22 juillet 2024 | International, Terrestre
27 février 2020 | International, Aérospatial
New ‘Air Force Ventures’ Set To Transform Technology Strategy
Steve Trimble
The U.S. Air Force has adopted a three-phase strategy to select small, innovative companies outside the traditional defense industry to perform advanced development work and to tap Silicon Valley-style venture capital firms to help taxpayers finance the new technology.
A new process could help rationalize the one-year-old Air Force effort to attract high-tech startups with dozens of Air Force Pitch Day events. These conferences have led to hundreds of small contract awards but no obvious path to guide the aspiring defense contractors further into the byzantine military acquisition process.
- U.S. Air Force plans to make 50 large “bets” on technology
- New acquisition training to be based on Fighter Weapons School
For the private startups and venture capitalists involved, the Air Force Ventures initiative is designed to offer a new route to the commercial market for potentially game-changing technologies that could benefit from a risk-tolerant government customer providing funding and early support.
“We don't really think of ourselves as a [stand-alone] market, but we purchase things in quantities that [are] meaningful enough that we can bridge companies until they reach a level for commercial success,” says Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics. “That's one reason that [venture capitalists] are interested in this.”
The Air Force Ventures process starts with the Pitch Day events, during which the Air Force can place initial “bets” worth up to about $50,000 each in Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants on promising, potentially game-changing ideas, says Roper, speaking to about 1,000 Air Force acquisition officials during a Feb. 14 webinar.
As the companies transition toward Phase II SBIR awards, the Air Force plans to grant about 300 contracts worth up to $1 million each—with a program office agreeing to fund about one-third of the costs. The funding match is meant to link the SBIR award to a program office, creating a path for the technology to potentially transition beyond the laboratory stage and into a program of record.
The third and final step in the Air Force Ventures concept whittles the pool of awards to about 50 recipients. The amount of the award is potentially “unlimited,” Roper says, but is generally regarded as at least $10 million.
The first of the “big bets” in Phase III are now under evaluation, Roper says. The contract awards could be announced at South by Southwest, a week-long technology conference and entertainment festival scheduled for March 13-22 in Austin, Texas.
The initiative explicitly seeks to help the Air Force break from traditional defense contractors. As the Air Force attempts to field leap-ahead capabilities within the next decade for the Advanced Battle Management System and Next-Generation Air Dominance, leveraging the innovative ideas and technology flowing into the commercial market is seen as critical.
“[R&D] in this country is 80% commercial,” Roper explains. “So in the 21st century, the [defense] industrial base should be dual-use. And so we've got to crack the code on how to have public and private funding work seamlessly inside an Air Force program.”
But there are significant challenges as the Air Force tries to leverage commercial-sector technology investments: Small companies often need to find a market quickly to generate revenue and cash flow, whereas government program offices tend to make decisions slowly—and inconsistently.
“In many cases, their commercialization [strategy] is devalued [by investors] if they have government funds,” Roper adds.
The Air Force's program managers also face a learning curve.
“If we're making 1,000 small bets a year, the reason we're making 1,000 is that we know most of them aren't going to pan out. So we can't manage the companies the way we would a traditional program,” Roper says. “But we can manage them as a portfolio—the same way that a private investor or a venture capitalist would.”
To prepare, the Air Force is sending acquisition officials back to school. Next year, a cadre of program managers will be enrolled in a six-month course at Stanford University, which will teach the Air Force to manage technology investments like a venture capitalist, Roper says. The next step is to expand educational opportunities within the Air Force. A new acquisition curriculum, modeled on operational training centers such as the Fighter Weapons School, will be created, Roper says.
Sur le même sujet
-
-
6 novembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité
How COVID-19 Is Affecting The Defense Industrial Base
Jen DiMascio The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated some of the risks that have always existed in the defense industrial base. Although government assistance and a robust Pentagon budget have helped offset initial trials, more challenges are looming. One of the biggest risks to the defense industrial base is that some companies serving the military are too heavily leveraged toward the commercial sector or too reliant on international companies, financial analysts told Aviation Week's DefenseChain Conference. “Some of these places are two weeks from bankruptcy,” says Chris Celtruda, managing principal at Destiny Equity Partners, says. Suppliers are beginning to falter because of a combination of factors, including the need to comply with cybersecurity standards, the pressure that prime contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin have applied to them and their reliance on commercial business. A prime example is the recent bankruptcy of Impresa Aerospace, a Wichita-based company that made parts using computer numerical control machines as well as sheet metal parts and assemblies for Boeing and Lockheed military aircraft but was highly dependent on its work for the commercial Boeing 737 MAX. The U.S. federal Paycheck Protection Program helped delay some business failures, but others are inevitable, says Rick Nagel, managing partner of Acorn Growth. “The Impresa bankruptcy is an example of a lot more insolvencies we may see,” he adds. Weakness among niche companies could pose a problem for the Defense Department in the future. “I'm always amazed at how many critical systems have multiple single points of failure on major programs,” he says. At the Pentagon, officials have been working to keep essential suppliers afloat and to keep production moving through its sprawling international industrial base. For the U.S. Army, that has meant initial disruptions to Apache fuselage production in India and to the flow of generators from Mexico. The Pentagon and the State Department helped ease the stoppage, but the incident has caused them to review the full range of risks to its international supply chain. “I think that we can navigate through this, though it's certainly always going to be complex in today's global economy,” says Patrick Mason, deputy program executive officer for U.S. Army Aviation, adding that he is in the position of putting pressure on vendors to reduce cost, particularly to provide savings on multiyear aircraft contracts. One trend emerging along with the pandemic is a movement toward onshoring or reshoring overseas business for reasons of cybersecurity and the protection of the U.S. industrial base. As that happens, and as the commercial aviation market sags, Raanan Horowitz, president and CEO of Elbit Systems of America sees opportunity. “We are trying to position ourselves around some of those discontinuities,” Horowitz says, adding that the company likes going after opportunities that are not necessarily glitzy but hold value. “We are intensifying efforts toward looking at licensing, taking over orphan product lines and positioning ourselves to be part of the long-term solution.” Horowitz says Elbit is investing in U.S. infrastructure to capture new business. Industry officials see broad support for bringing more of the defense supply chain back to the U.S. The shift stems in part from the COVID-19-related economic downturn but also from longstanding concerns about China. In the fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress passed restrictions on contracting with companies that use Chinese telecommunications equipment. Though companies first look for the best value, the threat posed by Chinese parts that either do not work or could transmit classified information back to China is an ongoing concern, says John Luddy, vice president for national security policy at the Aerospace Industries Association. “The concept of reshoring of supplies to better connect our allies and friends, both from a production standpoint and from an operational functionality and alliance standpoint, I think the volume is getting turned up on that a little bit,” he says. “There's also a strong impetus in Congress to look at exactly how vulnerable we are. That's going to be a more intense discussion in the year to come than it has been.” And that trend toward reshoring could have unintended consequences, warns Steve Grundman, founder and principal of Grundman Advisory. “I'm genuinely concerned that benign moves to secure our supply chain to prevent nefarious supplies and code [coming] into particularly our defense supply chain or commercial aerospace supply chain could slip very easily into protectionism,” Grundman says. “If you want to really put pressure on the defense budget, ask the defense industry to reshore the supply chain. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/supply-chain/how-covid-19-affecting-defense-industrial-base
-
8 août 2018 | International, C4ISR
In contemporary warfare, cyber trumps nukes
By: Shalom Lipner Nuclear proliferation appears to weigh heavily on U.S. President Donald Trump's mind. Standing next to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Helsinki last month, Trump said ominously that it's “probably the most important thing that we can be working on.” Since then, Trump has proposed dramatically to negotiate denuclearization with Iran — after threatening the country with “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” — and even floated the idea of a second meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un with the goal of dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal. For someone whose projection of power derives so intensely from online networks, Trump is surprisingly old-fashioned. During the 1964 presidential campaign, President Lyndon Johnson aired a spot deemed so controversial than it never ran a second time. As an innocent, young girl picked petals off a daisy in the park, her voice was drowned out slowly by a launch countdown. Then, narrating against the backdrop of a mushroom cloud, Johnson proclaimed: “We must either love each other, or we must die.” His Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater — the implicit warmonger who was not even mentioned by name — lost by an overwhelming margin. But the more contemporary battlefield of cyberspace merited not one single mention in Trump's remarks alongside Putin in Finland. Unless you count the infamous Democratic National Committee server, that is, which he referenced nine times. While Trump obsesses about politics, the U.S. is exposed to great danger. Drawing a direct comparison to 9/11, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, has warned that America's “digital infrastructure ... is literally under attack.” He fingered Russia as the “most aggressive foreign actor” and awarded dishonorable mentions to China, Iran and North Korea. Trump then chose to accept Putin's denials of Russian interference over the assessment of his intelligence chiefs. His subsequent reversal was unpersuasive. Full Article: https://www.fifthdomain.com/opinion/2018/08/06/in-contemporary-warfare-cyber-trumps-nukes/