Tag Archives: Pentagon

The Problem with Military Efficiency

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United States military suppliers consolidated at the Cold War’s end, under pressure to reduce defense costs and streamline the nation’s industrial base. Over the past three decades, the number of fixed wing aircraft suppliers in the U.S. has declined from eight to three. During the same period, major surface ship producers fell from eight to two, and today, only three American companies supply over 90% of the Pentagon’s missile stockpile. 

Lower-tier defense firms are often the sole maker of vital parts—such as black powder—and a single crisis can bring production to a standstill. Today that’s emerging as a gnawing problem for the U.S., whether in supplying weapons and ammunition to Ukraine or in restocking reserves to prepare for a potential confrontation with China in the new era of great-power competition…The Pentagon describes this vulnerability  as the “single source” problem. Only one foundry in the U.S. makes the titanium castings used in howitzers, and only one company makes the rocket motor used in the Javelin antitank weapon widely used in Ukraine…

U.S. defense contractors’ inability to quickly replenish weaponry such as missiles and munitions for Ukraine has led Pentagon officials to argue that industry consolidation has gone too far and raised questions about how prepared America is for conflict. 

Excerpts from Gordon Lubold, US Military Has Explosive Problem, WSJ, Apr. 27, 202

Unbeatable Fusion: Big Tech and US Armed Forces

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Big tech equips the armed forces and United States law enforcement with cloud storage, databases, app support, admin tools and logistics. Now it is moving closer to the battlefield. Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle are expected to divvy up the $9bn five-year contract to operate the Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC). In 2021 Microsoft was awarded a $22bn contract to supply its HoloLens augmented-reality headset to simulate battles for army training for up to ten years. It is also helping develop the air force’s battle-management system, which aims to integrate data sources from across the battlefield. In June 2022 Alphabet launched a new unit, Google Public Sector, which will compete for the DOD’s battle-networks contracts. In a departure from Google’s earlier wariness of the Pentagon, its cloud chief, Thomas Kurian, has insisted: “We wouldn’t be working on a programme like JWCC purely to do back-office work.”

Except from  Defense Technology: Can Tech Reshape the Pentagon, Economist, Aug. 13, 2022

A Lethal Combination: Pentagon and NASA

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U.S. government and aerospace-industry officials are removing decades-old barriers between civilian and military space projects, in response to escalating foreign threats beyond the atmosphere. The Pentagon and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are joining forces to tackle efforts such as exploring the region around the moon and extending the life of satellites. Many details are still developing or remain classified.  Driving the changes are actions by Moscow and Beijing to challenge American space interests with antisatellite weapons, jamming capabilities and other potentially hostile technology. Eventually, according to government and industry officials briefed on the matter, civil-military cooperation is expected to extend to defending planned NASA bases on the lunar surface, as well as protecting U.S. commercial operations envisioned to extract water or minerals there…

Large and small contractors are maneuvering to take advantage of opportunities to merge military and nonmilitary technologies. They include established military suppliers that already have a foot in both camps, such as Northrop Grumman,  the Dynetics unit of Leidos Holdings, and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Smaller companies such as Maxar Technologies Holdings,  closely held robotic-lander maker Astrobotic Technology, and small-satellite producer Blue Canyon Technologies, recently acquired by Raytheon Technologies, also seek to diversify in the same way…

The U.S. astronaut corps always has included many military officers, some previous NASA scientists quietly shared data with military counterparts and NASA’s now-retired Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to launch Pentagon satellites. But today, veteran industry and government experts describe the cooperation as much more extensive, covering burgeoning capabilities such as repairing and repurposing satellites in orbit, or moving them around with nuclear propulsion. Intelligence agencies are more involved than ever in leveraging civilian technology, including artificial intelligence, robotic capabilities and production know-how.

Excerpt from Pentagon, NASA Knock Down Barriers Impeding Joint Space Projects, WSJ, Feb. 1, 2021

Beyond GPS: All Source Positioning and Navigation

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DARPA’s All Source Positioning and Navigation (ASPN) program seeks to enable low cost, robust, and seamless navigation solutions for military users on any operational platform and in any environment, with or without GPS. In particular, ASPN will develop the architectures,  abstraction methods, and navigation filtering algorithms needed for rapid integration and reconfiguration of any combination of sensors. This will enable rapid adaptation to evolving missions as well as reduction of the system integration costs and time-to-market for navigation solutions in general.

The goal of Phase 2 of ASPEN is to address the issues of optimization and real-time operation, showing capabilities beyond basic plug-and-play flexibility. Solutions must be capable of adapting to a diverse set of sensor and IMU inputs and selectively choosing the subset of measurements that produces the best possible solution, ideally mirroring the result from a tuned filter solution for that same scenario….Phase 2 solutions will need to demonstrate real-time operation in representative field (non-laboratory) environments. Although adaptability is the main goal of the ASPN program, the possibility of ASPN accuracy being substantially better than current state of art should be considered, given accommodation by ASPN of larger and more diverse sensor suites, ease of optimizing ASPN to immediate applications, and potential synergistic benefits of an open architecture.