“We put out our second draft on Friday; the deadline for feedback is Oct. 25, so you have about a week and a half left,” software acquisition chief Jennifer Swanson told contractors at AUSA. “Please, please give us feedback.”
“I can train algorithms literally overnight,” said Young Bang, the No. 2 civilian in Army acquisition — so even the streamlined Software Acquisition Pathway might not be fast enough.
Consolidate network monitoring, performance management, and fault isolation into a single, comprehensive solution.
"If some companies don't want to bid on a contract, it's a free country. Don't bid. Others will," Doug Bush said. "My goal is simply to get the capability for the Army, not to make everybody happy."
The service previously announced another initiative, dubbed #DefendAI, all of which are shaping its year-long dive into the cutting-edge tech.
One of the hopeful uses of the new LLM is for the government to create contracts at a quicker rate.
The Army presented a conceptual security plan that involves layers of security for AI use, but wants help ironing out the details.
Blending superior optics, advanced stabilization and AI-powered autonomy in a compact and rugged system, ASELFLIR 600 delivers unmatched intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.
Instead of demanding an exhaustive “AI Bill of Materials.” the Army will only ask contractors for a “baseball card” of key stats on their AI — while building up its in-house capacity to check for bad code or “poisoned” data.
“Any commercial LLM that is out there, that is learning from the internet, is poisoned today,” Jennifer Swanson said, “but our main concern [is] those algorithms that are going to be informing battlefield decisions.”
Breaking Defense's European Bureau Chief Tim Martin and naval warfare reporter Justin Katz chat about the biggest DSEI news from London this week.
The way the historic PEO organizations were initially set up was “for a reason,” but now the Army is modernizing, and the shift is needed to support its unified network, Young Bang said.
Michigan’s defense ecosystem and expertise makes it a special asset for production.
Today, just nine of the Army’s 540 acquisition programs use the streamlined Software Pathway, but senior officials told Breaking Defense in an exclusive interview they aim to "exponentially" increase that number by the end of next year.
Doug Bush laid out multiple avenues for keeping US stockpiles intact while keeping Ukraine armed for its battle against Russia, including potential industry incentives and getting help from America's friends.
"I think there's further work to do to improve the system. But we saw a lot of positive things as a test," the Army's top acquisition official said of IVAS, before separately noting a potential delay in a major future helicopter program contract.
After a directive confused some lawmakers, a provision in the NDAA threatens to nullify a potential shake-up of the Army's acquisition bureaucracy if representatives don't receive additional information about who's doing what.