Cyrus Jabbari stepped into the CDO role at U.S. Central Command in May, but his hiring wasn’t officially announced by the organization until this week.

In his new position, Jabbari will “oversee the strategic integration of data-driven solutions to enhance operational effectiveness across CENTCOM’s area of responsibility,” according to a press release.

Centcom has been on the cutting edge of U.S. military technology adoption. It has three units — Task Force 59 under Naval Forces Central Command, Task Force 99 under Air Forces Central, and Task Force 39 under Army Central — that in recent years have been experimenting with and deploying emerging tech such as AI and machine learning, data analytics, unmanned systems and cloud computing. The command has also adopted tools like the Maven Smart System to aid decision-making.

Jabbari isn’t a newcomer to the Defense Department. He previously served as the first-ever CDO in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. In that role, he was charged with developing, managing and overseeing implementation of data policies across the Pentagon’s R&E enterprise, including for organizations such as the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), Missile Defense Agency, Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Test Resource Management and Defense Technical Information Center, among others, according to his LinkedIn profile.

At the R&E directorate, he also chaired the Transition Tracking Action Group, which was stood up in February 2024 to boost DOD’s ability to keep tabs on, manage and make smart investments in technology transition efforts across the Pentagon’s vast capability development enterprise, all the way from the early stages of R&D to fielding, according to a press release.

The action group enabled “a new approach to technology portfolio management that leverages advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence to provide DOD officials with the insights [they need] to make informed, innovative decisions,” Jabbari said in a statement last year.

Prior to that, Jabbari supported the Pentagon as a data and analytics lead at ANSER, a non-profit corporation that develops solutions for clients in the national security community, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“Thrilled to officially welcome a fantastic partner Cyrus J. to the team — it’s amazing when the right people end up on the right team and in the right position for the right mission at the right time — magic happens,” Centcom Chief Technology Officer Joy Angela Shanaberger said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday night.

In a separate statement, she said she was “confident his expertise will be a game-changer in our efforts to harness the power of data to drive warfighter-centric innovation across United States Central Command.”

“Joining CENTCOM is both a professional honor and personal calling. This command stands at the forefront of operational experimentation and complexity — where decisions must be made faster, with greater precision, and under immense pressure,” Jabbari said in a statement. “CENTCOM is where data must drive action and where data is valued as a warfighting asset. A lot of great leadership has put CENTCOM on the right path, and I am honored to carry us into our next phase of accelerating data capabilities for ever-pressing missions.”

The position of Centcom CDO was previously held by Michael Foster. He left the command in December near the end of the Biden administration and is currently chief data engineer at Raft, a defense technology company, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The post US Central Command hires new chief data officer appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Marine Corps — which is part of the Department of the Navy — has a requirement for “multi-purpose” UGVs, Lt. Col. Scott Humr, deputy director for intelligent robotics and autonomous systems (IRAS) at the Capabilities Development Directorate, noted during a presentation at the Modern Day Marine conference last month.

“I think those are going to be very critical for logistics, for sensing, for communications, ISR, etc.,” he said, using an acronym that stands for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

The request for quotes released Wednesday appears to be geared toward laying the groundwork for that type of capability.

“The Government is seeking to acquire services for the development of an open-source
architecture for Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) systems equipped with advanced
sensor fusion and control algorithms to allow for modularity with different sensors and
payloads,” officials wrote.

Contract items for the solicitation include those types of algorithms as well as their integration onto small and medium-sized surrogate UGVs for testing.

The Defense Department intends to award a firm fixed price contract, with an anticipated period of performance from date of award to Dec. 31, 2027. The estimated award date is June 1, according to the solicitation.

“We are pursuing a requirement for a multi-purpose unmanned ground vehicle to provide capability across the [Marine Air-Ground Task Force],” Humr told members of industry at the Modern Day Marine conference. “We see this as important piece of how we envision robots working with robots. We have many pieces of the puzzle, as it were, but we need other enablers within that system to eliminate the Marine from doing the drudgery work and putting them where we need them the most. And so most of all, really, what we want is technologies to free Marines to fight.”

In today’s defense tech ecosystem, software is even more critical than hardware, he noted.

“Modern platforms, whether UGVs, [unmanned surface vessels], aircraft, or autonomous systems in general, are increasingly software-driven with upgrades, mission configurations and even survivability enhancements … coming from lines of code. They aren’t coming from physically redesigning the systems. So in an era where threats evolve daily, it’s the agility and intelligence of our software that turns the steel and silicone into decisive, lethal assets. So what do we need from industry? We need open standards, modular design, cybersecurity baked in from the beginning, from design and rapid prototyping, so we can get capabilities in the hands of Marines faster,” Humr said.

Systems need to be built from the get-go to collect, process and share data, he suggested.

Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific is involved in the architecture effort that the new solicitation is for, according to the request for quotes.

Unmanned platforms are seen by military officials as tools that can perform a variety of missions and help keep troops out of harm’s way as much as possible.

“The idea that Marines must be the first to make contact with the enemy is increasingly becoming outdated and precarious. However, as Marines, we will always pride ourselves on taking risks and be ready to put ourselves in danger when the time calls, but now we can do it through the sequencing of first using robots … in our echelon of forces,” Humr said.

For the multi-purpose UGV, the Corps needs a platform that “can do a lot of things” but “not to try to do everything really well,” he noted.

“We know that [when] we get into the point of trying to make one system that does everything well, we end up with some Frankenstein that does nothing well. And so I think a very basic system is kind of where we want to start. They already exist,” he said.

Humr suggested the Corps was still contemplating its acquisition strategy for the multi-purpose UGV platforms.

“We don’t know exactly what strategy we will approach, but I think we want to approach it with the most maximum amount of flexibility. We know that we can’t buy [or] order 1,000 of these machines and think that they’re going to be the solution. I see us buying … in small increments, testing, getting feedback and improving those on version 1.2, 2.0., etc.,” he said.

“We need to develop the requirement a little bit more and ensure that we get it out there quickly, and make sure we have the funding to support that as well,” Humr said. “I think we’ll get there. I think there’s a lot of energy and a lot of interest in it now. We’ve seen some of the autonomy that’s on some of these systems now.”

He noted that organizations working with Defense Department tech hubs like DARPA, have been demonstrating AI technologies that could be integrated onto vehicles.

“They’re taking that autonomy and putting it on their systems, multiple different systems, in fact. And so, I see that’s where we’re going to be able to make the most money and real quickly buy what’s already there, and taking the best of breed from what industry [and] our labs are doing,” Humr said.

The post Navy solicits industry for unmanned ground vehicle architecture appeared first on DefenseScoop.

DARPA, one of the Pentagon’s premier R&D organizations, aims to create “technological surprise” and game-changing capabilities for the U.S. national security community. It has been credited with aiding major technological breakthroughs, including precision weapons, stealth technology, the internet and GPS, among others.

The agency has six technical offices overseeing biological technologies, defense sciences, information innovation, microsystems technology, strategic technology and tactical technology.

Winchell is coming to DARPA from the Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office, where he served as the AI and autonomy portfolio leader.

Other high-tech organizations where he’s held leadership or technical roles include chief engineer with the Defense Department’s Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team (Project Maven), Presidential Innovation Fellow at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and program manager at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

Winchell is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and served as a nuclear engineer in the activity-duty submarine community. He currently holds the rank of commander in the Navy Reserve.

His academic background includes a B.S. in physics and an M.S. degree in applied physics from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, as well as an M.S. degree in systems engineering from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

He’s expected to officially take the helm at DARPA on May 19.

Winchell will take over for Rob McHenry, who has been serving as DARPA’s acting director in the early months of the second Trump administration. Stefanie Tompkins led DARPA during the Biden administration.

The post Trump administration picks new DARPA director appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Those initial areas include drones, counter-unmanned aerial systems and electronic warfare. The commercial drone sector is pretty well established, however, what is less clear is how such flexible funding would look for electronic warfare, where to date, most systems have been exquisitely designed and purpose-built for the military.

The thinking is that this agile pot of money, which is really budget line item consolidation, will help the Army be more adaptive on the battlefield in an era where changes are happening in days to weeks as opposed to months and years. In the Ukraine-Russia war, which has spurred the need for a new approach, combatants are discovering that technology, capabilities and tactics are being countered almost as soon as they’re deployed, requiring quick changes and creating an exponentially shorter innovation cycle.

For the U.S. military, programs are set up as specific line items with specific pots of money as opposed to a broad capability portfolio. Currently, the Army can’t take money from one electronic warfare program line item and use those funds for another EW program to adjust to real-world needs if, for example, a certain technology has matured that could be surged to forces on the battlefield to support an urgent requirement.

However, flexible funding, or line item consolidation where all EW programs are housed under the same budget line, could allow the service to move money that traditionally would’ve been allocated to one system to another for forces that may need it sooner — or if a new technology comes along that is ready for primetime and addresses a need.

“Working with the committees on record over on the Hill, how do we consolidate so that we have some flexibility to respond to that operational environment through our budget construct and we are not limited to the bureaucracy inside the building of reprogramming action in order to respond to something?” Lt. Gen. Karl Gingrich, deputy chief of staff, G-8, said in March at the annual McAleese Defense Programs Conference. “We learned some tough lessons over the last two years as we were watching our soldiers in contact and our inability within our budget to actually move some money to address their needs. We lost a couple of months in there. We can no longer afford to do that. And that’s why we’re doing [a push for] agile funding.”

Moreover, that consolidation not only provides greater flexibility, but innovation as well, according to officials.

“The Army’s agile funding proposal will provide increased flexibility. The streamlined budget structure enables rapid innovation, response and fielding of EW capabilities, and enhances the Army’s flexibility and ability to swiftly address relevant threats in real-time by taking advantage of the latest technological advancements,” said a spokesperson from program executive office for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors.

The Army’s Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team capability provides an apt example for what the Army would like such flexible funding to achieve. That program, as initially outlined, would be the service’s first ground-based jammer in decades providing integrated cyber, signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities mounted on Strykers and heavy platforms as well as a manpackable dismounted version.

The Army eventually hit pause on the platform-based component of the program as it sought to disaggreigate the signals intelligence and EW aspects. The service ended up awarding the TLS Manpack using a system that had been proven and used by special operations forces.

Despite the engineering challenges the platform side faced, there was an urgent operational need by the Army that General Dynamics responded to with its Tactical Electronic Warfare System-Infantry Brigade Combat Team, or TEWS-I technology, that provides a smaller system designed for infantry vehicles.

However, under the current way Army budgeting works, there was no ability to pivot funding from the TLS-BCT effort to acquire TEWS-I and get that to the field to a wide swath of units.

Moreover, if new software is all of a sudden developed that can improve a system, like the TLS Manpack, against a threat, but there aren’t any funds left in that line, the Army can’t move funds from a less mature program to upgrade the Manpack. A single consolidated electronic warfare budget line would allow the service to do that.

“I do think that the idea here is to give them more flexibility to move money around between different EW programs, because they’ve got … a variety of EW programs in various states of development,” Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, said. “I think the Army wants to be able to accelerate the ones that have the most promise, like you saw with the TLS Manpack … that’s an example of the Army realizing that their initial [concept of operations] for the BCT version maybe didn’t make sense, and they needed to pivot to a different design. Whereas the Manpack seems like they’ve got a more straightforward way forward and they’ve got a CONOP that they believe works.”

Traditionally, the military electronic warfare market has required purpose-built, exquisite systems. However, today, technology has advanced to the degree that several commercial companies now have capabilities that are ready to go, a reality the Army is trying to capitalize on.

The way military budgeting works presently, is it hamstrings programs and makes it harder to look at commercial-off-the-shelf solutions. That is still driven by the way the Army and the program office aim to outfit the entire Army with a system, according to a former official.

“If we bought one TLS Manpack, then the entire Army had to get that exact same TLS Manpack and we didn’t revisit upgrades until that was done,” the former official said. “What the flexibility would give us is the ability to pivot in stride.”

When a new program is coming into play, the program office will conduct a bake-off of sorts where different vendors will bring in their technologies for evaluation. Rather than doing the bake-off with a bunch of vendors and going through a longer, drawn out process, flexibility would allow officials to say a COTS solution is ready now, purchase a set of it, get it to the 101st Airborne Division, let them play with it, then buy the second set and give it to 82nd Airborne Division, and then buy the third set and deliver it to the 25th Infantry Division, as an example, according to the former official.

For its part, the Army has noted it wants to get out of the business of so-called pure fleeting where every unit is outfitted with the same equipment. Service officials have talked about tranching capabilities to select units that are deploying or that require it in the background, using those deployments and other exercises to make tweaks and advancements that can be incorporated and outfitted to other units later.

“You can continue to modernize the force and get capability in the hands of soldiers, instead of waiting three to five years from when the real time of need is,” the former official added.

This could lead to the fielding of different capabilities made by different vendors in different theaters, but the key is ensuring they’re all riding on common open, interoperable software architectures.

Such an approach could raise questions of fair and open competition. According to the former official, the iterative process of continuing to build on capability and force vendors into bake-offs means they will constantly be competing to stay ahead.

Clark noted those concerns with a constant rapid prototyping approach.

“By accelerating movement from prototyping into procurement at some kind of scale you naturally forego opportunities for competition,” he said. “I think that’s the tradeoff that DOD is making right now that they’re saying, because of this need for speed, I’m going to give up probably some deliberation that it would otherwise have.”

However, he acknowledged a COTS approach incentivizes companies to constantly be innovating.

For the larger, platform-based, exquisite programs, agile funding affords flexibility to not necessarily be wedded towards dollars that have been allocated across the five-year budget cycle if the prototype matures or doesn’t work well.

Critics in the past have said this type of arrangement means less congressional oversight and a risk of money falling into a type of slush fund. The reason for line item funding based on programs instead of portfolios is so lawmakers have a better understanding for accounting and overseeing exactly how and where the Army and the other services are spending money to avoid potential or perceived malfeasance.

However, Army officials have noted they’ve received positive responses from lawmakers in their engagements about the idea of having more flexibility. Some top congressional members have also voiced support.

Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of the panel’s Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, has previously expressed his backing for the Army’s flexible funding efforts for drones, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare.

“This effort will allow the Army rapidly adopt critical technologies that are shaping the modern battlefield without needlessly wasting time with misaligned dollars. I look forward to working with the administration and our new Secretary of Defense to ensure our warfighters have all the tools they need to keep Americans safe,” he said.

According to Clark, others across the DOD have consolidated lines, such as the Defense Innovation Unit and DARPA. The key is constant feedback and transparency with Congress on how funds are being used to ensure success.

He noted, however, that such a flexible approach could risk having too much focus on prototyping new technologies without fielding systems at scale to soldiers.

“Unlike the Air Force or the Navy, where if you field 10 or 20 of something, that could make a difference, because it could be on 10 or 20 ships or aircraft that are the ones that are forward deployed. Whereas the Army, it operates at such a larger scale that you have to have systems be distributed to many, you have to have hundreds of systems for them to be relevant numbers,” he said. “They need to think about making sure that they don’t make these innovation cycles so short that they’re never fielding a system in a relevant quantity. I think that’s the one challenge they’re riding up against right now.”

The post What does flexible funding for electronic warfare mean for the Army? appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The aim is to “cut wasteful spending” and “support the continued rationalization” of the Defense Department’s IT enterprise, Hegseth wrote.

The move comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration to implement Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives across federal agencies.

Hegseth’s new memo to senior Pentagon leadership ordered the termination of contracts affecting a variety of DOD components, including a Defense Health Agency contract for consulting services; an Air Force contract to re-sell third party enterprise cloud IT services; a Navy contract for business process consulting services; and a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) contract for IT helpdesk services.

In a video released on social media touting these DOGE-related efforts, Hegseth estimated that those contract terminations would save the Pentagon approximately $1.8 billion, $1.4 billion, $500 million and $500 million, respectively.

“These contracts represent non-essential spending on third party consultants to perform services more efficiently performed by the highly skilled members of our DoD workforce using existing resources,” he wrote in the memo.

Hegseth also tasked the Pentagon CIO to work with the DOGE team to produce a plan within 30 days for how DOD will in-source IT consulting and management services to the department’s civilian workforce.

The new call for in-sourcing comes as Pentagon leaders are advancing efforts to make major cuts to the civilian workforce. Hegseth has said he wants to reinvest savings from employee reductions into higher-priority warfighting capabilities.

The plan from the CIO that Hegseth ordered in Thursday’s memo must also address how the Defense Department will negotiate “most favorable rates on software and cloud services, so the DoD pays no more for IT services than any other enterprise in America,” the SecDef wrote.

The memo also tasks the chief information officer to complete an audit of Pentagon software licensing by April 18. The purpose of the audit is “to ensure we are only paying for the licenses we actually use, the features we actually need, at the most favorable rates,” according to Hegseth.

Katie Arrington is currently performing the duties of DOD CIO.

Earlier this week at the Sea-Air-Space conference, Navy Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun said DOGE and the DOD CIO were reviewing the service’s software enterprise.

“It’s all about making the right investments in modernizing, but modernizing with an eye towards effectiveness and efficiency. We’ve got this new administration. We’ve got the DOGE in working with us, and they’re focused on effective consumption of commercial software. Are we doing the best job we can deliver in buying and utilizing the software that we have?” she said.

The Navy is a huge purchaser of software licenses, Rathbun noted.

“It’s a big number. And so are we buying effectively? Are we utilizing the things that we’re buying effectively? There’s always opportunity for improvement. And I would say that’s an area in my portfolio that I want to focus on but have not a lot of people to do that, which is something that has always bothered me and I want to be doing better at is really this optimization concept. I’ve got to continuously modernize but I have to do it in an optimal way,” she said.

The post Hegseth issues new directive to rein in Pentagon spending on IT services contracts appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The top-down requirements process Ukraine’s military inherited from Moscow in the 1990s kept headquarters analysts employed but left 87 percent of needs unfulfilled. Today, warfighters get the final say in what gets built. Drones that once relied on GPS and luck now use automated navigation and targeting algorithms to overcome operator error and Russian jamming, raising success rates from 20 percent to 70 percent. The newest generation uses fiber-optic cable for communication to eliminate the threat of electronic interference.

The Pentagon’s approach to weapon development looks more like the one used by Soviet apparatchiks. Requirements officers in the Joint Staff and military services try to guess capability gaps and potential solutions years in advance. By the time these analyses emerge from the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) two years later, the threat has changed, technology has marched on, and a different solution is likely needed.

By definition, predictive planning systems such as JCIDS cannot work in a dynamic environment. They define performance metrics before testing a single prototype because they assume cutting-edge defense systems can only arise from dedicated government-led research and development. That approach is now obsolete thanks to the rapid advance and broad availability of militarily-relevant commercial technology.

Ukraine’s successes show how the U.S. Department of Defense could unlock the potential of private-sector innovation through collaborative experimentation between engineers and operators. Instead of funneling their needs through a multi-year staffing process, Ukrainian commanders talk with local drone pilots and data scientists to identify problems and reach out to government offices that can pay for solutions.

Under Kyiv’s innovation model, a new uncrewed system concept can reach the battlefield in months, drawing on commercial AI to quickly adapt flight paths or identify targets in thousands of video streams. For example, a volunteer-driven missile team eschewed extensive predictive analysis and prototyped a new cruise missile in a year and a half — an unthinkable timeline under Ukraine’s previous Soviet-model bureaucracy.

Real-time operator feedback is essential to this approach. It defines what is “good enough” and helps program managers cut through the competing equities that often prevent a system from reaching the field. In less than a year, Ukraine’s military created Delta, a situational awareness system like the elusive Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept that the Pentagon has chased for nearly a decade. Coders started Delta with a single battlefield map and added new modules when soldiers asked for them. Now the system ties together thousands of drones, cameras, satellite feeds, and Western cannon and rocket artillery systems.

Instead of waiting for a glacial interagency process to dictate universal interoperability requirements, Delta’s developers iteratively add new elements and test them in the real fight. During NATO interoperability exercises in 2023, Delta proved the value of this bottom-up approach by sharing data via Link 16 with F-16 jets and integrating with Poland’s TOPAZ artillery fire control software. Delta reflects genuine cross-domain synergy, born out of emergent needs and continuous iteration, not years of staff approvals.

Ukraine’s success is not simply a fluke born out of existential desperation; it’s the logical consequence of removing unnecessary processes and letting warfighters shape the pipeline. While we in the United States prioritize box-checking staffing for documents that meet formatting guidelines and have all the right system views and appendices, Ukraine lets demand drive immediate action. This shift from central planning to distributed innovation has not only kept Ukraine in the fight but also opened the door to realizing advanced integrations like real-time targeting.

The Pentagon should take Ukraine’s combat lessons to heart and fund the work to find solutions for today’s problems. Requirements officers should stop trying to predict the future and begin collecting and refining operational challenges to drive experimentation. And acquisition executives should give innovative program managers and their industry partners the decision space to quickly develop systems that deliver relevant capability, use existing components, and can respond to future enemy countermeasures.

The DOD has experimented with new acquisition pathways and innovation initiatives that have these attributes. But “Band-Aid” solutions that speed up paperwork or create more prototypes don’t address the core problem: a requirements system that prioritizes predictive planning over operational results.

The Pentagon should retire centralized requirements processes such as JCIDS. In their place, the U.S. military services should fund focused campaigns of experimentation that test multiple solutions against clear operational problems, enable rapid learning from failure, and scale what actually works in realistic conditions. Until the DOD abandons its Soviet-style faith in headquarters apparatchiks and embraces structured experimentation driven by warfighters, it will continue to fall behind adversaries who are willing to adapt and learn.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, and an expert in naval operations, electronic warfare, autonomous systems, military competitions and wargaming. Previously, he served as special assistant to the chief of naval operations and director of the CNO’s Commander’s Action Group, led studies on the Navy headquarters staff, and was an enlisted and officer submariner in the Navy.

Dan Patt is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, where he focuses on the role of information and innovation in national security. Patt also supports strategy at national security technology company STR and supports Thomas H. Lee Partners’ automation and technology investment practice. Previously, he co-founded and was CEO of Vecna Robotics and served as deputy director for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office.

The post The Pentagon should abandon Soviet-era centralized planning appeared first on DefenseScoop.

There’s said to be no survivors in the aftermath of the tragic crash, which happened around 9:00 p.m. local time on a notoriously highly-congested flight path in the National Capital Region. The Army is closely supporting the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board-led investigation into the incident, officials said.

In statements, press briefings and one-on-one conversations Thursday, several defense officials shed new light on the mid-air collision. Their comments confirm that — despite the Army’s unfolding experimentation with AI and autonomous software — the helicopter involved was not equipped with or deploying any such systems.

“It did not have any AI capability,” Jonathan Koziol, who serves as chief of staff at the Headquarters Department of the Army Aviation Directorate, told DefenseScoop during a media call.

“With any testing like that — with new systems — it’ll be away from populated areas. Just in case a tragic incident happens, we want to reduce the risk of impacting or hurting anyone else in and around that area, so we definitely wouldn’t be testing that type of equipment in this area,” Koziol said.

He emphasized that the latest trends show that the Army had “greatly reduced accidents over the last year.”

Koziol told reporters that he views this incident as a tragic circumstance where two aircraft tried to “occupy the same space at the same time.”

In separate conversations earlier Thursday, three defense officials speaking to DefenseScoop on the condition of anonymity also noted that this specific Black Hawk mission, known colloquially as a “tech flight”, would not incorporate any experimental AI software. 

They suggested that those sort of “gold-top” helicopters, as well as other craft flying in those specific air corridors, would most likely not be employing AI.

Over the past few years, the Army has been exploring how to integrate autonomy and AI-enabled capabilities across its aviation portfolio as part of a larger effort to modernize its fleet. However, many of those efforts are still in nascent research-and-development phases. The service has focused both on fielding new platforms such as the manned Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA), as well as upgrading legacy helicopters with the technology.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is slated to begin experiments this year that would integrate an autonomy system developed by Sikorsky onto an experimental UH-60M “optionally piloted” Black Hawk, designated MX. The modernized version of the aircraft features fly-by-wire controls — a semiautomatic system that replaces an aircraft’s conventional manual flight controls — and serves as a flying testbed.

Under the $6 million contract awarded to the helicopter’s manufacturer Sikorsky in October, the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) is expected to test and mature applications for a range of autonomous flight capabilities, including fully unmanned operations.

The effort builds upon Sikorsky’s previous autonomous flight research conducted over the last few years under DARPA’s Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS) program. In 2022, the Lockheed Martin subsidiary first flew the MX Black Hawk without any humans onboard during the Army’s annual Project Convergence experimentation event. The company later demonstrated the aircraft’s ability to be controlled by operators in the cabin or on the ground via a tablet. 

Sikorsky did not immediately respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment regarding the Black Hawk’s autonomous flight capability.

The investigation continues

On the call Thursday, Koziol told reporters that once the investigation is complete, the government will hopefully have retrieved and gained access to flight recorders that were onboard both aircraft that could provide the “real truth” behind the wreck.

“And as long as the black box is recovered and the information is able to be downloaded, which it normally is, we’ll be able to get the voice communications of all the radios and the crew members talking to each other, along with all of the aircraft information itself — how the engines were running, or speed of the rotors, the altitude of the aircraft — so we should be able to have all of that data for the investigation team to come to a conclusion,” he said. 

Among a wide variety of safety concerns now emerging about that D.C. airspace, the collision is also raising questions about how night-vision eyewear could impact military pilots’ flight performance. 

“It was a fairly experienced crew that was doing a required annual night evaluation. They did have night-vision goggles,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a recorded video from his office that aired Thursday morning.

Briefing the media, Koziol said that in his view, it would be acceptable — and possibly even standard — for the military pilots to not have physically worn the goggles even if they had them on hand.

“It does help the air crew members, but we also have requirements to fly. We call it ‘night unaided,’ where we don’t have aided night-vision goggles helping us fly. I don’t know if they were — we’re speculating now, we’ll leave that to the investigation. But they can easily fly at night without the goggles, especially in this environment with all the bright lights and no lights on the river, they could definitely know where they’re at,” he said.

Wednesday’s fatal collision comes after a spike in aviation accidents and mishaps featuring Army aircraft, as fiscal 2024 saw the service’s highest number of Class A flight mishaps — designated for incidents resulting in fatalities, permanent disabilities or destruction of the aircraft — in 10 years.

According to an Army newsletter published earlier this month, there were 15 Class A flight mishaps over the year, compared to nine recorded in fiscal 2023 and four in fiscal 2022. Only one of those incidents involved a UH-60M Black Hawk, the document stated.

Koziol noted that an Army Aviation Safety Stand-Up initiated in April 2024 allowed the service to reinforce and review both its policies and training protocols. Separately from Wednesday’s accident, the Army is looking to publish additional training material and leader development materials related to aviation safety, he said. 

“This is planned well ahead of that, to show how important safety is for Army aviation and trying to curb that trend that we had last year, which we hope was an anomaly because the previous five years were probably the safest in Army aviation we had in a long time,” Koziol said.

During his confirmation hearing Thursday to serve as President Donald Trump’s secretary of the Army, Daniel Driscoll pledged to focus on aviation safety and prevent any future accidents from occurring again.

“It’s an accident that seems to be preventable. From what we can tell today, that should not happen. I think [there should be] a focus from the top down, on a culture of safety. There are appropriate times to take risk and there are inappropriate times to take risk,” Driscoll told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I don’t know the details around this one, but after doing it, if confirmed, and working with this committee to figure out the facts, I think we might need to look at where is an appropriate time to take training risk. And it may not be near an airport like Reagan.”

The post Army helicopter involved in fatal crash over the Potomac was not using AI, sources say appeared first on DefenseScoop.

Pentagon officials see quantum sensors as promising capabilities for alternative positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR).

However, there are challenges involved in deploying the technology that DARPA aims to tackle with a new program that it’s looking to kick off, dubbed Robust Quantum Sensors (RoQS).

The initiative “seeks to bring quantum sensors to DoD platforms. While quantum sensors have demonstrated exceptional laboratory performance in a number of modalities (magnetic and electrical field, acceleration, rotation, and gravity, etc.), their performance degrades once the sensor is placed on moving platforms due to electrical and magnetic fields, field gradients, and system vibrations. RoQS seeks to overcome these challenges through innovative physics approaches to quantum sensing. The forthcoming RoQS program aims to develop and demonstrate quantum sensors that inherently resist performance degradation from platform interferers and demonstrate them on a government-provided platform,” officials wrote in a special notice and future program announcement recently posted on Sam.gov.

DARPA, which reports to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, hopes to transition RoQS-developed sensors onto U.S. military platforms with associated programs of record to help fulfill requirements. To that end, the agency intends to work with contractors and platform builders to identify systems for quantum sensor integration and also government platform owners to facilitate integration and testing at the end of the program, per the notice.

Pentagon officials and others have been working to mature quantum technology for real-world applications.

Quantum tech “translates the principles of quantum physics into technological applications,” a recently updated Congressional Research Service report explained, including concepts like superposition — or the ability of quantum systems to exist in two or more states simultaneously — and entanglement where “two or more quantum objects in a system can be intrinsically linked such that measurement of one dictates the possible measurement outcomes for another, regardless of how far apart the two objects are.”

Although DOD officials see potential uses for quantum-enabled capabilities in other areas like computing, encryption and communications, sensing is considered by many observers to be the most mature application for near-term use by the Pentagon.

That’s the one “that we know by far the most about,” John Burke, principal director for quantum science in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said in June at a tech summit hosted by Defense One.

Such capabilities could provide an alternative to the Global Positioning System in case GPS is denied or degraded in future operating environments.

“You’ve probably heard about jamming and spoofing concerns, for example. So we’re busily working on other quantum technologies to input positioning and timing at the edge of the warfighter so that they don’t rely on GPS all the time,” Burke said. “So that’s sort of the earliest thing we’re working on. There’s a whole slew of technologies under that umbrella. We’re really pushing out on that. So even this year [in] 2024, we’ve got about $100 million coming out to work just on that area. So we’re really pushing hard on that.”

The Pentagon has been using its Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) program to buy a new generation of atomic clocks that could be put into some “strategic assets,” he said, adding that “the first new wave of quantum technologies is really going out today.”

The CRS report noted that successful development and deployment of quantum sensors could boost detection of things like adversary submarines, underground structures, nuclear materials and electromagnetic emissions — and thereby help the U.S. military find concealed objects of interest and enemy forces.

For ISR there’s “an umbrella of remote sensing capabilities and a lot of different kinds of technologies in there. Things like magnetometers to find magnetic objects. You can imagine a lot of things that the military might care about … may have iron in them or steel, things that are magnetic. So we’re tracking trying to figure how to use those in all kinds of different ways,” Burke said.

Currently, quantum technologies are “a little bit expensive,” he noted.

“But that’s okay for certain strategic missions in the military. So we’re starting from those kinds of missions that go with anything — submarines, strategic bombers, long-range sort of missiles … these kinds of assets, to start inserting new technologies,” he said. “We have these things called magnetometers you can put in systems for like this thing called magnetic navigation. It’s extremely robust. We’re really excited about that. There’s navigation technologies. Once we get those established, we can start building up the manufacturing base, first in the Defense Department. That’s the path that we’ve taken. But I think in the long run, you’re gonna see these kinds of technologies proliferate into civilian” sectors.

The post DARPA eyeing new quantum sensing program appeared first on DefenseScoop.

The Lockheed Martin-subsidiary will add its MATRIX autonomy system onto the upgraded helicopter, designated MX, in 2025, allowing the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) to test and mature a range of autonomous flight capabilities — from solo-pilot ops to fully unmanned flight, according to a press release.

“Autonomy-enabled aircraft will reduce pilot workload, dramatically improve flight safety, and give battle commanders the flexibility to perform complex missions in contested and congested battlespace, day or night in all weather conditions,” Rich Benton, Sikorsky vice president and general manager, said in a statement. “Soldiers will rely on Black Hawk helicopters into the 2070s, and modernizing the aircraft today will pay dividends for decades across Army Aviation’s current and future aircraft.”

As the Army modernizes its aviation fleet under its future vertical lift portfolio, leaders have been keen on integrating autonomy and artificial intelligence where they can. That includes introducing new drones — such as the Future Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System (FTUAS) and smaller “launched effects” — as well as looking at ways manned platforms can carry autonomous flight capabilities.

Sikorsky’s MATRIX autonomy is the foundation of the companies work on DARPA’s Aircrew Labor In-cockpit Automation system (ALIAS) program, which looks to develop a customizable, removable system that introduces AI-enabled flight into existing aircraft while reducing cognitive loads on pilots. As part of the program, the company demonstrated the first-ever flight of a UH-60A “optionally piloted” Black Hawk without any crew onboard in 2022.

The upgraded MX Black Hawk will be almost exactly like Sikorsky’s UH-60A fly-by-wire Black Hawk. The new contract will enable DEVCOM to experiment and mature applications of autonomous flight and develop concepts of operations around scalable autonomy, according to the company.

“Evaluation will include assessment of different sensor suites to perceive and avoid threats, obstacles and terrain, and develop standards and system specifications interfaced with the MATRIX system and a fly-by-wire flight control system,” per the press release.

The post DARPA to test autonomous flight capability on Army’s Black Hawk helicopter in 2025 appeared first on DefenseScoop.

She responded: “I mean, the stuff that just catches everyone’s imagination is we want to make stuff that we’ll need where we are going to need it — so making food out of plastic, or food out of thin air.”

Although the DARPA chief did not provide additional details then, a spokesperson later confirmed that Tompkins was referring to two different programs that fall within the agency’s Biological Technologies Office: Cornucopia and ReSource.

Experts involved with Cornucopia are working to enable the on-demand production of appetizing, microbial-origin food using water, air, and electricity. Those participating in ReSource are pursuing efforts to make food and other products (like lubricants, adhesives, tactical fibers, and potable water) from plastics and other military waste.

In recent, separate interviews, the two program managers overseeing Cornucopia and ReSource briefed DefenseScoop on their teams’ latest research findings and results. They each also highlighted how this work contributes to an overarching DARPA mission to help “de-risk logistics” associated with supplying food and other key items to troops in remote and dangerous locations.

“We’re always concerned about the warfighter, and there’s this whole concept of what we call contested logistics — and having access to materials at the point of need is a huge issue,” Dr. Leonard Tender, who leads ReSource, told DefenseScoop.

Cornucopia

Putting it simply, bio-manufacturing and bio-technologies are associated with a broad range of techniques, processes, and capabilities that use living organisms or biological systems to generate various products.

“I think a lot of people focus on bio-manufacturing as making small molecules. But food is a product, right?” Dr. Matthew Pava, the DARPA program manager in the biotechnology office who oversees the Cornucopia effort, told DefenseScoop. 

“Cornucopia is sort of envisioning an opportunity to create food — maybe from a less obvious source — which is microorganisms,” he explained.  

The greater aim of the program, according to Pava, is to demonstrate a system that can produce a “biomass” within a 24-hour period that can serve as a food source to sustain 14 warfighters for a single day.

“So the idea on this program is to stick, essentially, gasses — like air, that contains some carbon dioxide, a lot of nitrogen, or an exhaust stream from something like a generator, which you’re probably going to have in a [deployed situation]. Placing those gas sources into chemicals like microorganisms, simple organic molecules, sugars — performers are taking different approaches to that — but that’s where the system starts. And then the sugars need to basically get consumed by the organisms that ultimately will be your biomass,” Pava explained. 

When it first launched several years ago, Cornucopia was designed to answer fundamental research questions about whether it is possible to use such engineered microorganisms to grow a biomass (or constellation of cells) that was edible — flavorful — and could sustain military personnel.

As the first phase of the program was being conducted, researchers involved initially focused on synthesizing flavor molecules to generate a “super tasty biomass, where we could tune a flavor profile to be whatever you wanted it to be,” Pava said. 

“What was found in the first part of the program is that, first of all, that’s a really, really hard problem. Because what gives food flavor is not usually singular molecules, but it’s a profile of a large set of molecules in a very particular ratio with one another,” he said.

Therefore trying to engineer the metabolism of an organism to very precisely tune the production of each one of those molecules and get that right each and every time “is a pretty significant challenge in and of itself,” the program manager explained.

Further, the organisms don’t just produce the flavor molecules that humans want them to — they also create other molecules for their own metabolism and individual purposes, which can create off-putting flavors.

Based on such learnings in phase 1, those involved re-scoped Cornucopia to create a “blank-space” biomass that contains all the macro- and micronutrients warfighters need to be considered “nutritionally complete” by operation standards and has no taste until flavor molecules are introduced.

“And the reason why the blandness is important is because it’s really not so difficult to add flavor. It’s a lot harder to take flavor out of something. You can think about if you over-salt the soup that you’re making. To take the salt back out of the soup is a little bit more challenging than if you were adding more salt to it,” Pava said.

An example of how this work “might play out,” he added, is that teams involved could create a healthy biomass powder that can transform into a food product — “like a pudding, or shake, or jerky,” as Pava put it — and then adding “a flavor packet” to it that inspires the flavor profile or taste of a specific dish.

The scientist noted that actually creating solid food items with texture like jerky would be extremely difficult. However, Pava noted, DARPA’s “intention is to shift possible.”

He and his colleagues engaged with Army Soldier Centers and others developing food rations for the military to inform their work. One element that really stood out to Pava in those conversations was how much food’s purpose “isn’t just sustaining the warfighter — but it’s also a comfort,” he said.

“So there’s this important psychological aspect of it as well, which is really why food is sort of a complicated topic. You could imagine somebody that has to operate abroad in tough circumstances, and they’re relying on a platform to produce food for them. It would be ideal if, in a moment, they could say, ‘Today, I really feel like eating something that tastes like chicken or eating something that tastes like beef,’” Pava told DefenseScoop.

While what DARPA is trying to make would be healthier, he likened the aims to contemporary ramen noodle dishes that come with various packs of flavor powders.

“From a repurposability standpoint, I can make that taste like many, many different things, but ultimately it’s the same product that you need,” Pava said.

DARPA has two teams on contract for Cornucopia: one from SRI International, and the other from the University of Illinois, Urbana. While the originally planned program was structured across three stages, it was re-scoped down to only two. The second phase recently kicked off and there’s about one-and-a-half years left of work anticipated in the pursuit.

“One of the other things that we added in phase 2 is the revised tasking for our performers. We’re now asking them to seek [Food and Drug Administration] certification … that will greatly facilitate the ability of doing a human study, to taste this biomass” down the line, Pava said. 

ReSource

DARPA’s ReSource effort, which recently concluded after unfolding over the last four years, broadly encompassed work to create “on-demand” products — like lubricants, adhesives, tactical fibers, potable water, and edible macronutrients — on the battlefield by engineering them in self-contained units from feedstock collected there, onsite.

In a recent interview, Leonard Tender, the program manager who led ReSource in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, told DefenseScoop the ultimate aim was solving “two really hard problems at once.” 

“The first hard problem is: How do you deal with mixed plastic waste, paper waste in particular, which are a huge problem in general, but also for the military — especially when you’re in a forward deployed situation, or off the beaten path, and you have a lot of this material — how do you get rid of it responsibly? And a lot of times the logistics of getting that material off base and handling it requires extensive transport chains and high expenses,” Tender said.

The other difficult challenge envelops all that it takes for critical materials — and in particular, fuels, oils, lubricants and food — to be supplied into austere conflict environments. 

“So the notion is that we can connect the two — and that is, convert waste materials into those useful materials. Then you’re not worrying about getting those waste materials off-site, and you’re not worrying about bringing those useful materials on-site. You’re just converting one to the other,” Tender explained.

DARPA leadership selected performer teams from Battelle, Iowa State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michigan Technological University to support the ReSource program. Each team opted to tackle the program differently in terms of execution.

Broadly, the challenge directed those involved to explore and establish a low-power means to transform trash and no-longer-usable objects into food and other items within a self-contained, transportable unit that is smaller than a few cubic meters, roughly the size of a pickup truck. 

When asked by DefenseScoop what the simplest way to describe this work would be, Tender said: “We’re converting waste to value.”

“It’s very exciting to be at this point and to actually see these ideas come to fruition — at least, in the prototype form — where we actually have these built-out shipping containers, essentially that are doing the process and we actually feed in the waste one side and at the other side, you can imagine, like a spigot, where you know your outcomes are oil, your lubricant, or pancake-like bacteria that can be used by itself or to supplement food,” he explained.

On the heels of this success, the agency is now exploring transition opportunities for the technologies developed — and engaging with potential sponsors involved in more advanced research development who’ve expressed interest in driving further innovation around these concepts.

Many DARPA programs result in new technologies, concepts, and development pathways via the commercial sector for dual-use capabilities.

“The ability to convert waste materials into single-cell protein, for example, could be very impactful in the commercial sector. And so our teams are working with entrepreneurs to do that,” Tender explained.

“DARPA doesn’t like to make products that people go and buy. Our goal is to sort of de-risk the original concept — and we have done that,” he added.

De-Risking at DARPA

As the Defense Department’s top research and development hub, DARPA is deliberate and strategic about de-risking new technologies and emerging concepts to motivate the private sector and others to invest in further product development.

“Taking the de-risk idea, we think in terms of technology readiness levels, or TRLs. So at DARPA, it very typically starts at a very low number, where someone has sort of a glimmer of an idea and might have a couple of results from literature that says it’s possible, but it’s never been really attempted — then to take it to a higher level idea where you kind of like demonstrated it in a prototype form, and that’s where we are right now” with ReSource, Tender said. 

“And then there’s other sponsors to take it from the prototype form out to something that can actually be implemented, provided to the warfighter or commercialized. And so we have a lot of interest from those follow-up transition partners,” he noted.

Pava, Cornucopia’s program manager, put it another way: “Being DARPA, we’re trying to de-risk that first, critical, super hard step, and then we’re going to need to bring in transition partners [from across the military] that we hand the baton off to.”

In their separate conversations with DefenseScoop, both program managers suggested that their teams are taking an aggressive approach to de-risking solutions that might be useful in addressing significant military logistical burdens. 

“Getting food to the warfighter, especially if they’re in a location that has a very, very long logistic tail associated with it, is a challenge,” Pava said. 

He noted the power of potentially enabling new capabilities that could lead to one day having modular units that could be deployed alongside service members to provide food and sustenance at the precise place where it’s required. 

“So, you could capture carbon from air or gaseous waste, like generators’ exhaust, you can pull nitrogen out of the air and fix that and then grow up a biomass on that carbon or nitrogen, for instance, as opposed to having to ship pallets, on pallets, on pallets of [Meal, Ready-to-Eats or] MREs to tier warfare, which might not be possible,” he said.

“It’s not [about] ‘sustainment,’ I think, as we typically think of sustaining large infrastructure. But it’s sustaining our people in very particular circumstances where we’re asking them to do really hard and dangerous stuff,” Pava added. 

In a recent email after the interviews were conducted, DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins told DefenseScoop that the agency is also thinking seriously about supply chain resiliency from multiple different angles — and that’s “all driven by our program managers” like Pava and Tender.

“Along with making food, extracting water, and producing medicine when and where we need it, we’re modeling complex global supply chains to understand where the weaknesses are. And when there are things we just can’t make at the point of need, we’re looking at new ways to revolutionize delivery and transport,” Tompkins said. 

The post ‘Waste to value’: Inside cutting-edge DARPA efforts to make food out of trash and gasses appeared first on DefenseScoop.