The Army will effectively rent back-office IT “as a service” from contractors, allowing it to focus on modernizing the front-line network.

Awards for Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft designs went to Bell, Boeing, Karem, Sikorsky, and a partnership of AVX and L-3.

Quality control problems at Boeing are just part of wider supply shortfalls that could hamstring Army helicopters in a major war.

The Army’s got lots of really old IT on its bases which may not hold up in a real war.

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is looking to get a tighter grip on how it pays large defense contractors, and has drawn up plans to cut up front costs while rewarding companies that hit their milestones on time.   The defense industry, however, isn’t happy about it. Every major defense industry trade association voiced opposition to the… Keep reading →

The head of the Special Operations Command is concerned that even the most advanced tech his troops use in the field today is being aged out, given rapid advances in commercial technologies that have overtaken military-grade gear.

if you can deliver new technology really fast, the US Army is now willing to pay your company much higher profits. And it’s working hard to make sure that new tech actually gets to new weapons.

“My eyes are watering with what our young people can do right now,” the Assistant Commandant said.
“They’re really smart and they’ve got a lot of really good ideas,” Commandant Neller said. “We would be well served to turn them loose.”

WASHINGTON: The National Security Agency, which can go for 10 years without a contract protest, currently faces three, slowing the agency’s ability to issue new contracts. “We are sitting on three of them right now. Used to be you could go a decade without one, let alone sitting on three in one year,” Charlie Stein, of… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: If the Air Force wants to build a single global network linking forces in the air, sea, land, space, and cyberspace, it must first eliminate the proprietary standards that keep its existing systems from sharing data. That’s the key conclusion the service’s Multi-Domain Command & Control taskforce recently reported to the Chief of… Keep reading →