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Happy Friday!
This week brings lots of news out of Sea-Air-Space.
SECNAV Carlos Del Toro announced plans to address the devastating findings from the shipbuilding assessment released last week. That includes looking at root causes of supply chain delays for critical materials and borrowing processes from foreign shipyards--in particular, South Korea.
- “When my team and I went to South Korea, we were floored at the level of digitization and real-time monitoring of shipbuilding progress, with readily available information down to individual pieces of stock materials. Their top executives could tell us — to the day — when ships would actually be delivered. I am pushing our shipbuilding industry to invest in itself to get better, to be technological leaders, and to once again deliver platforms on time and on budget.”
Del Toro also announced the release of the Naval Science and Technology Strategy, which aims to cultivate groundbreaking scientific research and accelerate delivery of technological innovation to the Navy and Marine Corps.
- It identifies a list of 11 priority focus areas: Autonomy/AI; Naval Aerospace; Directed Energy & Kinetic Systems; C5ISR/Naval Space; Human & Biological Systems; Manufacturing; Materials/Electronics; Naval Engineering; Ocean, Atmosphere, & Space; Power & Energy; and Undersea Systems.
The NPS team had a strong presence at Sea-Air-Space, with the biggest story being the announcement of a memorandum of understanding between NPS and DIU.
- This official relationship builds on existing collaborations between the two organizations and promises to drive new opportunities including more experimentation, personnel exchanges, and projects with the Naval Innovation Center at NPS.
Other NPS showings at Sea-Air-Space: connecting with young future innovators with hands-on activities at the STEM expo on Sunday, and participation from NPS President VADM (Ret.) Ann Rondeau on panels on wargaming and additive manufacturing.
The Space Force released its commercial space strategy, following last week's release of the DoD commercial space integration strategy. The Space Force version builds on the four guiding principles laid out by DoD (balance, interoperability, resilience, and responsible conduct) and identifies four lines of effort: collaborative transparency, operational and technical integration, risk management, and secure the future.
- Key to this strategy is collaborating with and understanding the capabilities in the commercial space sector. This relationship building is essential to the goal of fostering "growth of the industrial base through partnerships with organizations like SpaceWERX, AFWERX, DIU, etc."
DIU released its State of the Space Industrial Base report, which among other things calls for multiyear procurement, agile policymaking, sustained funding, and an end to continuing resolutions. For the first time, the report includes feedback from allies representing 17 partner nations collected during a workshop held at NPS last May. The report provides a lot of data on launches, global competition, spending, and policies.
- It calls out challenges with contracting: "Acquisition and contracting remain poorly suited to purchasing data as a service. Inadequate funding for project scope and execution of funding within a timely period of performance continue to hamper implementation efforts. New concerns were presented with the SBIR process not aligning with commercial business models." (see p. 44 of the report)
DoD announced the creation of the Transition Tracking Action Group, an initiative to understand the valley of death from Dr. Heidi Shyu, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering -- and one of our keynote speakers at the symposium.
- The TTAG "will create a department-wide method to track technology transition and determine the reasons capability-enhancing technologies do or do not transition, to enable the Joint Force to deter and, if necessary, prevail in contested environments."
Our top story brings the latest leak about the capabilities Replicator is seeking to develop: anti-drone technology, with Anduril identified as providing one of the systems.
And in research, NDIA has released its annual Vital Signs analysis of the defense industrial base. It finds that despite calls for increased speed in delivering warfighting capabilities, defense contractors continue to face increasing regulatory burdens.
21st Annual Acquisition Research Symposium
Have you looked at the program lately? Here's a panel relevant to the ongoing conversation about shipbuilding on Wednesday, May 8:
Panel #04: Lessons in Shipbuilding: Past, Present, and Future
Live Only
Chair: Jill J. Boward, Executive Director, Combatants Program Executive Office, Ships
- SSBN Columbia Class Submarine Case Study (Robert Mortlock, NPS)
- Industrial Assessment Directorate: Impact of the Navy's 30-Year Shipbuilding Plan on US Industrial Base (Timothy Shives et al., NPS)
- Ship Shaping: How Congress and Industry Influenced U.S. Naval Acquisitions from 1933-1938 (Henry Carroll, CSIS)
Register now to join us in Monterey or online.
This Week's Top Story
Counter-drone systems included in DOD’s initial Replicator selections
Brandi Vincent, Defense Scoop
The Pentagon’s first tranche of systems for its secretive Replicator initiative includes counter-drone assets in addition to different-sized unmanned surface vessels and loitering munitions, DefenseScoop has learned. ...
Several officials familiar with the Pentagon’s Replicator 1.1 selections who spoke to DefenseScoop in recent conversations on the condition of anonymity shared new information about what can essentially be considered four “buckets” of technology systems set to be accelerated for military use in this first tranche of the initiative.
They confirmed that the Switchblade 600s loitering munitions, made by AeroVironment, were picked for Replicator in association with Army Program Executive Office Soldier’s Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (LASSO) program.
Counter-drone capabilities make up another set of assets selected for the Replicator 1.1 tranche. According to the officials, Anduril’s Wide-Area Infrared System for Persistent Surveillance (WISP) technology was tapped for ramped-up production, in association with efforts put forth by the Marine Corps’ Ground Based Air Defense program.
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