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Happy Friday!
In the news this week:
DoD has posted the proposed new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) regulatory language and process for contractors to comply with the new requirements. The rule and response to public comments were posted in the Federal Register yesterday. CMMC compliance will be required at time of award.
Heidi Shyu's office has announced the second annual Technology Readiness Experimentation (T-REX) event, to be held Aug. 19-28 at Camp Atterbury, Indiana. Press will be allowed at the event on August 27, so look for stories coming out in a few weeks.
- "TREX is a sustained campaign of experimentation developed to support the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER) initiative. As a key RDER event, TREX24-2 is a full-scale exercise featuring tactical scenario demonstrations and a Prototype Technology Display to demonstrate and assess new and innovative warfighting capabilities."
The next tranche of Replicator capabilities will include Anduril's large displacement unmanned undersea vessel (Dive-LD).
- Anduril has made news for betting big on industrial capacity, with a factory in Rhode Island underway to make more of this UUV and the recently announced megafactory Arsenal-1, intended to be capable of producing "tens of thousands of autonomous vehicles and weapons."
The Space Force is continuing work with international partners to craft a strategy aimed at strengthening the space supply chain. This effort connects to many others demonstrating the resoundingly global nature of the defense supply chain, such as the collaborations to support Ukraine.
Our top story looks at how two recent contracts show improvement at how DoD procures new technology, with this unsurprising revelation: success at getting new tech into the hands of warfighters requires understanding of military needs, the technology itself, AND the acquisition process.
And in ARP news, we're excited to share news of a collaboration between students in the Department of Defense Management and the Navy's Force Resilience Office.
- What will our students learn about organizational culture with these real-world challenges to work?
This Week's Top Story
Two programs suggest the Pentagon is getting better at buying technology
Patrick Tucker, Defense One
Two new reports suggest that the Pentagon may have finally learned how to buy technology at lower cost quickly, at least when it comes to AI-driven capabilities.
One report looks at the Maven Smart System, or MSS, part of Maven, a system for rapidly analyzing and sharing intelligence. Palantir currently has the prime contract and is looking to expand the number of users from hundreds to thousands. But the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps, working with as many as 70 companies in a DevSecOps environment, played a key role in developing the system through a series of exercises called Scarlet Dragon. Emelia Probasco, a Senior Fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, describes how MSS works in a report out this week.
“It can access sensor data from diverse sources, apply computer vision algorithms to help soldiers identify and choose military targets, and then provide workflow support that enables a request to be approved by the chain of command in order to strike a target. It can also serve as a repository where battle damage assessments can be stored, as well as provide a map of the location of friendly forces and targets,” the report states.
Without this software, the Army elements that coordinate service and joint fires—do not have easy access to sensor and image data from commercial and military satellites, something service officials have long sought.
Probasco argues this was an important organizational feat, more than a technical one. MSS had senior leaders who championed the program, a mature technology, and direct access to developers and testers. And perhaps most importantly, officials used flexible approaches to risk-management and funding. But the key ingredient was the involvement of leaders who understood three things: the power of artificial intelligence, the needs of the United States military, and the bureaucratic ins and outs of contracts—particularly the sorts of contracts that tech companies need, as opposed to the ones the Defense Department prefers.
“Pentagon leaders have hailed the importance of ‘dual-lingual’ leaders who understand emerging technologies and the military to help bridge the gap between technical opportunities and operational needs,” the report says. “Our case study highlighted a third ‘language’ that was critical to the successful development of Scarlet Dragon: contracting and acquisition.”
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