The U.S. Army will procure 3,500 ultra-lightweight camouflage net system suits designed to conceal soldiers’ electronic and heat signatures for multispectral protection, the Army Times reported Saturday.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing that the key to camouflage is hiding invisible signatures emanating from electronic systems as well as heat signatures produced by humans and vehicles. The lightweight suits, intended to conceal warfighters and equipment from sensors and modern communications systems, is slated to replace woodland and desert netting deployed since the 1990s.

The Army issued ULCANS contracts in 2018 and is on track to supply the suits to its units this year.

The General Accountability Office published a report highlighting the development progress of a U.S. Navy initiative to replace its presidential helicopter fleet with the Sikorsky VH-92A aircraft. The VH-92A acquisition program decreased its developmental costs by four percent since its conception in April 2014 due to some changes in design, stable requirements and program efficiency, GAO said Thursday.

The agency also noted that while the program remains in schedule, the delays within the initiative will lessen the time needed to evaluate the beginning of the production phase by three to five months. In addition, it may also affect the aircraft’s performance requirements including its mission communications system and landing zone suitability.

The report added that the program intends to address gaps in communication links and other related segments.

Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said digital engineering could help the service and the Department of Defense address the challenges facing contractors in rapid defense procurement initiatives, National Defense Magazine reported Friday.
 
“Through increased computing speed, storage capacity and processing capabilities, digital engineering has empowered a paradigm shift from the traditional design-build-test methodology,” he said at a recent conference hosted by the Air Force Association in Arlington, Va. “This approach can enable DoD programs to prototype, experiment and test decisions and solutions in a virtual environment before they are delivered to the warfighter.”

The Air Force uses document-intensive and stovepiped engineering processes to replace or sustain weapons systems, according to the DoD’s latest digital engineering strategy. The approach affects how the defense industrial base secure contracts and works on tech development and maturation, which commonly take years, Roper said. 

“What I think digital engineering can do for the Air Force is allow us to compete things more frequently,” he said.

Acting Defense Secretary and 2019 Wash100 Award winner Patrick Shanahan told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon could integrate the National Reconnaissance Office into the Space Force into the future, Defense News reported Thursday. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), SASC ranking member, asked about the Department of Defense’s reason for not putting NRO under the new service branch and Shanahan said DoD didn’t want to delay the formation of the new force. 

“The bias in the proposal is towards speed. The proposal we submitted really represents the stakeholders that we have control of,” said Shanahan. “When we look at the many stakeholders, there is real work to be done there to negotiate. So we thought about it as a multi-step process where eventually there would be more alignment, but not in the first phase,” he added.

NRO is an agency within the intelligence community with approximately 3,000 employees and oversees several classified satellites for reconnaissance operations, according to the report.

The Government Accountability Office issued a report highlighting the slow progress in the Office of Management and Budget’s Data Center Optimization Initiative. GAO said Thursday that of the 24 agencies participating in the program, 11 did not create a plan to meet their goals to close or improve data centers in 2018.

OMB required agencies to complete efforts under DCOI in September 2018. However, as of August only 13 either achieved assigned closure goals or established plans to meet the deadline.

“The 24 agencies reported limited progress against OMB’s five data center optimization targets for server utilization and automated monitoring, energy metering, power usage effectiveness, facility utilization and virtualization,” GAO said.

In August, 16 of the agencies reported meeting cost savings targets of a total of $2.36 billion between fiscal years 2016 and 2018. GAO recommends that agencies improve performance in the DCOI, prioritize their remaining data centers’ operational efficiency and identify further savings. Only 11 participating agencies agreed with the recommendations.

The U.S. Marine Corps is planning to update its Kaman K-Max helicopters to incorporate autonomous capabilities intended to support experimental cargo delivery operations, Flight Global said Thursday. 

Lt. Gen. Steven Rudder, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation, said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month that the service branch plans to modernize its two K-Max aircraft as part of its K-Max autonomy research effort and Marine Air Ground Task Force – Unmanned Expeditionary Capabilities program. Rudder noted that the initiatives can help the Marine Corps conduct operations amid pilot shortages. 

USMC began the K-Max effort in 2011 before transferring the helicopters to the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona for further experimentation in 2016. Kaman and Lockheed Martin previously teamed up to jointly develop a flight control system that can autonomously power a K-Max helicopter.