BigBear.ai is on contract to combine 15 readiness data systems into a new cloud-based system called Global Force Integrated Management, while LMI leads on consolidating 28 more into the Army Training Integrated System.
Counter-drone strategy was a key theme at this year's AUSA conference, ahead of an Army challenge to industry to take out dozens of UAVs at a time.
“What we learned was, given the requirements we gave the vendor, it just was going to cost more. ... You don’t want to see that, but it’s going to happen sometimes," Army acquisition chief Doug Bush said.
"I think the most important thing that I'm communicating to industry is that we need a flexible network in the future," Mark Kitz, leader of PEO C3T, told Breaking Defense. "And we need to be able to iterate our programs so we can have that flexible network in the future."
“The intent is to launch the [Mojave] aircraft from the aircraft carrier and if conditions are suitable, we'll look at recovering it,” said Jaime Walters, vice president of international strategic development at GA-ASI.
“If you sweat, you die,” said Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, commander of the Alaska-based 11th Airborne Division. “That’s the environment we’re talking about... the harshest environment on the planet.”
Shield AI’s Hivemind pilot is “the Android operating system with the aircraft manufacturer,” the company’s president Brandon Tseng told Breaking Defense. “We want to work with every OEM [original equipment manufacturer], every aircraft.”
Army undersecretary Gabe Camarillo on Tuesday declared 2024 the “year of Army security cooperation."
Army acquisition chief Doug Bush said in the future the service's LASSO drone program will see "entry points for other vendors, potentially, because there's so much innovation in that space."
US Army Special Operations Command's Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga credits successful information operations with the defection of 17,000 Russian soldiers.
The program is based off a similar concept being executed in US European Command.
“The deal was always [first] that we would give them two Reaper systems, bring them to Ukraine to train, but we have now sweetened that to cover spare parts, reach back technical support, and we would even include some initial transfer of data," said C. Mark Brinkley, chief marketing and communications strategist at GA-ASI.
"The baseline program, so far, [is] going well. It's a building block," Doug Bush, the head of Army acquisition, said. But for the next iteration, "What else can you do with that chassis? Weapons? Sensors?"
One of the questions the Army's ISR Task Force is grappling with regard to sensing is how best to "leverage the vast proliferation of commercial satellite providers," said task force director Andrew Evans.
The two ATHENA aircraft are part of the Army’s long-term move from prop-driven intelligence, surveillance, & reconnaissance to higher-performance jets.