Nexus 23 agenda, innovation adoption, Burn Bag, and more
All of the latest news and announcements from Applied’s government team
The Nexus Newsletter
Welcome back to The Nexus Newsletter. In this edition, we announce the agenda for Nexus 23, discuss a recent report from the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption, share a recent podcast appearance, and more.
Nexus 23 agenda
We are thrilled to announce an action-packed agenda for Nexus 23! The two-day thought leadership symposium will feature fireside chats with senior leaders and experts like Michèle Flournoy, Marc Andreessen, Ellen Lord, Dr. Mark Esper, and Rep. Rob Wittman, and engaging panel discussions, including:
Ukraine: Autonomy, AI, and lessons from the battlefield
Autonomy policy: Shaping the future of warfighting
Industry and the warfighter: Breaking down barriers
Acquiring critical technologies at speed: New strategies and reforms
See the full schedule of panels, fireside chats, networking events, and more at the link below.
Innovation adoption
The Department of Defense does not have an innovation problem - it has an innovation adoption program. With that in mind, the Atlantic Council Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption published its interim report last week. The interim report lays out a series of ten recommendations for Congress and the Pentagon to address the innovation adoption problem in the Department of Defense:
Introduce a new capability portfolio model
Consolidate program elements
Reset reprogramming authorities
Modernize DOD to align with the 21st century industrial base
Strengthen alignment of capital markets to defense outcomes
Incentivize tech companies to do business with the DOD
Modernize budget documents
Establish bridge fund for successfully demonstrated technologies
Scale the Space Development Agency model
Modernize DOD requirements system
We are proud to serve on the commission alongside other leading voices from government, academia, and industry.
For more, read a recent op-ed from Commission Director - and Applied Intuition Defense Advisory Board member - Stephen Rodriguez and Program Director Clementine Starling. Register for Nexus 23 to hear more about the importance of solving the Department’s innovation adoption challenges.
Podcast: Autonomy challenges for DOD
Our team recently joined the Burn Bag podcast for a discussion on current and future use cases for autonomous systems, roadblocks that complicate rapid and efficient autonomy development, how the Department can accelerate the adoption of private sector innovations, and more.
Upcoming events
Applied’s government team is attending and exhibiting at a number of events this month. Meet us there!
April 19-20: MDEX International | Book a meeting
May 9-11: XPONENTIAL 2023 | Book a meeting
News we’re reading
Autonomous systems are gaining momentum in the national security space. Below, we’ve pulled key quotes from recent articles of interest, plus brief commentary from Applied Intuition’s government team:
Defense News | US Navy aims to field manned-unmanned fleet within 10 years
By Megan Eckstein, Naval Warfare Reporter, Defense News
Key quote: The U.S. Navy plans to operate a fleet of crewed and unmanned platforms within the next 10 years — an ambitious timeline that will require the service to quickly develop and mature autonomous systems, while ensuring confidence in the technology. [...]
Similarly with unmanned systems, he added, “how do we assure that those — whether it’s in the air, on the surface or in the subsurface — are going to be obedient in terms of what they’re programmed to do in a complex environment? And until we have a full understanding of that level of obedience, then they’re probably going to be tethered to a ship [or] another aircraft.”
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday made similar remarks to reporters later that day, discussing the potential use of unmanned vessels for resupplying Marines in the Pacific.
“We do see great potential in leveraging unmanned in a lead/follow-like manner … to sustain a force forward. If you think about what we’re doing in the air with Next Generation [Air Dominance], where you would have a quarterback that would be a manned [tactical aircraft] with unmanned as his or her wingmen, same kind of approach,” Gilday said.
Our take: Building trust in autonomous systems is essential. Here, “obedient” seems to be a synonym for “performant” - i.e., that autonomous systems perform according to requirements or other parameters - specifically as it relates to teaming with manned platforms in the sea and sky.
Establishing a robust and broadly-understood certification process for autonomous systems should be a major priority. Employing commercial best practices for autonomy development and testing, including a scenario-based plan to provide traceable, quantitative evidence of autonomy performance, should play a central role in that effort. Additionally, ensuring that pilots and other operators expected to team with autonomous systems are incorporated into the development process for those systems early on is essential to establishing trust across human-machine teams. Commercial best practices such as the definition of narrow operational design domains, or design reference missions, with performance metrics; a DevSecOps platform by which to develop and test iterative software; and a simulation-first approach will be critical to realize Admiral Gilday’s concept and schedule.
Breaking Defense | EXCLUSIVE: Pentagon aims to ‘own the technical baseline’ for AI tech, R&D official says
By Sydney Freedberg Jr., Contributing Editor, Breaking Defense
Key quote: The DoD is well aware it’s playing catch-up to the rapidly advancing private sector in many aspects of AI, acknowledged Maynard Holliday, the Pentagon’s deputy CTO for critical technologies. A big part of the conference is a push, not only to better understand what’s happening on the cutting edge, but how the military can adopt and adapt commercial tech to build AI capabilities it can trust — and control.
“We recognize we need to fast-follow, but we also need to develop military-specific applications of these commercial technologies, and as Under Secretary LaPlante has said in the past, we need to own the technical baseline of these technologies, so that we can have control over their evolution to a militarily specific solution, rather than being vendor-locked and having us beholden to one single vendor to evolve a capability.” [...]
So how can DoD reconcile its desire to own the technical baseline with private industry’s obsession with protecting its intellectual property?
“Great question,” Holliday acknowledged. Part of the solution, he said, is that “we’re going to have to develop our own militarily specific, DoD-specific corpus of data that’s updated with our information, our jargon, so that we can interact with it seamlessly — and that we trust it.”
Our take: We were honored to welcome Mr. Holliday to our Mountain View, California headquarters last fall to discuss ways to enhance warfighter trust in autonomous systems. At the visit, Mr. Holiday said: “Building warfighter trust in autonomous systems is a key priority for OUSD (R&E). Ongoing collaboration between the DOD and innovative commercial companies will prove essential to building trust and promoting principles of responsible AI. As the number of defense autonomy programs expands, the DOD must continue to harness commercial best practices for autonomy development and program design to ensure mission success.”
As the DOD pursues a range of autonomous systems across domains and use cases, it is essential that the Department invests in the infrastructure required for program success. Namely, infrastructure that allows the DOD to collect, manage, and share data across the organization. Effective data management lies at the heart of any modern autonomy development pipeline, but data collection and management has so far been overlooked by DOD autonomy programs. We’re happy to hear that Mr. Holiday recognizes the important role that the enterprise-wide sharing of data can have in enabling the development and deployment of safe, trusted, and effective autonomous systems.
Read more about Mr. Holliday’s visit to Applied last fall and read our primer on enterprise data management for defense autonomy programs.
War on the Rocks | Prime Time for Software: Reimagining the Future of Defense Acquisition
By Christine H. Fox and Akash Jain, Palantir Technologies
Key quote: However, because the systems needed to combat higher-tech adversaries will increasingly rely on software-driven digital capabilities — such as data fusion and AI — one should ask: Is the traditional, hardware-centric model of defense acquisition and systems integration always the best model for fielding the most capable military technology that America has to offer?
Given the massive changes wrought by information technology in recent years — and importantly, their corresponding impact on modern warfare — it is worth re-thinking the conventional wisdom that only traditional prime contractors can lead the development and production of all of America’s most consequential defense capabilities. The Defense Department should widen the aperture of what qualifies a company to manage defense acquisition programs and consider including a different kind of leader in the defense industrial enterprise: A prime contractor whose core expertise originates in software, rather than hardware. In other words, a “software prime.”
Our take: Increasingly, the cutting edge capabilities under development are software-defined, not hardware-defined. Autonomy, for example, is first and foremost a software problem. While software is typically not as flashy as hardware, it is often the most complex element of modern capabilities and platforms. The concept of a “software prime” is not a new one; take, for instance, Microsoft’s priming of the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmented System or IVAS. This is a primarily software company delivering a hardware/software capability as the prime. Given our experience working with the DOD as a pure software company, we aren’t sure the DOD is ready to change its acquisition construct to favor software primes. The reality is that hardware companies with software experience that build and test hardware in an software-like manner (the Anduril’s and SpaceX’s of the world) will probably lead the way in changing DOD mindsets on hardware-first vs software-first acquisitions.
General Atomics | GA-ASI Flies MQ-20 Avenger Autonomously Using LEO SATCOM Datalink
By General Atomics
Key quote: On April 6, 2023, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) conducted live, tactical, air combat maneuvers using Artificial Intelligence (AI) pilots to control a company-owned MQ-20 Avenger® Unmanned Aircraft System. Collaborative maneuvers between human and AI pilots were conducted using GA-ASI’s Live, Virtual, Constructive (LVC) collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) ecosystem over a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication (SATCOM) provider’s IP-based Mission Beyond Line of Sight (BLOS) datalink. The LEO SATCOM connection was also used to rapidly retrain and redeploy AI pilots while the aircraft was airborne, demonstrating GA-ASI’s ability to update AI pilots within minutes.
This marks the first deployment of a LEO SATCOM provider connections running on an operationally relevant unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) platform. [...]
“The flight demonstrated GA-ASI’s unmatched ability to fly autonomy on real, tactically relevant, unmanned combat aerial vehicles,” said GA-ASI Senior Director of Advanced Programs Michael Atwood. “It displayed effective BLOS Command and Control through the collaboration between three defense primes. This showcases our rapidly maturing CCA mission system suite and moves us one step closer to providing this revolutionary capability to the warfighter.”
GA-ASI leveraged its end-to-end CCA ecosystem for the flight that fused third-party capabilities, human-on-the-loop control, and autonomy to enable effective human-machine teaming for 21st century conflicts.
Our take: Congratulations to our friends at General Atomics on this latest milestone in their autonomy development process! Collaboration across a number of different prime contractors, startups, and other players is critical to developing autonomous systems at speed and scale.
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