wars, and that role will only grow as the Pentagon shifts its focus to major combat operations against near-peer threats.
With that growing role, the equipment those EOD technicians carry with them will change, too.
At the National Defense Industrial Association's annual Global EOD Symposium recently, multiple speakers focused on how the community has spent the past two decades primarily working the improvised explosive device threat. But they cautioned that old and new threats will emerge in major combat.
Repeated throughout their comments was the admonition that the community must be “full EOD, not just IED.”
To meet that mission, the Army is turning to technology to help fill the gaps.
Pat McGrath, chief of the materiel development branch for Army Training and Doctrine Command's EOD concerns, laid out some of the new items in the works.
Army EOD teams will soon have three aerial drones, soldier-borne sensors, tiny “nano” helicopter drones and tethered Unmanned Aerial Sensors at their disposal.
The enhanced render safe kit will also include binocular night vision devices, lightweight dismounted X-ray machines, lightweight electronic countermeasures, and lightweight mobile detectors for radiation and chemicals.
The Army needs 176 kits and expects to have initial operational capability by 2021, McGrath said.
Full article: https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/08/22/army-eod-soldiers-will-soon-get-a-whole-new-kit-and-new-robots
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By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force's program executive office for battle management has been redesignated PEO Digital, but it's more than a name change, the service's top acquisition executive told Defense News. Instead, it's about taking one of the Air Force's most diverse acquisition portfolios — covering everything from JSTARS ground-surveillance planes to certain communications gear — and transforming it into the headquarters of agile software development as the service moves forward with evermore sophisticated information technology programs, said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics. In at least the beginning, it will look much like the service's program office for buying services. “It won't do all of the software development for the Air Force. There's no way it could,” Roper said in a Sept. 7 interview. But the hope is that it will be able to manage agile software development for some of the Air Force's most tricky programs, while at the same time providing expertise and software development tools to the rest of the program offices. “As programs shift to agile development, where they're pushing code out every month, where they are working directly with the user, where they are measuring their output using metrics that tell them whether it's good code or bad code, PEO Digital will provide Air Force standards for doing it and a playbook for making it work,” Roper said. FUll article: https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/air-force-association/2018/09/17/air-force-transforms-existing-program-office-into-its-new-software-development-hub