October 13, 2020 | International, Naval, C4ISR
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Navy awarded a contract potentially worth $69.8 million over five years for engineering services for its tactical network.
In an Oct. 8 contract announcement, the Navy said Philadelphia-based defense contractor McKean Defense Group was award a one-year contract for engineering services for the Navy's Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services, including “technical and programmatic services for networking, communications and computer systems and associated certification and information assurance for new developments, current operations and planned upgrades.”
The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract has a one-year base period with four option years. The first year of work is valued at $12,228,590. No funds were obligated at the time of the award.
Work will be performed in the continental United States in San Diego, California; Norfolk, Virginia; Hawaii; Washington, D.C.; and Charleston, South Carolina, as well as outside the continental United States in Japan; Guam; Bahrain; and Italy.
According to the announcement, fiscal 2021 funds will be designated as task orders. The funding will come from from several areas, including FY21 accounts for Navy operations and maintenance; research, development, test and evaluation; and shipbuilding construction. Other funding may come from the accounts related to Foreign Military Sales; Program Directive Air; and the Navy working capital fund.
The contract was competitively awarded with two offers summited. Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific awarded the contract.
July 12, 2023 | International, Other Defence
NATO leaders agreed on a more ambitious military spending goal at a summit in Vilnius this week, but the case of the alliance's big spender, Poland, highlights the complexity of spending the money effectively.
July 12, 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Mark Pomerleau Dana Deasy, the Department of Defense's new CIO, said he sees four critical areas to support the national defense strategy and digital modernization: cloud, artificial intelligence, command, control and communications, and cyber. Speaking at an event hosted by Defense Systems in Arlington July 11, Deasy said those initiatives are listed not in order of importance, but rather in order of integration. Cloud is the foundation for many future warfighting capabilities as well as the other three priorities. As a result, the much anticipated Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure proposal is “not a longs ways off, [but] we have a bit more work to do before we release,” he said. Despite not committing to a specific release date for the multibillion dollar JEDI proposal, Deasy said he wants the overall JEDI effort to be comprehensive, clear and maximize responses. The proposal, he said, should be written in a way “that truly represents what any smart intelligence company in private industry would do in seeking to put an enterprise cloud in place.” Deasy, who has been on the job about two months, acknowledged the department doesn't have a true enterprise capability that will deliver the efficiencies on the scale it needs. Since taking over the JEDI acquisition, he said there is a top down, bottom up review of the effort. deally, an enterprise solution should allow for flexibility, management of classified and unclassified data, scalable in the form of both infrastructure as a service and platform as a service, have common governance and will eventually be a multi-cloud, multi-vendor environment. he said. In his remarks, Deasy also highlighted the recently established Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. The center, he said, will advance DoD's ability to organize AI capability delivery and technology understanding within DoD. The center will also help to attract and cultivate much needed talent in the AI space, he added, demonstrating successful intersection of human ingenuity and advanced computing to include ethics, humanitarian considerations and both short term and long term AI safety. https://www.c4isrnet.com/it-networks/2018/07/11/no-surprise-cloud-tops-new-defense-cios-priorities/
July 24, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Kratos will move forward in the Air Force program to build an AI-enabled drone wingman known as Skyborg. Each company Thursday was awarded an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $400 million, but no seed money was immediately allocated as the firms will have to compete against each other for future orders. Through the Skyborg program, the Air Force wants to field a family of unmanned aerial systems that use artificial intelligence to adapt to battlefield conditions. The Skyborg drone should be cheap enough where the loss of aircraft in combat could be sustained, yet survivable enough so that it could move into a high-end fight and function as a wingman to manned fighter jets. “Because autonomous systems can support missions that are too strenuous or dangerous for manned crews, Skyborg can increase capability significantly and be a force multiplier for the Air Force,” said Brig. Gen. Dale White, who leads the Air Force's program office for fighters and advanced aircraft. “We have the opportunity to transform our warfighting capabilities and change the way we fight and the way we employ air power.” Air Force acquisition executive Will Roper has said that Skyborg could eventually become smart enough that, like R2-D2 in the Star Wars films, it can autonomously present information and conduct tasks to help decrease fighter pilot workload. The system learns from prior experiences how best to support human pilots. But in the near term, the Air Force wants to use the Skyborg program to integrate an autonomous air vehicle with open mission systems as a way to demonstrate that it can team with a manned fighter, the service said in a statement. “Autonomy technologies in Skyborg's portfolio will range from simple play-book algorithms to advanced team decision making and will include on-ramp opportunities for artificial intelligence technologies,” said Brig. Gen. Heather Pringle, the Air Force Research Laboratory commander. “This effort will provide a foundational government reference architecture for a family of layered, autonomous, and open-architecture UAS.” https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2020/07/23/four-companies-got-contracts-to-build-the-air-forces-skyborg-drone