🪖📲 What the Army's digital transformation efforts are up against
Come see us at AUSA
Welcome back to the Nexus Newsletter, Applied Intuition Defense’s biweekly newsletter covering the latest in national security, autonomy, and software-defined warfare.
Headed to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference? Catch us at booth 3455 in Hall C at AUSA! Ahead of the conference, we wanted to share a few thoughts on some of the Army’s biggest digital transformation undertakings as well as some recommendations made by our chief technology officer to Congress during a hearing last month.
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🪖Top of mind: The Army’s software and digital engineering roadmaps
Defense News | US Army moves out on digital engineering strategy
“Already, the defense industry is using digital engineering, including digital twins, to develop future vertical lift aircraft, combat vehicles and even hypersonic weapons.
‘We view digital engineering as the linchpin of all the digital transformation efforts that we have ongoing today,’ [Army Deputy Assistant Secretary for Data, Engineering, and Software Jennifer] Swanson said in a June 18 press briefing at the Pentagon.” (Defense News)
The Army is making noble strides to foster the adoption of digital engineering best practices and agile contracting for software. This year, the service released its Enabling Modern Software Development and Acquisition Practices and Army Digital Engineering memos and — despite some initial blowback from industry — Army senior leaders greatly recognize the need for reform and the adoption of best practices from the commercial sector.
Back in June at our Nexus conference, Army acquisition chief Young Bang spoke about what the service hopes to accomplish with it’s digital engineering strategy:
The biggest challenge with respect to digital engineering in the Department of Defense (DOD) is this: The motivation that led to the adoption of modern digital engineering methods and tooling in the commercial industry was and continues to be driven by market forces. DOD’s monopsony and the consolidation of the defense industry, which is driven by requirements, has naturally lagged behind. While fostering digital engineering enablement through policy is good, we think this approach will naturally face significant challenges when it comes to implementation.
There are strong winds blowing against the Army’s digital engineering efforts. For example, commercial companies excel at digital engineering (those that do not no longer exist), but the Government is hesitant to use the software it can provide as a service. Further, the defense prime ecosystem has weak incentives for digital transformation, which is motivated primarily through requirements. In certain cases, the Government is trying to build and maintain its own tools and algorithms themselves and the developers of which are also not exposed to competition.
Breaking Defense | Frustrations mount over Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle autonomy, acquisition approach
“The chief complaint from industry sources is around the Army’s approach to the program: trying to cobble together its own robot piece by piece, without a clear competition strategy for the payloads or key communications and network equipment — essential components to make an unmanned vehicle work.” (Breaking Defense)
A few years ago, the automotive industry realized that its goals for achieving full autonomy were over-ambitious and made a deliberate pivot to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Meanwhile, L3/L4 autonomy continues to steadily make progress by riding on the commercial success of ADAS, and the technology advancement associated with better tooling to develop it.
The Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program and the Army are starting to learn the same lesson. The program placed a significant investment into commercial autonomy providers in 2022 through its software acquisition pathway, but has not yet made known how it plans to merge this acquisition path into the main hardware acquisition. After all, the program only has “autonomy ready” requirements or “hooks,” and integrating capabilities beyond the requirements does pose perceived risk to the program.
The Army should consider that, like the automotive industry has learned, programs like RCV have to start small to go big on autonomy. Requirements for "autonomy ready" platforms are not actual requirements for autonomy, and when challenges arise, this fact will create incentives to abandon autonomy procurement altogether. The Army must also consider that the procurement of autonomy will not be instantaneous. Autonomy-ready requirements do justify the establishment of the infrastructure necessary to procure autonomy in the future. Without this infrastructure in place, the Army could potentially be in a higher risk situation where it cannot understand the capabilities of the autonomy technology that it wants to procure once the requirements become explicit.
The Cipher Brief | Pentagon May be Slow to ‘Paradigm Shift’ in AI-Driven Weapons
“Peter Ludwig, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Intuition Defense, which leads in autonomous ground vehicles, told the committee, “Given the importance of software in the modern battlefield, it is critical that DoD not treat software the same as hardware. Software is never finished. It continues to live and grow as conditions rapidly change. Unlike hardware, its evolutions occur in weeks, not years, and if the software does not evolve at this speed of relevance, it becomes obsolete.” (The Cipher Brief)
ICYMI, our CTO Peter Ludwig testified in front of the House Armed Services Committee last month. In his opening statement, which you can read here, Peter made several recommendations to the committee and specifically called out the RCV program for being a pioneer in its use of the Agile Acquisition Frameworks - using the Software Acquisition Pathway to acquire software and Middle Tier Acquisition for the hardware.
One of the recommendations made before the committee was to expand the use of the Software Acquisition Pathway:
That’s all for today’s newsletter. See you next time!