💻 ⚙️ The Army's software & digital engineering roadmap
Plus, a recent AFWERX win.
Welcome back to the Nexus Newsletter, Applied Intuition Defense’s biweekly newsletter covering the latest in national security, autonomy, and software-defined warfare.
This week, we share a new contract announcement, our thoughts on comments by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, and the team’s takes on some news items that caught our attention.
🎉 AFWERX Autonomy Prime selects Applied Intuition Defense to provide synthetic data
We’re excited to announce we were awarded a contract from AFWERX Autonomy Prime to deliver synthetic data to support the Air Force’s computer vision model development for rapid prototyping. This contract award will enable Applied Intuition Defense’s autonomy development solutions and dual-use technology to help the U.S. Air Force rapidly design, test, and field novel autonomy technology that meets the needs of an ever-changing battlefield.
Under the contract, Applied Intuition Defense will provide Autonomy Prime and the Program Executive Office Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance and Special Operations Forces (PEO ISR-SOF) with critical information about how to optimally implement synthetic data.
“In a complex battlefield, ensuring that capabilities move at the speed of development is crucial to success. This work is essential to filling current gaps in the autonomy development, training, and T&E pipeline, ultimately allowing the U.S. Air Force to adapt and operate in complex environments,” said Peter Ludwig, Co-Founder and CTO of Applied Intuition. “We are thrilled to continue to support a trusted partner like AFWERX and help the U.S. Air Force’s PEO ISR-SOF tackle critical national security use cases.”
🛠️ Shedding the Pentagon’s “old mindsets”
Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks earlier this month said the Department of Defense “cannot tolerate the same old mindsets” when it comes to innovating and strategic competition with China, referring to, in part, the program, budgeting, and appropriations processes to field capabilities at scale.
She pointed to her year-old Replicator initiative as an example of the Pentagon ditching these old mindsets, saying what DOD has accomplished “in under 12 months can take seven-to-ten years for similar-sized capabilities.” To date, DOD has reportedly delivered the first set of systems chosen under Replicator and systems under “tranche 2” have already been selected.
“I started working at DOD more than 30 years ago, and I've heard plenty of salty language, but to this day, the most profane and damaging seven words I hear in the Pentagon are, ‘this is how we've always done it.’ That is simply unacceptable today.
We are innovating at the speed of technology development by necessity. It's a pace that may make some uncomfortable, but it's required to keep up with technology, to deliver for the warfighter at scale, and to continue outpacing our competitors.”
- DSD Kathleen Hicks
These statements highlight a critical point: outdated thinking will hinder the ability to field capabilities at scale and speed. Innovation requires agility, speed, and risk – a willingness to embrace the unknown. Historically, these qualities have been stifled by bureaucracy, acquisition processes, the appropriations cycle, and a cultural resistance to change.
Former Commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, GEN (Ret.) Raymond Anthony “Tony” Thomas, touched on what the future of the battlefield will look like at the sidelines of this year’s Nexus 24 symposium:
🗞️ News we’re reading
There were several news stories coming out of GVSETS this year about the Army’s digital engineering and autonomy efforts, and a few stories about the Army’s software roadmap. Below, we’ve pulled key quotes from articles of interest, plus brief commentary from Applied Intuition Defense’s team.
Defense News | Army tweaking major software effort to be more commercial friendly
Key quote: “‘No venture capital-backed company that DIU and every other part of DOD has worked so hard to get into the system, none of our companies can bid on that,’ [Govini CEO Tara Murphy] Dougherty said in July. ‘Until we get the parts of the department who actually put the billion dollar, 10-year contracts into place to understand what it means to work with companies like ours, this isn’t going to work.’”
Our take: Sharp feedback like this from industry in the media is often counterproductive — Applied Intuition Defense strives to provide constructive feedback to Army leaders the right way. Nevertheless, the facts of the matter are that the Army’s software policy, and subsequent draft Request for Proposal for a multiple award Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity for modern software development, are rather traditional and status-quo. Though they strive to facilitate the procurement of modern software, the nature of this contracting activity favors services-oriented small businesses and large incumbent primes.
Under the draft language, larger venture-backed companies that excel at software development will take on unfavorable risk when bidding in order to bypass the cost proposal requirements or severely restrictive data rights intent. These companies fall into a “no-man’s land” of sorts where they will not qualify for the qualified subcontractor pool, nor will they be competitive as a prime. In the end, the Government will essentially continue with the status quo for software contracting.
Breaking Defense | Digital engineering saving time, money on Army’s XM30 vehicle competition: Officials
Key quote: “‘If we had a paper-based process, it would literally have taken us forever and a day to evaluate those types of design features,’ [Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology Young] Bang added. ‘So, the digital engineering model that they [vendors] and the team used helped them really accelerate the time that they can evaluate between 1,000 to 3,000 interfaces.’”
Our take: XM30’s leadership in digital engineering will pay dividends for the Army. It’s a strategic effort for our national security that is also reflective of the challenges in commercial automotive and the imperative to match our pacing technological adversary (China) in the development of software-defined capabilities. The risks associated with the black box supplier base and legacy distributed architectures are too great to tolerate any longer. XM30 and the Army’s digital engineering pathfinders are paving the way.
Breaking Defense | What is preventing the Army from integrating autonomous vehicles into its formations?
Key quote: “One key issue that needs updated software is mobility — in particular obstacle detection and avoidance. Preparing its uncrewed fleet to travel at speeds that maintain pace with manned platforms in difficult terrains is also a concern as the current UGVs would slow down convoys putting them in risky positions. (Breaking Defense recently outlined a number of these issues in a two part series focused on the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle program.)
‘We want to have our soldiers be able to push [uncrewed] capabilities out, either ground, air, whatever, and be able to do that in some autonomous fashion,’ Robert Monto, Director, Advanced Concepts and Critical Technologies, US Army Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) claimed.
Another issue to be addressed is ensuring those systems can access networks and safely communicate and operate without enemy interference. In order to protect those platforms from cyber intrusions, the branch plans to deepen its cooperation with industry.”
Our take: From our perspective there are three things that are preventing the Army from integrating autonomous vehicles into the formation:
The Army has not yet established the DevOps infrastructure and test and evaluation (T&E) tooling pipeline across the autonomy enterprise to effectively iterate, learn, and deploy autonomy software.
The acquisition strategy for piping cutting-edge software onto the hardware platforms has not been clearly defined.
Programs with autonomy requirements and testing organizations (i.e. U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command) are not coordinating resources and sharing data effectively at the enterprise scale.
In essence, the Army has several programs with autonomy/ADAS/teleop requirements, but is not yet truly resourcing or executing an autonomy program as we know it, which contain the key elements of a T&E pipeline for continuous development and deployment, a DevOps infrastructure, and data engine.
That’s all for today’s newsletter. See you next time!