DefenseScoop

🏆 We are thrilled to announce the winners of the 2024 #DefenseScoop50 Awards! These visionary leaders and innovative programs are at the forefront of revolutionizing defense through advanced technology. Join us in congratulating these pioneers who are not only redefining the future of military strategies but also ensuring our national security. Explore the full list of this year's remarkable recipients: https://lnkd.in/d3ED45ST

The Army is looking to extend the ranges of its equipment designed to protect the service’s aviation fleet and personnel from emerging threats. The organization’s aircraft survivability equipment (ASE) initiative has a number of efforts underway aimed at developing a suite of sensors and countermeasure systems to protect platforms currently in the inventory as well as those that are in the works, such as the Future Long Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA). Col. Brock Zimmerman, program manager for ASE, said many of the new programs are being designed to detect and defeat adversary capabilities at much longer ranges than the Army’s current systems. https://lnkd.in/gRc2K7_D

Emerging capabilities such as proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite communications and hybrid cloud capabilities will allow U.S. military forces to operate effectively without having to be constantly connected on the battlefield in the future, according to a Marine commander. Unlike the conflicts in the Middle East of the last 20 years against a technologically inferior enemy, Pentagon officials anticipate contested and congested digital environments where maintaining connectivity will be difficult — a concept known as DDIL, or denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited, in Defense Department parlance. https://lnkd.in/eWrtd-J7

Navy eyeing new navigation tech for autonomous maritime drones in case satnav is lost. Jon Harper reports: https://lnkd.in/eTQNCJV8

DOD looking to release enterprise-wide guidance on software modernization. Mikayla Easley has the latest: https://lnkd.in/eeg_7gyh

The Department of the Air Force has tapped Susan Davenport to serve as its chief data and artificial intelligence officer, the organization announced Tuesday. Davenport will take over responsibilities from Chandra Donelson, who has been the DAF’s acting CDAO since April while also maintaining her role as the Space Force’s data and AI officer. Prior to that, Eileen Vidrine served as the DAF CDAO from January 2023 until her retirement earlier this year in March. https://lnkd.in/emW5hhGe

The Defense Innovation Unit launched GigEagle in 2022 as an artificial intelligence-powered prototype designed to match certain military personnel with unique and underutilized skills to temporary, short-term work opportunities applicable to their expertise and in demand across the Pentagon’s components. Since then, that real-time talent marketplace has been expanding to serve an increasingly wider variety of Defense Department users and enabling heaps of new connections between people and options for 90-day-or-less gigs. https://lnkd.in/eb3_vDdC

Challenges with maintaining its massive electronic health record system on-prem have prompted Pentagon plans to move to a cloud-based solution and award a high-dollar sole source contract to Leidos to continue on as a systems integrator for the program. MHS GENESIS — billed as the first all-in-one EHR system covering the entire Defense Department and one of the largest such systems in the world — reached full deployment in March after an extensive rollout. But officials say change is already needed. https://lnkd.in/eeEec4jT

The Space Development Agency has tapped 19 space companies to compete for upcoming prototype demonstrations under its new Hybrid Acquisition for Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (HALO) vendor pool, the organization announced Wednesday. As part of the HALO pool of pre-approved vendors, the selected businesses will now be able to compete for demonstrations and experimentation task orders that will support future tranches of SDA’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). Each company has received an other transaction agreement (OTA) with an initial $20,000 to compensate for administrative and other expenses, according to the agency. https://lnkd.in/efKNi2fg

Against a backdrop where military personnel are operating at the nexus of multiple complex threats, command leaders for Army and Air Force units across Europe and Africa are facilitating new and creative joint exercises to push modernization and transformation alongside some of America’s closest military partners. The recently completed Ramstein Flag 2024 and the ongoing and more secretive Neptune Eagle, among a variety of other related exercises and activities, are paving new means to combat anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities that could affect who can enter critical real-world operating environments. They’re also enabling deeper interoperability, according to service members steering and participating in these future-focused events. https://lnkd.in/eWTt9CWs