Tanks for Ukraine, Nexus 23, DOT&E, and other news
Applied Intuition
Accelerating the world’s adoption of safe and intelligent machines
The Nexus Newsletter?
Welcome back to The Nexus Newsletter. We’re back after a lengthy hiatus - we’ll try to catch you up quickly. This week we are thinking a lot about the innovation we have seen in Ukraine, or what we at Applied like to call “innovation at the speed of ‘hold my beer.’” We wonder what systemic changes might be required for the DOD (and our industrial base) to be this flexible.
Read this week’s newsletter to hear our musings on sending Bradleys and Strykers to Ukraine, Nexus 23, test and evaluation updates from DOT&E, and more from the nexus of autonomy and national security.?
Bradleys, Strykers, and Leopards for Ukraine?
Earlier this month, the United States announced that it would send 59 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and 90 Stryker armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine as part of a larger aid package.?
The Bradleys and Strykers are not tanks, right? Correct. Several European countries, however, want to send small numbers of Leopard II tanks to Ukraine, causing mixed reactions from Germany, which must approve re-exports of the Leopard. American lawmakers, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, are now urging the U.S. government to export M1 Abrams main battle tanks (MBT) to Ukraine, though perhaps more as a “symbolic” gesture than to actually increase capability. In late-breaking news, it sounds like the pressure campaign was successful: The U.S. will send 31 Abrams tanks to Ukraine.?
It will be interesting to see how the Bradleys perform in Ukraine, as they were originally designed in the 1970s and 1980s to enable the US Army to fight the Soviet army. With the news that the US government is sending Bradleys and Strykers to Ukraine, there is tremendous opportunity to collect operationally relevant sensor data for developing autonomous mobility and AITR software for our future vehicles and their sensors, including the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) and Optionally-Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV). While there will undoubtedly be valuable lessons learned from the performance of the Bradleys in Ukraine, the Army was quick to (publicly) deny any linkage between the deployed vehicles and the OMFV program in a comment to POLITICO Pro: “Bradleys provided to Ukraine will support Ukrainian Army requirements and have no linkage to US Army requirements for the OMFV program. We are closely monitoring events in Ukraine, and the Army will certainly consider any lessons learned whether they be tactical, logistical or materiel in nature in the formulation of future requirements and execution of future programs.” Despite the denial, the US military would be remiss to let this opportunity for data collection pass it by.
Nexus 23: Register now!?
The world’s leading autonomy and national security symposium is back for 2023. Join us at Nexus 23 to hear directly from the visionaries shaping the environment, defining the policy, building the technology, and operating the systems that are needed to enable mission success in an increasingly complex global environment.?
Register now to hear from prominent speakers, including:?
FY22 DOT&E Annual Report
The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) in the Department of Defense (DOD) recently released their FY22 annual report to the public. The report includes a discussion of how DOT&E plans to use newly-appropriated funds to improve testing infrastructure for autonomous and AI (A&AI)-based systems:
News we’re reading?
Autonomous systems are gaining momentum in the national security space. Below, we’ve pulled key quotes from recent articles of interest, plus brief commentary from Applied Intuition’s government team:?
By Shelby Holliday, Senior Video Producer, Correspondent and YouTube Host, The Wall Street Journal
Key quote: “We’re using a model that I call ‘factory to fleet.’ […] We’re bringing things here very quickly and then testing them in the environment in which they would ultimately serve and quickly determining can they show promise and be effective in this environment,” said Vice Admiral Brad Cooper. “Ensuring maritime security here is job one for us. A key aspect of that is understanding what’s happening on the water, and this is where these unmanned systems and artificial intelligence can be helpful.” [...]
“We’re talking about data, cloud compute, machine learning, and AI, and when all of those come together you start to get into the predictive space. The end state is an understanding of the environment so rich that we’re anticipating things to happen so that we can prevent them from happening,” said Task Force 59 Commodore Capt. Michael Brasseur.?
Our take: We are big fans of Task Force 59 (and its new sister task forces), and we strongly believe that their concept of experimentation - with a focus on existing commercial capabilities, rapid iteration, and field experimentation - will prove critical to developing and fielding autonomous and uncrewed systems that respond to the needs of the warfighter and can be seamlessly integrated with existing manned platforms operating in the maritime domain. The Task Force is disrupting long-held business practices in the Department and we hope to see broader implementation of its efforts across the different services. Its biggest limitation is our current Title 10 restrictions on Combatant Commands receiving R&D funds that would be required to scale to true experimentation. For a good overview of experimentation vs demonstration vs prototyping, see this surprisingly not-dense guide from DAU.
Defense One | Right Hands, Right Place: Why We Must Push Military Technology Experimentation to the Edge?
By Schuyler Moore, CTO, U.S. Central Command?
Key quote: This rule doesn’t only apply to hardware; software must equally be tested in theater. A computer-vision algorithm should be trained with real, recent images from the location it will be used, and a system detecting air threats should be tested against the actual threats it will encounter at a given base. The list goes on.
Military users in the real world are the ultimate gauntlet to determine usefulness of technology. At a remote outpost in Iraq or on a ship in the Pacific, functionality is king; buzzwords and hypotheticals serve no purpose. The technology either works to support the mission, or it doesn’t.?
For that reason, the military must push more operational experimentation. While early-stage tech research and development can and should remain at the labs and with the development communities, more mature technology should be pressure-tested in a real environment by real users at the earliest opportunity. The Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps and the Navy’s Task Force 59 are already rapidly driving technology integration out in the real world, but this model of tech experimentation has not yet been accepted and adopted broadly. The military must shift its approach to technology experimentation focused on real user testing in real-world environments if it hopes to keep pace with rapidly-evolving threats and technologies.
Our take: Thorough testing and experimentation of cutting edge military technology is critical to developing capabilities and concepts of operation that work, and testing by the end users is most valuable. When it comes to autonomy, we would support efforts to stand-up operational prototyping of commercial autonomy capabilities and data collection across domains and at scale - an all-domain TF59, for example. We are excited to see that CENTCOM understands the value in providing cutting edge technologies to the end users for operational testing early in their development process, and we are looking forward to hearing more from Schuyler Moore at Nexus 23.?
领英推荐
Bloomberg Government | Why DOD Should Get Out of the R&D Business
By Mislav Tolusic, Managing Partner, Marlinspike Partners
Key quote: Successful entrepreneurs know the secret to success—new products need to be 10 times better than current market alternatives. Successful investors will tell you when there’s demand, there’s funding. Combine the two and you have the ingredients for a radical improvement of the Defense Industrial Base.
The DOD should go back to its primary mission of running a military and have the private sector fund RDT&E. First, the DOD should aggressively start redirecting RDT&E funds towards procurement. In fiscal 2023, $140 billion was obligated to the agency’s RDT&E and $167 billion went to procurement. Going forward, DOD should keep the total RDT&E and procurement spending constant but reduce the RDT&E spending and transfer those dollars towards procurement. This would be an easy way to keep costs under control while at the same time resolving the inflationary problems affecting the industrial base.
Second, the DOD should simplify the acquisition process to tap into venture capital funding. The current procurement process is driven by a checklist of requirements. The Army’s list of requirements for gun replacement was 360 pages. Such level of detail doesn’t allow for innovation and differentiation, generally key advantages new market entrants have over established players.
The DOD should broadly specify the capability it needs, commit to buying the best products, and let private companies design them. As part of the process, the DOD should commit to holding a competition and award purchase contracts to the contest winners. This would be akin to how the private sector functions. Companies and their shareholders finance product development, not customers.
Our take: Despite the provocative headline, the recommendations here are actually not as divisive as one might think. Moving funding from RDT&E into procurement and allowing private companies to lead R&D efforts will accelerate development timelines, reduce costs for DOD, and enable the Department to focus on acquiring the right capabilities in sufficient quantities to enable mission success. The 1960s are ancient history - the private sector is the engine of innovation in the defense industry today, not the DOD. Non-traditional companies are already investing heavily in research and development (R&D) for defense (see Trae and Steck’s explanation on Eric Lofgren’s Acquisition Talk Podcast earlier this month). However, annual Independent Research and Development (IRAD) from traditional primes isn’t adequately incentivized due to the nature of DOD acquisitions and reimbursable IRAD, as well as the nature of the companies and their growth/public investment structures. The biggest issue with this recommendation is solutions to change the incentives for traditional primes to re-invest profits to innovate.??
On the second point, we agree that streamlining the requirements and acquisition process to provide room for disruption and innovation is valuable. Thankfully, we’re already seeing that at the individual program level: the Army released a prioritized list of broad “characteristics” early in the process for the Optionally-Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV), rather than a detailed list of rigid requirements. They have continued to emphasize flexibility as the competition has proceeded and additional requirements are released, enabling innovation and diverse approaches among the various industry competitors.?
Let the private sector do what it does best - innovate - and let the DOD focus on procuring much-needed capabilities at scale.?
Breaking Defense | Bradley replacement, OMFV, will live or die by software
By Sydney Freedberg Jr., Contributing Editor, Breaking Defense
Key quote: In fact, Army officials told Breaking Defense that software is so central to OMFV that Army leaders are considering a separate series of contracts specifically for software development, in parallel to the contracts already planned for the physical vehicle. OMFV contractors are already required to deliver new code every six weeks, but the proposed dual track would allow even more intensive focus on software, in hopes of moving even faster.
“The software pathway will be key,” said Col. Jeff Jurand, who, as Dean’s program manager for Maneuver Combat Systems, oversees OMFV. And if the Army can decouple the pace of software upgrades from the much slower cycle for new hardware, Jurand told Breaking Defense, “we can pour it in on a cadence that we’ve never been able to do.”
But the service is still deciding whether to include all software development as part of the current five-phase OMFV program or spin some off as a separate set of contracts.
Another Army program, the Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV), is pioneering the two-track approach with separate contracts focused on hardware and software — though it’s still too early to say how successful it’ll be. RCV contracted with QinetiQ and Textron to build experimental remote-controlled mini-tanks, including the embedded software to run the vehicles. But it’s also contracted, through the Defense Innovation Unit, with Applied Intuition for software development tools and with Kodiak, which makes self-driving trucks, for navigation algorithms.
“It’s new ground for the department,” said Lt. Col. Chris Orlowski, Dean’s product manager for Robotic Combat Vehicles. “I’m not aware of any other programs that have structured a hardware and software program in parallel like this.”
Our take: It is encouraging that the Department is partnering with production software companies to enable continuous integration and deployment of software. Decoupling software updates from slower-moving hardware is the only way to ensure that technology like automatic target recognition and mobility autonomy remain operationally relevant. With OMFV and RCV having overlapping autonomy requirements, PEO GCS is breaking new ground in coordinating software procurement in a way that is very positive, novel, and innovative within the constraints of the defense procurement system.
Breaking Defense | It’s time for new incentives for defense primes to invest in startups
By Capt. Chip Walter USN (Ret.), Managing Director, Marlinspike Partners
Key quote: [...] accelerating technological dynamism is not simply about making federal dollars flow to startups — it’s about making sure those startups evolve into sustainable businesses and their technology transitions into DoD programs.
There’s an easy, clear path for that to happen: by turning to the biggest defense contractors and providing them the right incentives to invest their cash towards non-traditional defense firms, especially those making big bets with little safety net.
In 2021 alone, the top six Defense Primes received over $120 billion in defense contracts. Those same six companies invested over $6 billion of Independent Research and Development (IRAD) funding — just five percent of their massive collective income. Even a small portion of that money could move mountains for tech startups if it was applied externally. [...]
While I suspect there are many ways to incentivize the primes, two possible solutions could be through giving the prime tax incentives for investing while the startup remains private, or by allowing a portion of the investment to be an allowable expense if the startup’s solution migrates into a program-of-record. To seek the most appropriate solution, I recommend DoD establish a working group to include members from several primes (ones with and without a Corporate Venture Capital program) to work through intended and limit unintended consequences of the incentives.
Now, it takes two to tango, and startups have expressed concerns in the past about whether working with a prime would mean they would lose their IP. Let’s be clear: Intellectual property of both the startup and prime must be protected for this to work.
Our take: There’s no doubt that major defense prime contractors should invest more in IRAD. Whether they do that by increasing the number of partnerships they sign or by investing directly in startups is perhaps a different story. Startups’ concerns about IP rights are well-placed, and incentives for primes to provide favorable IP rights to the startups they invest in would likely need to be significant - and recurring - to generate buy-in. Broadly, however, we agree with the overall premise that major defense primes are not investing adequately in IRAD funding, and are not incentivized to do so by the government.
By Jon Harper, Managing Editor, DefenseScoop
Key quote: Howard University will be awarded a $90 million contract by the Air Force for an initiative aimed at advancing “tactical autonomy” technology, cultivating STEM talent and addressing racial disparities in Pentagon R&D funding.
“The contract will establish a Historically Black Colleges and Universities-led University Affiliated Research Center consortium to execute research focused on tactical autonomy that will aid in the transition of research into practical applications. Work will be performed at the awardee’s facility and consortium members’ campuses and is expected to be completed by Jan. 31, 2028,” according to a Defense Department announcement released late Thursday.
The Air Force Research Lab, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is the contracting activity.
The initiative will focus on three main areas as it relates to autonomous systems: trust, collaboration between platforms, and human-machine teaming, Air Force Chief Scientist Victoria Coleman told reporters last year.?
Our take: We are thrilled to see the Howard-led UARC effort has been awarded the funding it needs to advance autonomous systems through trust, teaming, and interoperability. We look forward to seeing the research that results from the award.?
Thank you for reading?The Nexus Newsletter. Stay tuned for more announcements from Applied Intuition, additional information about Nexus 23, and other important news from the nexus of national security and autonomy.