Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson released the updated version of his strategy document detailing major changes in how the U.S. Navy will acquire and field new technologies, USNI News reported Monday.

Richardson’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 2.0 aims to speed up the development, testing, fielding of tools, weapon systems and ships, among other assets of the service branch. The document also sets goals to acquire technologies to help the Navy deter the growing Russian and Chinese aggression.

Acquisition goals detailed in the new document include contracts for new frigates, unmanned aerial, surface, underwater vehicles, replacement for the F/A-18E/F and EA-18G aircraft, hypersonic weapons, laser technologies and enterprise network modernization. The Navy aims to release the contracts between 2020 and 2030.

The service also looks to establish capability and concept development hubs and a Warfighting Development Directorate to help in the development, acquisition and deployment of new technologies. The Navy released the strategy document in 2016 to guide officials through changes in the fleet, operating environment and in the administration’s priorities.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will host a Proposers Day on Jan. 9 to discuss and develop a contract for a semi-automated system to help the defense community analyze complex events in multimedia platforms. The event at the Holiday Inn in Arlington, Va., will focus on the requirements of a broad agency announcement for DARPA’s Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas program, according to a notice FedBizOpps posted Monday.

The KAIROS program aims to build a system “that identifies, links and temporally sequences” scenes and automatically sends data to human operators or analysts. “Rapid comprehension of world events is essential for informing U.S. policy, diplomacy and national security,” DARPA said in the notice. The agency said it will seek “revolutionary ideas that use schema-based AI to comprehend events, their components and the participants involved.”

KAIROS will involve a two-stage development to initially focus on automated approaches for learning schemas from big data, followed by the development of automated technologies that apply such schemas to multimedia or multilingual information to extract complex events. Registration for the KAIROS Proposers Day is open until Jan. 2.

Ellen Lord, undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment at the Department of Defense, has said she thinks DoD should collaborate with launch service providers to ensure the availability of services to bring small and large satellites to space on short notice, SpaceNews reported Monday.

“I think we need to look at launch service capability for small sats as well as large,” she said Monday at the Pentagon.

Lord told reporters about DoD’s partnership with Virgin Orbit, a small satellite launch startup that spun out of Virgin Galactic.

Virgin Orbit received a contract in November 2017 to demonstrate its air-launched rocket system, LauncherOne, through DoD’s Space Test Program.

LauncherOne is set to launch in 2019 a small satellite for DoD through a Boeing 747 aircraft variant.

Lord also mentioned that the Defense Innovation Unit also works with Virgin Orbit’s Vox Space subsidiary, which offers engineering and mission management support services to government clients.

The Department of Defense has started to declassify space traffic data as part of the U.S. government’s effort to advance space commercialization and safety, Popular Mechanics reported Thursday.

“This is us being transparent, leaning forward and trying to enhance that spaceflight safety through data sharing,” Col. Scott Brodeur, director of the Combined Space Operation Center, told the publication.

Diana McKissock, head of space situational awareness sharing at the 18th space control squadron, said the government recently declassified two-line element sets for at least 500 man-made space objects with plans to release more data.

Those objects are part of a catalog that DoD manages and can be publicly accessed through the space-track.org website.

TLEs work to encode the probable orbital movement and position of a space object.

McKissock said the U.S. needs to expand its space traffic management initiative as more companies send satellites into space.

“We’re looking forward to working with our civil counterparts on how we can better support the global community as space becomes more contested and congested,” McKissock noted.

Officials at U.S. Strategic Command said the declassification move aligns with the Space Policy Directive-3, which directs the Department of Commerce to publicly disclose space traffic information.
 

McAleese & Associates reports the U.S. Navy’s Super Hornet aircraft has achieved a mission-capable-rate of 66 percent. By end of 2019, the Navy is confident it will meet Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ mandate of 80 percent mission-capable.

During the recent “Navy/USMC Readiness” hearing, Richard Spencer, secretary of the Navy, shared the same optimism to reach the goal of 80 percent. Spencer revealed an increase of 40 percent in the last two months. In a statement for the hearing, the panel declared business process reform to be a top priority for civilian, military leadership and is a continuous learning enterprise.

“We’ve embraced lessons from commercial airline heavy-maintenance practices and their data-driven approach to improve naval aviation’s maintenance processes,” Spencer said. “This will be the foundation of the Navy Sustainment System. Fleet Readiness Centers are an example of this kind of partnership, focused on reducing a significant backlog in aviation component repair parts.”

Bill Moran, the vice chief of naval operations, confirmed the mission-capable-rate continues to rise from 66 percent. He also reiterated the Navy’s public shipyard recapitalization is a crucial development for 2019, but the Navy is planning to send a handful of Los Angeles attack submarines outside of the Navy’s public shipyards.

Spencer mentioned Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., is very vocal about the demand for Los Angeles attack submarine “maintenance-availability” work with GD Electric Boats because it would ramp-up the 1st 2021 Columbia-class order and improve the GD Marine sector operating margin.

John Pendleton, director of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, didn’t express the same confidence that the Navy could reach Sec. Mattis’ objective of 80 percent. He said sustaining F-35 planes and reaching this benchmark would be “difficult to achieve.” However, Pendleton reiterated that everyone is working towards the same objective.