Sponsored By Oxley Developments
www.oxleygroup.com
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07 Dec 23. SiTime Solves Critical Challenges in GPS-enabled Defense Systems. SiTime Corporation (NASDAQ: SITM), the precision timing company, today announced its Endura Epoch Platform™ built for robust and resilient positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services critical in defense operations. The ruggedized MEMS oven-controlled oscillator (OCXO) boosts the resilience of PNT systems and other equipment, such as radars, field and airborne radios, satcom terminals and avionics against spoofing, jamming and other disruptions in Global Positioning System (GPS) signals.
“GPS was originally deployed for national security and later adopted for a variety of commercial and industrial applications,” said Piyush Sevalia, executive vice president of marketing at SiTime. “In addition to national security applications, GPS plays an essential role in civilian infrastructure, such as aviation, power grid and emergency response. An industry analysis revealed that a total GPS outage would negatively impact the economy by $1bn per day.”
“Over the last few decades, defense systems and business processes have been structured around GPS-based PNT,” continued Sevalia. “However, a GPS signal can be disrupted intentionally and unintentionally, which can lead to disastrous consequences on military operations in the space, air, maritime, ground and cyber domains. GPS disruptions can cause equipment malfunctions, increased risk to personnel, or even complete mission failure. In these situations, an ultra-stable, local clock device can provide the accurate time reference for PNT until the trusted GPS signal becomes available again. SiTime’s Endura Epoch Platform is a breakthrough precision timing solution that provides this accurate time reference, allowing PNT systems in national security and defense applications to achieve a new level of performance even during the disruption of the GPS signal.”
Based upon the transformative precision timing innovations of the Epoch Platform launched in September 2023, the Endura Epoch MEMS OCXOs are specifically designed to meet the challenging shock and vibration conditions found in aerospace and defense. These devices are manufactured using proven semiconductor processes that deliver the reliability and quality expected from silicon devices that cannot be achieved by quartz crystal OCXOs, especially in extreme conditions.
Key Features of SiTime Endura Epoch Platform
The Endura Epoch Platform MEMS OCXO greatly simplifies timing system design due to superior performance and delivers a significant improvement in size, weight and power (SWaP). Key features and benefits compared to quartz crystal OCXOs include:
- Programmable frequencies from 10 to 220 MHz
- Up to 70X better g-sensitivity
- Up to 30X better reliability
- Rated at 20,000 g shock survivability, up to 20X better
- Up to 20X better frequency stability over temperature
- Up to 3X better Allan deviation, a measure of short-term frequency stability
- Surface-mountable, small footprint and low height 9.0 mm x 7.0 mm x 3.6 mm
- Low 0.35 g weight, up to 300X lower
- 420 mW steady state power, up to 2X lower
Availability
Endura Epoch Platform MEMS OCXO samples will be available for selected customers early in 2024.
Additional Resources
- Product page
- Download product image
About SiTime
SiTime Corporation is the precision timing company. Our semiconductor MEMS programmable solutions offer a rich feature set that enables customers to differentiate their products with higher performance, smaller size, lower power and better reliability. With more than 3 billion devices shipped, SiTime is changing the timing industry. For more information, visit www.sitime.com. (Source: BUSINESS WIRE)
07 Dec 23. ‘Off to the races’: DARPA, Harvard breakthrough brings quantum computing years closer. Quantum bits are potentially powerful but notoriously error-prone. Now a Harvard team says it has found a way to prevent mistakes — by manipulating individual atoms with laser beams — making quantum processing much more efficient.
Widespread quantum computing may now come years sooner than widely expected, thanks to a Pentagon-funded project with implications for everything from rapid vaccine development and weather forecasting to cyber warfare and codebreaking.
If the Harvard-led experiment can be replicated and scaled up, it would still take years to make quantum computers widely available to run new forms of artificial intelligence for medical research, scientific experimentation and military command-and-control. But early adopters would almost certainly include intelligence agencies eager to crack encryption protocols widely used by governments and businesses alike. That makes it all the more urgent to implement the new quantum-resistant encryption algorithms the National Institute of Standards & Technology aims to finalize in 2024.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a paper in Nature announced results from a team of almost two dozen scientists, most of them from Harvard, funded by a DARPA program known as ONISQ (Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices). By manipulating individual atoms with precise, low-powered laser beams, known in the trade as “laser tweezers,” the Harvard-led team was able to create “quantum circuits” that correct for errors much more efficiently than alternative techniques — potentially overcoming the biggest barrier to practical quantum computers.
See how the technology we make makes the impossible, possible.
“Quantum error correction is fundamentally challenging,” said Mukund Vengalattore, DARPA’s program manager for ONISQ, because it’s impossible to measure a quantum phenomenon without changing what you’re measuring in the process.
Different corporate, government and academic teams have tried various approaches to error correction, but they all waste an “exorbitant” amount of the quantum computer’s power, he explained. But now the Harvard team has found a radically more efficient way to guard against errors.
“This is truly revolutionary,” Vengalattore told Breaking Defense in an interview. “Having been demonstrated and even validated in this paper … we are off to the races.”
How fast are are scientists racing? A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the Harvard-team’s experimental quantum computer is potentially four times as powerful as the most advanced quantum chip available for purchase, IBM’s Condor.
Unveiled Dec. 4, Condor boasts over a thousand quantum bits, or qubits — 1,121, to be precise — which is almost three-fold increase over last year’s record-breaking IBM Osprey. But what’s a qubit? The term turns out to have multiple meanings.
While a normal “classical” computer uses bits that can represent either 0 or 1, a qubit exploits the fuzzy nature of quantum phenomena to let it represent all the infinite possible values in between. That’s a nifty trick that could shortcut previously impossible calculations. But because quantum phenomena are so strange, it’s also much harder to figure out whether a qubit is working properly or glitching out.
So quantum computers to date have to devote most of their qubits to double-checking each other. That means the number of usable “logical qubits” that can actually do reliable calculations is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of actual “physical qubits” in the machine. (Yes, the terminology can be nearly as fuzzy as quantum theory.)
Using current error-correcting methods, it takes more than a thousand physical qubits acting together to form one logical qubit. IBM is now exploring a new, more efficient error-correcting technique it says should allow a mere hundred physical qubits to form a logical qubit. So depending on which technique is used, a high-end chip with a thousand physical qubits, like Condor, could generate as little as one usable logical qubit or as many as ten.
The Harvard team, however, used a radical new approach to error correction that turns a mere 280 physical qubits into 48 logical qubits. That’s about 20 times better than what IBM is hoping to achieve in its next-generation chip and 200 times more efficient than the 1,000-to-one ratio that current techniques try to reach.
“It really is transformative, because getting to even one logical qubit has been a huge challenge,” Vengalattore told Breaking Defense. “All the previous estimates: … How many physical qubits do we need to do something useful? How many physical qubits do we need to do error correction?… All of that is now in a sense up in the air, because we need to rethink all of those algorithms and all of those estimates.”
Skip Sanzieri, co-founder of QuSecure, which builds software to defend against quantum-powered hacking, said logical qubits are the “Holy Grail” for quantum computing.
“[Physical] qubits are very ethereal: they can be disturbed easily,” he said, which is what leads to errors.
With the Harvard team’s approach, “you don’t need the thousands, hundreds of thousands, [or] millions of [physical] qubits to error-correct,” Sanzieri told Breaking Defense. “It’s a huge speed-up, amazing — if this works.”
Even the low-hanging fruit is potentially life-saving. If scientists can scale up the Harvard team’s 48 logical qubits six-fold, to 286, “we could simulate molecules with the complexity of penicillin — [which] could take as many classical bits as atoms in the universe,” added another QuSecure co-founder, Rebecca Krauthammer. “Things like simulating protein folding and trading strategy optimization become tractable.”
“When we close in on a thousand logical qubits and beyond … this could translate to instantaneous diagnostics, crafting treatments from exhaustive medical histories in mere moments,” Krauthammer continued. On the cybersecurity front, she said, at 4,000 logical qubits, “the data that has been harvested over the last several years can be decrypted” — potentially exposing all sorts of previously secure information, from Social Security numbers to state secrets.
In this context, the Harvard team’s 48 logical qubits may not sound like a lot. But the power of a quantum computer increases exponentially. The best measure of raw potential computing power is the number of possible configurations of qubits. For 10 qubits, that’s just over one thousand (1,024). For 48 qubits, that figure rises to over 280 trillion.
(To be precise, it’s 281,474,976,710,656. That’s about seven times more than the number of cells in the human body but still a lot less than the number of sand grains on Earth).
But it doesn’t top out there. Vengalattore is confident that the Harvard approach scales up more easily than other quantum computer designs, putting much larger numbers of logical qubits in reach. That’s because the Harvard team uses a form of physical qubit that — by the standards of imperceptibly tiny particles — is relatively easy to work with. Instead of using superconductors or electrically charged ions, it employs electrically neutral atoms, cooled to ultra-low temperatures.
To manipulate these atoms, a tiny laser beam pumps the chosen atom’s electrons full of energy, throwing them into what’s called a Rydberg state, which makes them much more prone to interacting with other nearby atoms. That interaction, in turn, creates the uncanny link between particles known as quantum entanglement. (If you have to ask…). If you turn the lasers on and off, you can pump the electrons up and down, changing the way the atoms interact, which in turn allows you to configure and reconfigure them into logical qubits that are resilient against error.
This is a dark horse approach in the quantum world.
“The quantum community is pursuing multiple paths to achieve more stable and less noisy qubits: The main ones are superconducting metals and ion capture,” said Bryan Clark, a retired Navy submariner who studies military technology at the Hudson Institute. “The approach DARPA funded was an outlier and not one being pursued by the big companies like IBM, Google, etc. … This is an exciting development.” (Source: Breaking Defense.com)
07 Dec 23. Babcock International Group (Babcock) has developed a technology with the capability of controlling single or entire fleets of vehicles in a defence environment. Babcock demonstrated its SwarmCore technology, an advanced software system made up of multiple networks, at the UK Ministry of Defence’s BattleLab site last week in Dorset. The project was created in collaboration with Arqit, a leader in quantum-safe encryption and supported by the UK’s national innovation agency, Innovate UK. Fundamentally, SwarmCore, which is ready to be tested in the military environment, can be used to control single or entire fleets of vehicles such as drones. It can be operated either fully autonomously or by remote human control at a safe distance from the battlefield. One of the key benefits of SwarmCore and its integration with Arqit’s Symmetric Key Agreement Platform, is its ability to receive and transmit data in a safe and secure way in a decentralised manner. In a defence environment, this would mean if a single vehicle as part of a fleet was either hacked or attacked – the rest of the fleet could continue its mission instructions with no single asset ever being a point of failure. With the integration of Arqit’s encryption technology, information carried on encrypted keys to and from assets will benefit from robust protection against cyber-attacks.
Babcock Chief Engineering and Technology Officer, Brad Yelland, said combining both autonomous systems with advanced software that can deal with potential cyber threats could be a gamechanger in the modern defence landscape.
“Disruptive technologies such as AI, machine learning and quantum – are playing an increasingly important role in the changing defence landscape and the rise in cyber threats.
“For our defence customers, developing technologies like this gives them more control in today’s complex defence environment, increased performance and security along with the ability for their teams to perform tasks remotely with solutions that are quicker and more cost effective to implement.”
Arqit Founder, Chairman and CEO, David Williams said: “This collaboration with Babcock has allowed us to deliver a ground-breaking technology that not only enhances security but can also boost operational agility, both in the present and in the foreseeable future.”
06 Dec 23. Honeywell (NASDAQ: HON), in collaboration with Pipistrel, a Textron Inc. (NYSE: TXT) company and leading electric aircraft manufacturer, ENAV, an Italian Air Navigation Service provider, and D-Flight, an Italian-based company providing air traffic management services for drones, marked a significant milestone in advancing the operation of remotely piloted aircraft within European airspace. The collaboration has resulted in a successful demonstration of ground control station technology using a multicopter drone at Gorizia Airport in Italy.
The key for the success of the emerging advanced air mobility sector is tied closely to the safe operation in both the Air Traffic Management (ATM) environment and the relatively new U-space environment. U-space uses a set of new services based on a high degree of digitization, automation of functions and specific procedures created to safely allow a large number of drones within an airspace. The recently completed demonstration is part of the SESAR Digital Sky Demonstration project, U-ELCOME, whose overall aim is to support the implementation of U-space services for the safe and secure integration of drones into airspace across Europe.
Honeywell’s Ground Control Station exhibited its capabilities in a real-world setting, showcasing features like dynamic flight plan updates and adeptly handling contingency situations. When faced with challenges such as link loss or airspace alterations, the Ground Control Station, with its autonomy executive technology, proficiently diverted the drone to a secure alternate landing zone. During the demonstration, D-flight rendered pivotal U-Space services, emphasizing the functionality of flight plan submissions, activation, and real-time data sharing on surrounding traffic and air-space availability.
The demonstration positions the contributing companies at the forefront of advancing technologies that operate beyond the visual line of sight utilized by pilots on traditional aircraft (often referred to as BVLOS technologies in aviation).
“This collaboration underlines the imminent importance of autonomy in aviation,” said David Shilliday, vice president and general manager, Advanced Air Mobility, Honeywell Aerospace. “Honeywell is channeling its avionics experience to craft a certifiable Ground Control Station, underscoring our commitment to innovative solutions for the unmanned aircraft segment.”
“U-space is crucial for the safe and efficient integration of drones into the airspace,” said Maurizio Paggetti, CEO at D-Flight and COO at ENAV. “It’s a key enabler for various applications and services that rely on drones and is an essential component of the future of aviation. ENAV Group is fully committed to demonstrating such services and, as leader of Italian cluster in U-ELCOME project, we are excited about the achievements of the initial integration of D-Flight services and Honeywell UAS Ground Control station. It represents an important milestone to mature the provision of U-space services in a complex ecosystem.”
“Sustainable aviation grows from innovation and partnerships,” said Tine Tomaži?, director of engineering and programs at Pipistrel. “Every demonstration raises the bar of what is possible, and we look forward to continuing developments at a rapid pace toward the commercial deployment of drones in EU airspace.”
Over the next year, Honeywell’s Ground Control Station is set to unveil enhanced capabilities, encompassing the management of multiple drones by a single operator and seamless handover of drones between different Ground Control Stations. Demonstrations with these enhanced functionalities including BVLOS flights are slated for the second half of 2024. The U-ELCOME project’s final demonstration is anticipated to include an integrated showcase of Pipistrel’s aircraft solutions with Honeywell’s Ground Control Station technology and d-flight’s U-Space services in Q2 2025.
The SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking is an institutionalized European partnership between private and public sector partners co-funded by the European Union to accelerate the delivery of the Digital European Sky through research and innovation. The U-ELCOME Digital Sky Demonstration project is coordinated by EUROCONTROL, funded by CINEA, the European Climate, Environment and Infrastructure Executive Agency in cooperation with SESAR 3 Joint Undertaking. The Italian cluster of the U-ELCOME project is led by ENAV.
05 Dec 23. DOD Awards $23.4m to Expand Domestic Capability to Upcycle Scrap Material into High-Grade Metal. The Department of Defense today announced award of $23.4 m via the Defense Production Act Investment (DPAI) Program to 6k Additive, LLC to expand capability to upcycle waste and scrap material for conversion into higher grade metals for use in defense and commercial supply chains.
“U.S. dependency on foreign sources for specialty metals presents a significant risk to national security,” said Dr. Laura Taylor-Kale, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy (ASD (IBP)). “6K’s products will feed supply chains that form the basis of our military’s core warfighting capabilities.”
The award will enable 6K Additive to execute facility renovation, equipment acquisition and installation, and engineering. This will result in production capacity for high-grade metals to include titanium, niobium, nickel, and tungsten. These metals are used in alloys for aircraft structural components, turbine engine blades, rocket engines, radar systems, and many other key defense applications. 6K Additive’s proprietary upcycling processes leverage abundant domestic sources of metal feedstock, to include end-of-life components, machine shop waste, and scrap from manufacturing processes such as casting and forging.
To date in calendar year 2023, the DPAI Program has made 24 awards totaling $735 m. DPAI is overseen by the ASD (IBP)’s Manufacturing Capability Expansion and Investment Program (MCEIP), in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Resilience. With MCEIP’s help, 6K Additive expects to achieve full rate production at their Burgettstown, PA facility by the end of 2026. (Source: U.S. DoD)
05 Dec 23. The F-35 of the Future Just Took Flight. Here’s Everything You Need to Know About It. Lockheed Martin is flying the first production F-35s equipped with refreshed computer hardware and software, bringing the fighter one step closer to new and improved weapons and capabilities.
• Lockheed Martin has begun flying new F-35s with the TR-3 package installed.
• TR-3 replaces older hardware dating back to the 2000s.
• The result will be a fighter ready for Block 4, an upcoming series of enhancements that will bring new weapons, hardware, software, and other capabilities.
Lockheed Martin is flying the first production F-35 fighter jets with the new TR-3 hardware and software update in Fort Worth, Texas, the U.S. defense contractor told Janes in late November. This marks a progression from the software’s flight debut back in January, when a developmental test team at Edwards Air Force Base in California first flew a TR-3-configured F-35.
Known as Technology Refresh-3, the update clears the way for a slew of new capabilities, known as Block 4, which will keep the fighter competitive with other emerging fifth-generation jets. Most F-35s worldwide will get the update, replacing older 2010s-era tech—a key stage in the fighter’s evolutionary timeline.
Toward Block 4
TR-3’s increased computing power will set the stage for Block 4, a new suite of capabilities for the entire line of F-35 jets. According to Air & Space Forces Magazine, Block 4 is largely a software upgrade, meant to run on new TR-3 hardware, that will deliver 53 improvements to the jet. The only expected hardware modifications will be on the weapons bay, in order to physically accommodate new weapons, and new cooling hardware designed to keep the computer system from overheating. As a result, the F-35 won’t change its external appearance—an action that would negatively affect its carefully crafted stealth profile.
DIVE DEEPER
Block 4 will deliver improvements to both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions. The upgrade will increase the performance of the Distributed Aperture System, a set of six infrared cameras positioned in all directions around the F-35, allowing the pilot to “see” through the jet below, and even pick up the telltale launch plume of a nearby ballistic missile on the ground. The increased computing power benefits the existing APG-81 radar system, which allows the F-35 to detect targets in the air, on the ground, and jam enemy radar systems, but will also allow the installation of the newly developed APG-85 radar destined to replace the APG-81.
The current F-35 fighter is a bit limited in weapons selection, at least compared to other fighters. Right now, the F-35 can embark the AIM-9X Sidewinder infrared guided air-to-air missile; the longer-range AIM-120 AMRAAM radar-guided missile; the GBU-31 2,000-pound GPS-guided smart bomb, GBU-32 1,000-pound GPS-guided bomb, and GBU-12 500-pound laser-guided bomb. In particular, the current version of the F-35 lacks the ability to conduct standoff attacks at long ranges.
Block 4 will also let the F-35 carry a whole new suite of weapons, including the 575-mile range JASSM-ER land attack cruise missile, the Navy’s Joint Standoff Weapon (JSOW) C1 missile, and the Norwegian Joint Strike Missile, a land attack cruise missile based on the Naval Strike Missile. The F-35 will also carry the shorter-range, all-weather GBU-53/B Stormbreaker guided bomb. Block 4 will also add the F-35’s ultimate firepower capability: the ability to deploy the B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bomb.
The Takeaway
Unlike its predecessors, the F-35 will undergo planned updates throughout its lifetime, designed to keep it combat-worthy for the next 30 years. Of course, these updates will cost money, but it’s comforting to know that there’s a plan to keep America’s $1.7 trillion investment relevant for decades to come. And, that an F-35 that goes to war in 2040 will go to war with 2040 technology—not 2010 technology.
(Source: News Now/https://www.popularmechanics.com/)
02 Dec 23. Pentagon approves first Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve projects. The Pentagon’s chief technology officer is preparing to transition the first slate of joint, rapid experimentation projects to production this fiscal year, following approval from Defense Department leaders.
Undersecretary of Research and Development Heidi Shyu said Dec. 2 that the deputy’s management action group — a panel of senior officials, service leaders and combatant commanders — approved three projects at a recent classified meeting.
The efforts are part of Shyu’s Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve initiative, or RDER, which takes prototypes offered from the military services and combatant commands, verifies their production readiness and operational utility and pushes the most promising ones to production.
Speaking with reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum here, Shyu declined to provide details on the projects that moved forward, but the first round of capabilities focused on long-range fire needs in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.
The intent is to begin manufacturing and fielding the systems with fiscal 2024 funding, but that plan is dependent on Congress passing defense appropriations legislation. For now, the government is operating under a continuing resolution, which means the Defense Department can’t spend money on new start programs like RDER.
Shyu said if that continuing resolution continues through the rest of the fiscal year, it would be a major setback for the program.
“My biggest fear is we have a year-long CR this year,” she said. “We’re demonstrating capability. . . . The things that work really, really well, we want to push forward. You have a CR, that’s going to create problems.”
The Pentagon requested $687m for RDER in its fiscal 2024 budget — nearly double the $358m it asked for the prior year. Congress appropriated $272m for the program in fiscal 2023, which ends Sept. 30, up from $34 m the previous year, for the effort, which helped the department start the first series of demonstrations.
Shyu noted that her office has worked closely with Bill Laplante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, to ensure that once procurement funding is available the systems can move right into production.
During a panel at the conference, Shyu said RDER’s focus on validating prototypes to address high-need capability gaps is complementary to another Pentagon innovation initiative known as Replicator. Through the effort, announced in late August, the department wants to field thousands of attritable, autonomous systems across multiple domains over the next 18 to 24 months.
The larger goal of Replicator, however, is to create a repeatable process by which the Pentagon can quickly field innovative capabilities in large quantities.
RDER’s experimentation and validation process, Shyu said, could be used to demonstrate Replicator candidates when there’s overlap between the capabilities both efforts are pursuing. While the first slate of RDER projects don’t have any Replicator cross-over, she said that could happen in the future. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
30 Nov 23. Defense Innovation Unit to host Replicator technology summit. The Defense Innovation Unit plans to host a technology summit in the coming months as it ramps up its engagement with candidates for the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, an effort to field thousands of autonomous systems by 2025.
The summit is slated for early 2024 and is designed to update companies on the Replicator process and get feedback on the Defense Department’s plans, according to Aditi Kumar, DIU’s director of strategy, policy and international partnerships.
“We’re bringing in our partners to think through what capabilities are critical to this and how we build some of the common architecture pieces and other enabling pieces to deliver a capability that, over the long term, the department can benefit from,” she told reporters in a Nov. 30 briefing.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in late August unveiled Replicator, a new DOD mechanism for rapidly fielding large quantities of innovative capabilities to military users.
Under the first iteration of that process, the Pentagon wants to field a fleet of attritable, autonomous systems across multiple domains over the next 18 to 24 months. To achieve its ambitious target, the Pentagon will increase or speed up production and fielding of existing systems and solicit new ones.
DIU’s role in Replicator is to assess what gaps exist in the military services today — be it individual capabilities or enabling infrastructure — and vet the proposed capabilities, evaluating whether they meet the department’s needs and determining whether they can be produced quickly and in large quantities.
DIU Director Doug Beck chairs the Defense Innovation Working Group, a panel of officials from the military services and combatant commands who will recommend projects that meet the Replicator criteria to the Deputy’s Innovation Steering Group, which oversees Pentagon efforts to rapidly field high-tech capabilities to address operational problems.
The Pentagon plans to field Replicator capabilities in batches, and Hicks told reporters Nov. 21 the department will identify the first tranche of candidate systems in December.
Kumar said that in the first few months since Hicks unveiled Replicator, the department has been working to set criteria for selecting systems. Those criteria — which she broadly listed as attritable, autonomous and resilient — will serve as “guideposts” as the department identifies capabilities it might consider within each capability tranche.
The first round of systems, she said, will likely consist of those that are “ready to go,” meaning they’ve already been tested and validated or are perhaps already being fielded in smaller quantities.
Beck said in the same briefing that while the first tranche will feature more mature capabilities, they won’t all come from traditional defense contractors.
“Those will come from a broad range of kinds of players — from larger companies to smaller companies to commercial companies that DIU works with frequently already,” he said. “We’re leveraging the best of all that capability.”
Along with identifying systems that may meet Replicator’s near-term goals, DIU is also developing processes for evaluating capabilities and integrating them into the military services.
“We need to have a concept of operations that will support the capabilities. We need to think about the experimentation that needs to go into it, the validation in an operational environment of individual capabilities, of group capabilities, of how they will work together,” Kumar said. “There are a lot of downstream implications of delivering these systems.”
Make or break
DIU’s role in Replicator is a significant expansion in the organization’s influence within the Pentagon — and experts say it presents a test for whether the Defense Department is serious about leveraging the non-traditional, commercial industrial base.
Ret. Lt. Gen. Clint Hinote, the Air Force’s former deputy chief of staff for strategy, integration and requirements, told Defense News that Replicator represents a “put up or shut up moment” for DIU.
“If DIU is successful, we will have thousands the thousands in air, land and sea in 24 months,” he said in an interview. “If they’re not, then I think we have to go and think, well, what is DIU good for?”
Andrew Metrick, a defense fellow at the Center for a New American Security, said Replicator’s goal of increasing the scale at which the department fields innovative capability is a big deal for commercial companies and startups. It also matters to private investors who want assurance that the Pentagon sees significant value in these companies before funding them.
“The big thing when you talk to investors is, [DOD has] gotten a lot better at funding the [research, development, test and evaluation] and prototyping of some of these technologies, but are absolutely terrible at getting it out into the field in numbers,” he told C4ISRNET. “I think that’s the important part about Replicator.”
Beck acknowledge the risk inherent in Replicator — at the process and financial level as well as reputational. The goal, he said, is to take bets in those areas in order to reduce future operational risk to military personnel.
“We’re taking those risks on purpose so that we don’t inadvertently transfer that risk into real risk for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and guardians who would ultimately have to fight a war if we end up having to fight it,” he said. “And that’s a conscious decision.” (Source: C4ISR & Networks)
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