Saab showcases missile system on Oshkosh vehicle at DSEI

On the same subject

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  September 21, 2020 | International, Land

  OMFV: Army Team Won’t Compete For Bradley Replacement

  SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR Industry and Congress were deeply skeptical of the Army's suggestion to enter a government design team in the OMFV competition. Now the Army has backed off. WASHINGTON: The defense industry, Congress, and thinktanks breathed a unanimous sigh of relief at the Army's latest announcement on the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program. In an email to reporters Thursday afternoon, the Army said it would no longer seek to enter its own design team in the OMFV competition, a controversial plan it had suggested in a draft Request For Proposals in July. “The whole purpose of publishing a Draft RFP was to elicit feedback from our industry partners. We take their feedback seriously,” the Army's armored vehicle modernization director, Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, told me. “We won't always agree — and must act in the best interest of our soldiers — but we will always listen.” Thursday's announcement is the latest twist in the decades-long struggle to replace the Reagan-era M2 Bradley, a heavily armed and armored troop carrier. It also suggests the notoriously bureaucratic and inward-looking Army acquisition system is finally starting to take defense contractors seriously when they say something is a bad idea. “The only surprising thing here is that the Army may have actually taken into account and listened to the over 500 industry comments received,” said Bill Greenwalt of thinktank AEI, a former Hill staffer who spent years reforming military procurement. “I expect they got an earful.” While the Army's announcement Thursday said it was still “carefully reviewing and analyzing industry comments (over 500 in total) [for] the next few weeks,” the message from industry on the government team seems to have been so strong the service didn't want to wait any longer to take action. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/09/omfv-army-team-wont-compete-with-industry-for-bradley-replacement/

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  September 5, 2023 | International, Naval

  AUKUS standoff: Australia, UK wait on Congress to approve pact

  AUKUS was announced two years ago. Now Congress must pass several bills to make the pact work, from export controls to submarine transfer authorities.

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  May 20, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security

  DoD Creating Standards For AI Programs

  DoD has "so many hundreds of programs that we really couldn't do a fair evaluation of each individual activity," Mark Lewis, director of modernization in the Research and Engineering office, said today. By THERESA HITCHENSon May 19, 2020 at 5:05 PM WASHINGTON: DoD's Research and Engineering (R&E) office has launched a new initiative to develop best practices for the many programs to design and build artificial intelligence (AI) applications, says Mark Lewis, director of modernization. AI is one of DoD's top research and development priorities, charged to the Director of R&E Mike Griffin. The standards initiative is the brain child of newly appointed AI technical director Jill Chrisman, Lewis told the virtual “Critical Issues in C4I Conference 2020,” sponsored by AFCEA and George Mason University. “When Jill first joined us just a couple of weeks ago, I asked her to give me a site view of all the efforts underway in AI across the department, and kind of give me an evaluation of where we stood,” Lewis explained today. However, he said, because DoD has “so many hundreds of programs that we really couldn't do a fair evaluation of each individual activity.” So, instead R&E has decided “to establish a series of standards, if you will, principles and practices that we consider to be good practices for artificial intelligence engineering,” he said. “I liken it to systems engineering.” A key goal of the new effort is to break down stovepipes in order to allow the various DoD AI efforts to share databases and applications. In addition, Lewis said, R&E is aiming to “figure out what are the artificial intelligence applications that will have the biggest impact on the warfighter.” This could involve moving out prototypes rapidly so that warfighters have an opportunity to “play with them, experiment with them, and figure out what makes their job more effective,” he added. At the same time, it would enable warfighters to quickly reject things that are not useful or overly complicated. Lewis said that developing autonomous systems is another top priority. That portfolio of effort is handled by assistant director Wayne Nickols, and is focused on development autonomous systems that can team seamlessly with humans. “We want autonomy systems that will operate in ways that put human life at lower risk,” he explained. “If we can if we can have a robotic system as a target, instead of a human being as a target, that's that's our preferred approach.” In his wide-ranging discussion, Lewis also expounded on DoD's research goals for quantum science — a focus area that he said is somewhat less well developed than others on DoD's high priority list. “There is a lot of hype associated with quantum science,” he said bluntly. “People are talking about quantum computers that will, in a few years, replace our fastest supercomputers, quantum communication technology, quantum key encryption techniques. And frankly, a lot of it is promising — but it's also very very far term.” That said, Lewis noted that there are two near-term opportunities for DoD in the field: enabling back-up positioning, navigation and timing capability in case GPS satellites are degraded in anyway; and future “exquisite sensors for a variety of applications.” https://breakingdefense.com/2020/05/dod-creating-standards-for-service-ai-programs/