Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Briana Reilly was a Pentagon emerging tech reporter until December 2022. She previously covered the Air Force for Inside Defense after joining the publication in June 2021. Before that, she spent five years covering state politics and government in Wisconsin for The Capital Times and WisPolitics.com.
The House Armed Services Committee wants to see the military step up its efforts to more widely leverage artificial intelligence and autonomy capabilities, including adding the technology to legacy systems, according to an amendment to the panel’s recently approved fiscal year 2023 defense authorization bill.
A new immersive commercial acquisition program from the Defense Innovation Unit seeks to reduce barriers to transitioning new technologies from nontraditional vendors to military components by teaching service contracting professionals about the process.
The Defense Department has released its framework for advancing responsible artificial intelligence throughout the military, outlining a series of action items surrounding implementing test and evaluation requirements for the technology, establishing acquisition tools for related capabilities and bolstering staffing levels to ensure appropriate oversight.
The leader of the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit hopes that a recently created "hedge strategy" he helped craft in coordination with the Office of Naval Research will pack "surprise" into DOD's development of large weapons platforms.
House authorizers want to see the Pentagon move more quickly in deploying 5G infrastructure across its military bases, with lawmakers signing off on amended language today that would require the defense secretary to set a target date for rolling out the wireless broadband infrastructure at all DOD installations.
House appropriators want the Pentagon's cost assessment and program evaluation office to complete its own review of the future propulsion systems officials are considering for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet, as the joint program office wraps up a separate analysis of engine modernization options.
The F-35 program is poised to reach its long-delayed, full-rate production decision by March 2024 under an updated acquisition program baseline that recently won approval, a Pentagon spokeswoman told Inside Defense.
As the Defense Department reviews its bedrock autonomous weapon systems directive, the Pentagon's first emerging capabilities policy director says officials have identified two starting points within their broader effort to ensure the language is "as clear as possible" regarding U.S. policy in this realm.
Senate authorizers are recommending directing another $56 million to U.S. Cyber Command for the development of its integrated cyberspace landscape in the fiscal year 2023 defense policy bill, but lawmakers also want to stand up a new office to bolster oversight of the architecture.
The Government Accountability Office has denied a protest from General Dynamics Information Technology targeting an $11.5 billion contract awarded to Leidos to unify the Pentagon's Fourth Estate IT environments, ending what amounted to a holding pattern for the Defense Enclave Services effort.
House authorizers want to nearly double the Defense Innovation Unit's fiscal year 2023 budget and fund an experimental avenue for bringing commercial technology into the military, in the weeks after some lawmakers publicly questioned top Pentagon officials' commitment to the organization.
Pentagon officials are hoping to see lawmakers advance legislation aiming to direct money toward microelectronics production, a measure the Defense Department's No. 2 official called "the most important thing that can be done right now" to address semiconductor supply issues.
The maker of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter's engines is on track to green light the last of the remaining sources needed to fully replace the propulsion parts that Turkey had supplied prior to that country's removal from the program.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking to explore the potential of turning existing tankers into so-called "airborne energy wells" that can use laser beams to send power to drones.
The Pentagon's deputy defense secretary said officials haven't yet seen a "substantial amount of inflation effect" on the military's budget, though she expects "those buying power concerns" will be visible down the line.
The Defense Innovation Unit, known for being the Pentagon's Silicon Valley outreach team, could be headed for a crossroads as it is poised to lose its longest-serving leader at a time when some in Congress -- critical of top military officials' commitment to the highly visible but small-budget organization -- are rallying to boost investment in the outfit.
Pentagon cyber chief David McKeown says military officials are focused on ensuring their systems that deal with sensitive data are held to standards "above and beyond" the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification framework that applies to defense contractors who handle controlled unclassified information.
One year into the Pentagon's artificial intelligence and data accelerator initiative, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks says the effort is already "proving its worth."
Leaders of the House Armed Services Committee's cyber panel touted their defense policy proposal's work to bolster biotechnology as they quickly advanced the measure today, setting it up for consideration before the full body of military authorizers later this month.
Three days into his new job, after various roles leading industry machine learning divisions, the Pentagon's first permanent chief data and artificial intelligence officer is working to tackle his next challenge: "AI at scale with bureaucracy."