“When you pull an organization that was a direct report to the deputy secretary or secretary and move it somewhere else…the message to the force is loud and clear: This isn’t a priority,” said retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, who founded the predecessor to the current Chief Digital & AI Office (CDAO).
“At this next T-REX [Technology Readiness Experimentation exercise], we’ll be starting to host TOPGUN school,” said prototyping & experimentation director Alex Lovett. “We’re going to be playing Red versus Blue, their best [offense] coming after our best defense.”
Michigan’s defense ecosystem and expertise makes it a special asset for production.
In written testimony from March, Michael indicated he would look to review the structure of the R&E office, while pushing to shift a culture he described as “overly risk adverse.”
“We really don’t have … the in-house capabilities to answer all the questions,” the Pentagon’s deputy director for advanced computing, Roy Campbell, told Breaking Defense. “We’re really going to have to ‘phone out’ to all these assets” that the private sector plans to build.
The US is still great at designing chips but has offshored the ability to build prototypes, which slows innovation and risks IP theft, said OSD’s Dev Shenoy.
DIB member Charles Phillips said the DIB should recombine AT&L because the DoD “need[s] integrated designs, we need integrated manufacturing capacity around the world. It’s hard to do that in separate organizations."
Consolidate network monitoring, performance management, and fault isolation into a single, comprehensive solution.
The Joint Fires Network, meant to match weapons to targets across a theater of war, is a crucial pillar of the Pentagon's nascent global command system, CJADC2.
“The establishment of these roles within Research & Engineering better positions our team to execute upon our mission of preserving our nation’s technological edge, now and into the future,” Heidi Shyu, under secretary of defense for research and engineering, said.
In addition to Heidi Shyu's expanded role, lawmakers have tasked the undersecretary of research and engineering to develop a strategy on how the Pentagon can leverage intellectual property to "enhance" its ability to procure emerging technologies and outpace adversaries.
The new laser will take part in the Army's demonstration of its Indirect Fires Protection Capability-High Energy Laser later this year.
The company is developing the Open Systems Interoperable and Reconfigurable Infrastructure Solution for the office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering through September 2024.
"Each of the services is clearly working on their own services capability gap so there's a missing piece in terms of when we fight in a conflict," Shyu said. "We don't fight within a single service, we fight jointly."
SCIFiRE is aimed at maturing an air-breathing hypersonic conventional cruise missile launched from either a fighter or a bomber.
“I don’t want to get into any specifics,” Mike White told me, “but some of the challenges we’ve had so far getting to flight have been, in certain instances, avoidable."