USAF Planning Boss Pushes for Flexible Budgets to Keep Up with New Tech - Air Force Magazine

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  January 31, 2020

  As tech startups catch DoD’s eye, big investors are watching

  By: Jill Aitoro SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Private investors are not yet lining up to back defense startups, but they are paying close attention. Two factors have created an opening that could lure venture capitalists to defense investments: first, a few select venture-backed technology startups are gaining traction; and second, there's been a strategic shift in approach to weapons development from the U.S. Department of Defense, focusing more on information warfare and, as such, software. In the words of Mike Madsen, director of strategic engagement at the Pentagon's commercial tech hub, Defense Innovation Unit: "We're at a significant inflection point right now that will be visible through the lens of history.” Nonetheless, for the tech startups, it's been slow going, as discussed during a Defense News roundtable in California. For the second year, leadership from DoD and the tech community came together to discuss the state of the Pentagon's efforts to attract commercial startups — this time digging into the challenges and opportunities that come with investment in defense development. “We went into this eyes wide open, knowing full well that to the venture community, the math doesn't make sense. Making the choice to contribute to the advancement of artificial intelligence for DoD represented for us more of a mission-driven objective,” said Ryan Tseng, founder of artificial intelligence startup Shield AI. But early on, “we were fortunate to get the backing of Andreessen Horowitz, a top-tier venture fund. They're certainly leaning in, in terms of their thinking about defense technology — believing that despite the history, there might be a way to find an opening to create companies that can become economically sustainable and make substantial mission impact.” Shield AI has raised $50 million in venture funding since 2015, with more rounds expected. Indeed, a few key Silicon Valley investors have emerged as the exceptions to the rule, putting dollars toward defense startups. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, which counts both Shield AI and defense tech darling Anduril in its portfolio, there's General Catalyst, which also invested in Anduril, as well as AI startup Vannevar Labs. And then of course there's Founders Fund. Led by famed Silicon investors Peter Thiel, Ken Howery and Brian Singerman, among others, the venture firm was an early investor in Anduril, as well as mobile mesh networking platform goTenna. Founders Fund placed big bets on Palantir Technologies and SpaceX in the early days, which paid off in a big way. Some of the early successes of these startups have “done an excellent job of making investors greedy,” said Katherine Boyle, an investor with General Catalyst. “There's a growing group who are interested in this sector right now, and they've looked at the success of these companies and [are] saying: ‘OK, let's learn about it.' ” Take Anduril: The defense tech startup — co-founded by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens — has raised more than $200 million and hit so-called unicorn status in 2019, reaching a valuation of more than $1 billion. As the successes piled up, so did the venture capital funding. According to Fortune magazine, those investors included Founders Fund, 8VC, General Catalyst, XYZ Ventures, Spark Capital, Rise of the Rest, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel. “I started my career at Allen & Company investment banking. Herbert Allen, who's in his 80s, always said: ‘Hey, you should run into an industry where people are running away,' ” said John Tenet, a partner with 8VC as well as a co-founder and vice chairman of defense startup Epirus. “There's so much innovation occurring, where the government can be the best and biggest customer. And there are people who really want to solve hard problems. It's just figuring out where the synergies lie, what the ‘one plus one equals three' scenario will be.” Also attracting the attention of Silicon Valley investors is the growing emphasis by the Pentagon not only on systems over platforms, but software over hardware. Boyle described the shift as the “macro tailwind” that often drives innovation in a sector. Similar revolutions happened in industrials and automotive markets — both of which are also massive, global and slow-moving. That emphasis on tech, combined with some recent hard lessons, also provides a glimmer of hope that the typical hurdles associated with defense investments — lengthy procurement cycles and dominance by traditional manufacturers, for example — could be overcome. Consider U.S. Code 2377, which requires that commercially available items be considered first in procurement efforts, said Anduril's Stephens. He also noted court decisions in lawsuits filed by SpaceX and Palantir, which ultimately validated claims that defense agencies had not properly ensured a level playing field for major competitions. “These types of things are now at least in recent memory for Congress, and so they have some awareness of the issues that are being faced,” Stephens said. “It's much easier now to walk into a congressional office and say, ‘Here's the problem that we're facing' or ‘Here's the policy changes that we would need.' There are also enough bodies like DIU, like In-Q-Tel, like AFWERX, like the Defense Innovation Board, like the [Defense Science Board] — places where you can go to express the need for change. And oftentimes you do see that language coming into the [National Defense Authorization Act]. It's part of a longer-term cultural battle for sure.” For now, all these factors contribute to the majority of skeptical investors' decisions to watch the investments with interest — even if they still take a wait-and-see approach. And that places a lot of pressure on the companies that are, in a sense, the proof of concept for a new portfolio segment. “My fear is that if this generation of companies doesn't figure [it] out, if they don't knock down the doors and if there aren't a few successes, we're going to have 20, 30 years of just no investor looking around the table and saying we need to work for the Department of Defense,” Boyle said. “If there aren't some success stories coming out of this generation of companies, it's going to be very hard to look our partners in the eye and say: ‘We should keep investing in defense because look at how well things have turned out.'” https://www.defensenews.com/smr/cultural-clash/2020/01/30/as-tech-startups-catch-dods-eye-big-investors-are-watching/

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  December 17, 2020

  How DoD can improve its technology resilience

  Mark Pomerleau WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense must bolster its resilience in mission platforms in order to stay ahead of threats, a new think tank report says. With the military's shift toward great power competition, or conflict against nation states, its systems and platforms will be under greater stress than technological inferior adversaries battled during the counterterrorism fight of the last decade-plus. Systems and networks are expected to be contested, disrupted and even destroyed, meaning officials need to build redundancy and resilience in from the start to work through such challenges. In fact, top defense officials have been warning for several years that they are engaged in conflict that is taking place below the threshold of armed conflict in which adversaries are probing networks and systems daily for espionage or disruptive purposes. “Resilience is a key challenge for combat mission systems in the defense community as a result of accumulating technical debt, outdated procurement frameworks, and a recurring failure to prioritize learning over compliance. The result is brittle technology systems and organizations strained to the point of compromising basic mission functions in the face of changing technology and evolving threats,” said a new report out today by the Atlantic Council titled “How Do You Fix a Flying Computer? Seeking Resilience in Software-Intensive Mission Systems.” “Mission resilience must be a priority area of work for the defense community. Resilience offers a critical pathway to sustain the long-term utility of software-intensive mission systems, while avoiding organizational brittleness in technology use and resulting national security risks. The United States and its allies face an unprecedented defense landscape in the 2020s and beyond.” This resilience, is built upon three pillars, the authors write: robustness, which is the ability of a system to negate the impact of disruption; responsiveness, which is the ability of a system to provide feedback and incorporate changes on a disruption, and; adaptability, which is the ability to a system to change itself to continue operating despite a disruption. Systems, the report notes, are more than just the sum of its parts — hardware and software — but rather are much broader to include people, organizational processes and technologies. To date, DoD has struggled to manage complexity and develop robust and reliable mission systems, even in a relatively benign environment, the report bluntly asserts, citing problems with the F-35′s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) as one key example. “A conflict or more contested environment would only exacerbate these issues. The F-35 is not alone in a generation of combat systems so dependent on IT and software that failures in code are as critical as a malfunctioning munition or faulty engine — other examples include Navy ships and military satellites,” the authors write. “To ensure mission systems like the F-35 remain available, capable, and lethal in conflicts to come demands the United States and its allies prioritize the resilience of these systems. Not merely security against compromise, mission resilience is the ability of a mission system to prevent, respond to, and adapt to both anticipated and unanticipated disruptions, to optimize efficacy under uncertainty, and to maximize value over the long term. Adaptability is measured by the capacity to change — not only to modify lines of software code, but to overturn and replace the entire organization and the processes by which it performs the mission, if necessary. Any aspect that an organization cannot or will not change may turn out to be the weakest link, or at least a highly reliable target for an adversary.” The report offers four principles that defense organizations can undertake to me more resilient in future conflicts against sophisticated adversaries: Embrace failure: DoD must be more willing to take risks and embrace failure to stay ahead of the curve. Organizations can adopt concepts such as chaos engineering, experimenting on a system to build confidence in its ability to withstand turbulent conditions in production, and planning for loss of confidentiality in compromised systems. Improve speed: DoD must be faster at adapting and developing, which includes improving its antiquated acquisition policies and adopt agile methodologies of continuous integration and delivery. Of note, DoD has created a software acquisition pathway and is implementing agile methodologies of continuous integration and delivery, though on small scales. Always be learning: Defense organizations operate in a highly contested cyber environment, the report notes, and as the department grows more complex, how it learns and adapts to rapidly evolving threats grows in importance. Thus, it must embrace experimentation and continuous learning at all levels of systems as a tool to drive improvement. Manage trade-offs and complexity: DoD should improve mission system programs' understanding of the trade-offs between near-term functionality and long-term complexity to include their impact on systems' resilience. https://www.c4isrnet.com/cyber/2020/12/14/how-dod-can-improve-its-technology-resilience/

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  September 9, 2020

  JUST IN: New Navy Lab to Accelerate Autonomy, Robotics Programs

  9/8/2020 By Yasmin Tadjdeh Over the past few years, the Navy has been hard at work building a new family of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles through a variety of prototyping efforts. It is now standing up an integration lab to enable the platforms with increased autonomy, officials said Sept. 8. The Rapid Integration Autonomy Lab, or RAIL, is envisioned as a place where the Navy can bring in and test new autonomous capabilities for its robotic vehicles, said Capt. Pete Small, program manager for unmanned maritime systems. “Our Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab concept is really the playground where all the autonomy capabilities and sensors and payloads come together, both to be integrated ... [and] to test them from a cybersecurity perspective and test them from an effectiveness perspective,” Small said during the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's Unmanned Systems conference, which was held virtually due to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Robotics technology is moving at a rapid pace, and platforms will need to have their software and hardware components replaced throughout their lifecycles, he said. In order to facilitate these upgrades, the service will need to integrate the new autonomy software that comes with various payloads and certain autonomy mission capabilities with the existing nuts-and-bolts packages already in the unmanned platforms. “The Rapid Autonomy Integration Lab is where we bring together the platform software, the payload software, the mission software and test them,” he explained. During testing, the service will be able to validate the integration of the software as well as predict the performance of the unmanned vehicles in a way that “we're sure that this is going to work out and give us the capability we want,” Small said. The RAIL concept will rely on modeling-and-simulation technology with software-in-the-loop testing to validate the integration of various autonomous behaviors, sensors and payloads, he said. “We will rely heavily on industry to bring those tools to the RAIL to do the testing that we require,” he noted. However, the lab is not envisioned as a single, brick-and-mortar facility, but rather a network of cloud-based infrastructure and modern software tools. “There will be a certain footprint of the actual software developers who are doing that integration, but we don't see this as a big bricks-and-mortar effort. It's really more of a collaborative effort of a number of people in this space to go make this happen," Small said. The service has kicked off a prototype effort as part of the RAIL initiative where it will take what it calls a “third-party autonomy behavior” that has been developed by the Office of Naval Research and integrate it onto an existing unmanned underwater vehicle that runs on industry-made proprietary software, Small said. Should that go as planned, the Navy plans to apply the concept to numerous programs. For now, the RAIL is a prototyping effort, Small said. “We're still working on developing the budget profile and ... the details behind it,” he said. “We're working on building the programmatic efforts behind it that really are in [fiscal year] '22 and later.” The RAIL is part of a series of “enablers” that will help the sea service get after new unmanned technology, Small said. Others include a concept known as the unmanned maritime autonomy architecture, or UMAA, a common control system and a new data strategy. Cmdr. Jeremiah Anderson, deputy program manager for unmanned underwater vehicles, said an upcoming industry day on Sept. 24 that is focused on UMAA will also feature information about the RAIL. “Half of that day's agenda will really be to get into more of the nuts and bolts about the RAIL itself and about that prototyping effort that's happening this year,” he said. “This is very early in the overall trajectory for the RAIL, but I think this will be a good opportunity to kind of get that message out a little bit more broadly to the stakeholders and answer their questions.” Meanwhile, Small noted that the Navy is making strides within its unmanned portfolio, citing a “tremendous amount of progress that we've made across the board with our entire family of UVS and USVs.” Rear Adm. Casey Moton, program executive officer for unmanned and small combatants, highlighted efforts with the Ghost Fleet Overlord and Sea Hunter platforms, which are unmanned surface vessels. The Navy — working in cooperation with the office of the secretary of defense and the Strategic Capabilities Office — has two Overlord prototypes. Fiscal year 2021, which begins Oct. 1, will be a particularly important period for the platforms, he said. “Our two Overlord vessels have executed a range of autonomous transits and development vignettes,” he said. “We have integrated autonomy software automation systems and perception systems and tested them in increasingly complex increments and vignettes since 2018.” Testing so far has shown the platforms have the ability to perform safe, autonomous navigation in according with the Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, or COLREGS, at varying speeds and sea states, he said. “We are pushing the duration of transits increasingly longer, and we will soon be working up to 30 days,” he said. “Multi-day autonomous transits have occurred in low- and high-traffic density environments.” The vessels have already had interactions with commercial fishing fleets, cargo vessels and recreational craft, he said. The longest transit to date includes a round trip from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast where it conducted more than 181 hours and over 3,193 nautical miles of COLREGS-compliant, autonomous operation, Moton added. Both Overload vessels are slated to conduct extensive testing and experimentation in fiscal year 2021, he said. “These tests will include increasingly long-range transits with more complex autonomous behaviors,” he said. "They will continue to demonstrate automation functions of the machinery control systems, plus health monitoring by a remote supervisory operation center with the expectation of continued USV reliability." The Sea Hunter will also be undergoing numerous fleet exercises and tactical training events in fiscal year 2021. “With the Sea Hunter and the Overlord USVs we will exercise ... control of multiple USVs, test command-and-control, perform as part of surface action groups and train Navy sailors on these platforms, all while developing and refining the fleet-led concept of operations and concept of employment,” Moton said. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/9/8/navy-testing-new-autonomy-integration-lab