The U.S. Army has marked the second year of Project Convergence and demonstrated 110 new technologies meant to support joint all-domain command and control as part of the experimentation effort, Defense One reported Wednesday.

Tech experimentation efforts that Army officials said worked during the project’s second year include artificial intelligence-enabled reconnaissance, high-bandwidth mesh networking using drones and a small satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit and rapid threat data sharing across services.

For AI-enabled reconnaissance, the military conducted a reconnaissance mission using four autonomous robots linked to two tethered drones.

“And so those robotic vehicles and their ability to collaborate and sense decided how to recon that area on their own,” said Col. Andre Abadie, head of the Project Convergence 21 operational planning team.

Abadie said those robots also decided how to report the detected threats to the communications component.

“We hope to take that next year and actually do that at night,” he added.

Project Convergence also allowed soldiers to test new equipment like the IVAS headset and helped Army officials to identify other areas that need improvement, such as equipping autonomous robots with new sensing capabilities and defending against adversaries’ electronic warfare capabilities.

A new survey by Pew Research Center has found that 86 percent of U.S. adults have heard of Bitcoin, Ether and other cryptocurrencies and 16 percent said they have used, traded or invested in cryptocurrency.

The Washington, D.C.-based think tank said Thursday it surveyed over 10,300 respondents between Sept. 13 and 19 and found that 43 percent of men ages 18 to 29 said they have used, invested in or traded a cryptocurrency compared with nearly two in 10 women.

The study showed that about 13 percent of U.S. adults said they have heard nothing about cryptocurrency at all. The center also found that White adults are less likely than Asian, Hispanic and Black adults to say they have traded, used or invested in the digital currency.

The Potomac Officers Club will hold its Digital Currency and National Security Forum on Jan. 27. Sign up for the virtual event to hear from government and industry leaders as they talk about the implications, risks, opportunities and challenges that digital currencies pose for the future of the U.S. economy and national security.

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that the Department of Defense establish processes and systems to ensure that missile defense system development programs align with the military’s operational requirements.

GAO said in a new report published Wednesday the Pentagon made modifications to the Missile Defense Agency’s acquisition flexibilities and transferred to the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment the authority to approve major MDA programs.

The changes are consistent with the acquisition best practices identified by GAO and comply with the actions it recommended that DOD take to improve missile weapons procurement. However, GAO found gaps in the process of matching the new systems’ capabilities with the end users’ requirements.

“DOD continues to rely on MDA to identify its own operational-level requirements, which could result in MDA later having to make costly, time-consuming design changes to meet warfighter needs,” GAO said in the report.

Among its recommendations is the establishment of a process at U.S. Strategic Command to record and validate operational-level warfighter needs in an initial requirements document.

The Air Force Research Laboratory and the University of New Mexico will collaborate on a congressionally funded project to establish a research center that will focus on exploring fiber lasers and other high-power technology.

AFRL said the partnership expects the future Directed Energy Center at UNM’s Science and Technology Park to commence operations by 2025.

“One of the important aspects of using DE weapons systems is that they are much less costly than traditional kinetic systems and result in less collateral damage,” said Kelly Hammett, director of AFRL’s directed energy directorate.

Edl Schamiloglu, professor in the university’s electrical and computer engineering department, will assume leadership of the center and his fellow professor Ganesh Balakrishnan will become the hub’s associate director.

Both academic professionals serve as principal investigators on a four-year, $2.4 million cooperative agreement between AFRL and UNM.

Michael Brown, director of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), said he believes the Department of Defense should reform its system of procurement to address the “DOD valley of death” between developing a prototype and deploying a program of record, the Washington Business Journal reported Wednesday.

He said DOD should change how it identifies systems for procurement through contract requirements, how it buys systems through its acquisition process and how it budgets for acquisition programs.

“The DOD-unique valley of death is when we bring a company through a successful prototype, and when they are ready to scale, the Department says, ‘Wait, I haven’t budgeted for that yet,'” Brown said at an event Tuesday.

“So that process, the two-and-a-half years of budgeting, really needs to be condensed and we need some flexibility around the edges so that successful technology can scale more quickly,” he added.

Brown is scheduled to speak at the Potomac Officers Club’s 8th Annual Defense and Research Summit on Jan. 19th. Click here to register for the event to hear from government and industry leaders as they discuss DOD’s innovation priorities, tech advancements and strategies to improve its defense capabilities and maintain its competitive edge.