“Showing up with the right product too late is a losing strategy,” said Istari CEO Will Roper. “When I look at the world of technology that's so inspiring to me, they live by the gospel of speed.”
The Defense Innovation Unit is undergoing a "pretty significant shift," Doug Beck, a former vice president at Apple and captain in the Navy Reserve who took over DIU in April, told Breaking Defense.
“Formula One is amazingly complex from an aerodynamic perspective. And in my opinion, it's more complex than what we do in aviation,” said Will Roper, the Air Force’s former acquisition chief.
“One of the things that was already useful ... was an understanding that in order to get private capital deployed, you need clarity and some understanding about what the DoD will look like as a customer," said board member and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
ABMS "has not been adequately focused on achieving and building specific, measurable improvements and operational outcomes," said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.
Darlene Costello, acting Air Force acquisition head, has issued a guidance document, called the Digital Building Code, for implementing the service's ambitious digital revolution.
Consolidate network monitoring, performance management, and fault isolation into a single, comprehensive solution.
A new pod-based comms system for the KC-46, enabling it to serve as a 'translator' for the incompatible radio systems of the F-22 and F-35, will be fielded in the last quarter of fiscal 2022.
The F-35 aside, the report recommends that the Air Force "resist future participation in any joint aircraft procurement or development programs."
Gen. Jay Raymond, Space Force chief, stressed that the new digital vision applies not just to service acquisition, but to everything the newest military service does, with a bottom-line goal of speeding decision-making.
With two B-21 test articles in production in Palmdale, Northrop Grumman will soon be flying a digital marvel of the 21st Century.
Michigan’s defense ecosystem and expertise makes it a special asset for production.
"We have hardpoints on the C-17; We have hardpoints on the KC-46. It's not a hard stretch to think that we could put one or two missiles on there for self defense," says AMC head Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost.
"We need to move away from these single point demos to true scalability," Jean-Charles Ledé, AFRL's advisor on autonomy tech, says.
"We're doing everything in our power to keep efforts going, because we believe ... it's the right way to help design our future force,"acting Air Force acquisition head Darlene Costello says.
One of three current contenders for the LongShot program will be chosen to go into flight test, "based on the currently allocated budget," a DARPA spokesperson told Breaking D.