July 17, 2024 | International, Aerospace
September 13, 2022 | International, Aerospace
The five-year contract is valued at up to US$175 million, and is expected to “significantly enhance” the training of fifth-generation combat pilots.
March 11, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security
By Mark Pomerleau U.S. Cyber Command nearly doubled the amount of money it issued in defense contracts between fiscal years 2018 and 2019, according to figures provided in written testimony to Congress. In 2019, the command awarded $74.9 million through 81 contracting actions, Gen. Paul Nakasone, the command's leader told the House Armed Services Committee March 4. Those figures are up from the 32 contracts valued at $43 million in fiscal year 2018 that Nakasone provided in testimony in February 2019. Congress gave Cyber Command limited acquisition authority in 2016 following the model of Special Operations Command. It capped acquisition funds at $75 million per year, with a clause that is scheduled to sunset in 2021. However, some members of Congress questioned whether it needed $75 million. Nakasone lauded the role of DreamPort, a public-private partnership in Columbia, Maryland created by Cyber Command to engage with businesses, in increasing the aperture of organizations it works with. “Over the past 18 months, Dreamport has allowed the Command to engage more than 1,000 private companies, educate over 1,000 military personnel on innovative technologies, and involve more than 350 students and interns from 65 colleges and high schools on STEM initiatives,” he wrote. “It has been home to Cyber Command's effort to begin implementing the principles of zero-trust networking on the military's networks. Dreamport also hosted the public-private collaboration that resulted in kits that help enable the Cyber National Mission Force to conduct Hunt Forward operations. The traditional ways of doing business would have been too cumbersome and too slow. Dreamport is key to the command's ability to engage in public-private partnerships at the unclassified level.” Nakasone also told the committee in his written statement that the command has hired its first command acquisition executive responsible for leading the organization's acquisitions and to develop capabilities for the joint cyber force. In total, the command requested a $636 million budget for 2021, compared to the $596 million it used in fiscal year 2020. The executive is largely responsible for procuring and developing capabilities under what Cyber Command calls the Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture, which was established in the last two years to guide capability development priorities. These capabilities fall under five buckets; Common firing platforms to be used at the four cyber operating locations of the service cyber components. These platforms will be worked into a comprehensive suite of cyber tools; Unified Platform, which will integrate and analyze data from offensive and defensive operations with partners; Joint command and control mechanisms for situational awareness and battle management at the strategic, operational and tactical levels; Sensors that support defense of the network and drive operational decisions, and; The Persistent Cyber Training Environment, which will provide individual and collective training as well as a way to rehearse for a mission. The Army is managing PCTE on behalf of Cyber Command and the joint force. The cornerstone of this architecture is the command's data tool called Unified Platform. Nakasone told the House Armed Services Committee that Unified Platform is starting to come online and over the next year it will be the central focus of building the architecture allowing the force to store data and conduct worldwide operations. Budget documents from the Air Force, the service procuring Unified Platform on behalf of Cyber Command and the joint cyber force, for fiscal year 2021 indicate flat funding for the tool for 2021 as compared to 2020. https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/cybercom/2020/03/09/cyber-command-doubled-its-contract-spending-in-the-past-year/
January 28, 2019 | International, Other Defence
By: Jill Aitoro WESTLAKE VILLAGE, Calif. — The promise of Silicon Valley is built on unicorns — startup companies valued at more than $1 billion. They're rare. Hence the name. But the payoff is big enough that venture capitalists are willing to funnel a lot of money by way of multiple rounds of funding toward unproven technologies, to accept significant risk, in hopes they'll be in on the ground floor of the next great discovery. Compare that to Washington, where in the words of Defense Innovation Board Executive Director Josh Marcuse: “We put forward a defense program full of things that we know aren't going to work, but no one is willing to say so.” For more than three years the Pentagon has attempted to draw upon the Silicon Valley culture of innovation, to buy instead of build, to take advantage of commercial technology. But success has been spotty at best — with SpaceX and Palantir rather exclusively held up as the two “unicorns” catering to the military. But while many procurement reformists will point to burdensome regulations as the problem, innovation leaders from both the Department of Defense and Silicon Valley companies agreed during a November roundtable hosted by Defense News that no laws currently in place prevent smart buying by the government. Instead, those same innovation leader say that what causes the greatest minds in the tech community to walk away from the largest buyer in the world is a slow, arduous process combined with a serious lack of understanding within the Pentagon for how software is designed. “We basically created an innovation program where you have to have Howard Hughes-style entrepreneurship to do anything that matters,” said Trae Stephens, partner at San Francisco-based venture capital firm Founders Fund and co-founder of Silicon Vally tech firm Anduril. To buy or to build Since the 1990s, defense acquisition regulations have clearly stated that commercial preference should be given in every contracting decision. Reinforcing that point, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics released a guidebook for acquiring commercial items in January 2018, stating: “The time and cost to develop and field new capabilities, the technological advances made by near peer competitors and the rapid pace of innovation by private industry have demonstrated the need to access the best technology — now.” And yet, such earnest support of commercial tech does not regularly filter to the acquisition community. Agencies over-specify requirements, “so now if the company wants to do business with [the Pentagon], they have to modify their product,” Stephens said. “All you have to do is say, ‘Yes, we have validated that there is no commercial product that meets our requirements,' and that's it.” The Pentagon does not, however, do the opposite — adapt requirements for a particular product. “There are a lot of things that we just have to build. We're going to build aircraft carriers, we're going to build fighter planes,” Stephens added. “And then there's the thing that we're going to buy — the products. These should be entirely separate conversations.” That over-specification runs counter to the “agile” development method typically favored by the tech community, which is built on a premise of short sprints that factor into evolving requirements. Agile can't exist without a degree of flexibility, ensuring, too, that if you fail, you fail fast. Contrast that with the traditional waterfall approach that predefines the various phases of development to ensure, in theory, a predictable outcome. Full article: https://www.defensenews.com/smr/cultural-clash/2019/01/28/what-the-pentagon-could-learn-from-unicorns