“If the Joint Force can just get a taste of what this will be like on the battlefield, it will be the most addictive drug that has ever been made for warfare,” Will Roper said of the Advanced Battle Management System.
By Theresa HitchensRoper says he hopes Congress “will smile on the Air Force for breaking out of ‘Platform Land’ and actually putting money towards digital transformation.”
By Theresa HitchensThe goal of the matching fund is to support tech startup firms to bridge the ‘valley of death’ and rapidly scale up capability.
By Theresa Hitchens“Given the DoD’s poor job of presenting how we would move people and what criteria would be used, the congressional pushback is expected,” says one Space Force proponent.
By Theresa HitchensAs commercial activities such as mining expand from Earth to the Moon, there will be “a need for the equivalent to a Navy or Air Force” to protect that region of space, says SDA chief Fred Kennedy.
By Theresa HitchensVenture capital funds are pouring money into space start-ups — including a number of firms being eyed by DoD –with investment in 2018 hitting a record high of $3.2 billion.
By Theresa HitchensWe can expect an important announcement in a few weeks that “a significant acceleration is doable” of the Air Force’s hypersonic efforts. Roper said he’d completed a review of all the service’s work on hypersonic, one of the Pentagon’s top priorities.
By Colin ClarkCORRECTED: TACO GILBERT’S AFFILIATION HOLLOMAN AFB: It may be hard to believe but the future of the Air Force may depend on three turboprop planes and a $20 million spec-built attack jet. They are the entries in what the service calls the Light Attack Experiment, a back-to-the-future attempt to rekindle the sort of innovation and…
By Colin ClarkLONDON: The most troubled program in the Air Force, the highly-secure set of GPS satellite ground stations known as OCX, underwent yet another quarterly review last Thursday and was found to have “made progress.” The Air Force statement says that Acquisition Undersecretary Frank Kendall and Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, “with support of Lt. Gen.…
By Colin ClarkThe Program Executive Officer for the KC-46, Brig. Gen. Duke Richardson, made a rare public appearance today at the Air Force Association to discuss his program, which has been hammered by schedule programs and cost growth. Fortunately, none of this costs the taxpayer a dime because it’s a fixed price contract. But the problems have cost Boeing at…
By Laura Baldwin, Mark Lorell and Obaid YounossiAFA CONFERENCE: After three years of bringing acquisition costs down but seeing schedule breaches grow and grow without any end in sight, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James announced today in her keynote speech at the premier US aerospace conference that schedule is now in the service’s sights. “Unfortunately, today it takes too long today…
By Colin ClarkPENTAGON: Ellen Pawlikowski helps decide what weapons the Air Force buys and manages the buying process, so when the lieutenant general says she likes autonomy and 3-D printing as the most promising capabilities for her service to develop as part of the new offset strategy, it’s worth listening. “This is Ellen Pawlikowski speaking,” she says in…
By Colin Clark