According to U.S. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, a 2023 Wash100 Award winner, the service branch must “continue to embrace innovation and transformation” to combat future threats.

In a keynote address at the 2023 Association of the U.S. Army Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C. last week, Wormuth highlighted data centricity and technology-driven approaches as key considerations in the Army’s journey forward, the Army said on Friday.

Laying the foundation for data centricity, said Army Chief Information Officer Leonel Garciga, is a “big piece” of the service branch’s current direction. What this entails is the implementation of policy, guidance and resourcing.

“I don’t care how good an algorithm is. If you don’t trust the platform, or you don’t trust the network, do you trust the output of that algorithm?” he said during a panel discussion at the event.

Steering the Army’s shift toward a data-driven force is its Digital Transformation Strategy. Released in 2021, the plan is designed to accelerate the process of bringing data to the forefront of Army operations. Its three major focus areas are modernization and readiness, optimized digital investments and a technically savvy, operationally effective digital workforce.

A core part of the strategy’s foundation is ensuring that data is properly collected and labeled throughout the Department of Defense.

Gabe Camarillo, under secretary of the Army, said the service branch must make sure that there is a routine way of tagging, governing and ensuring data accuracy across all functional Army components. Once a common method is established, he expects the service branch to “be able to really start humming.”

He noted that many of the service branch’s technical challenges have already been “figured out” in the private sector.

“The real question is how quickly can we adopt and change our processes to make the most advantageous use of capabilities that are already in the market,” said Camarillo.

Wormuth emphasized the “close partnership” the Army has maintained with industry as it has stayed on course with its “most ambitious modernization effort in 40 years.”

Since data and software will “impact the entire range and spectrum of military operations in the future,” the Army has to get these technologies right to sustain a technological advantage, Camarillo said.

Interested in learning more about the Army’s modernization journey? ExecutiveBiz’s Army Acquisition Priorities: Balancing Readiness and Modernization Forum will bring together top Army officials and industry experts to discuss how the service branch is transforming its approach to acquisition. Click here to learn more, and click here to register for the event.

Lockheed Martin has reached a new milestone in its Next Generation Interceptor initiative with the conclusion of its digital All Up Round Preliminary Design Review.

The completion of this testing phase, which was conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, indicates that Lockheed is on track to deliver NGI to the military services on an accelerated timeline, the company announced from Huntsville, Alabama on Monday.

“I am proud of our team’s commitment to innovating with urgency to achieve expectations for this phase of the program,” said Sarah Hiza, vice president and general manager of strategic and missile defense at Lockheed Martin.

According to Hiza, the added confidence in the design gained from the joint review has kept the program on schedule.

A developing component of the MDA’s Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, NGI will offer a modern interceptor to deter long range ballistic missile threats from U.S. adversaries. During the Preliminary Design Review, or PDR, the MDA considered the NGI program’s readiness and maturity to determine that the technology still meets the requirements for this mission.

The review was carried out using digital engineering and model-based engineering tools that increased cost-effectiveness. These digital review methods allowed for early and repeated hardware and software testing, which secured the PDR with lab demonstrations of flight-like engineering hardware.

With the conclusion of this testing stage, Lockheed will start procuring long-lead hardware for use in the production of flight test vehicles. The next phase of the process, the Critical Design Review, is expected to occur in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, and Lockheed projects the delivery of NGI to begin as early as fiscal year 2027. NGI’s previous milestone, the PDR of core subsystems, was completed in August.

NASA has pushed back the first flight of its X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft — manufactured by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works subsidiary — to 2024.

The X-59 aircraft will fly as part of NASA’s Quesst experimental mission that aims to demonstrate technology that can fly faster than the speed of sound while reducing the loudness of sonic booms to a quiet thump, the agency said Thursday.

According to NASA, the new flight schedule will give the agency extra time to fully integrate aircraft components and ensure system performance.

The Quesst team has transported the aircraft from its assembly facility to the flight line to commence safety and structural testing.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, called for rapid changes to the U.S. strategic posture to deter two near-peer nuclear adversaries in the future, citing a recent report from the Strategic Posture Commission that examined the long-term strategic posture of the United States.

“The results of their report detailed the gravity of the situation we face and emphasized that the current trajectory of the US nuclear deterrent is insufficient to deter the looming Chinese and Russian threat,” Rogers said in a statement published Thursday.

The HASC chair highlighted key takeaways including the absolute necessity of the nuclear force modernization program and the need for it to be supplemented to meet new Russian and Chinese threats; the expansion of the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and delivery systems; and the nuclear force size and composition and its ability to simultaneously deter both countries.

Rogers also reiterated some recommendations detailed in the report: “The Commission recommends Congress fund an overhaul and expansion of the capacity of the U.S. nuclear weapons defense industrial base and the Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration nuclear security enterprise… [and] the United States urgently deploy a more resilient space architecture and adopt a strategy that includes both offensive and defensive elements to ensure U.S. access to and operations in space.”

The U.S. Army is implementing an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance architecture modernization strategy that includes quantum computing and commercial satellite communications for the space, terrestrial and aerial domains, branch officials told attendees of the Association of the United States Army conference.

Leaders including Lt. Gen. Laura Potter, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, and Andrew Evans, director of the Army’s ISR Task Force, expounded on the Army Field Manual FM 2.0 – Intelligence doctrine published earlier this month.

Potter explained that the service branch’s ISR transformation will take place in “three layers: the space layer, taking advantage of government and commercial space based resources; an aerial layer that’s a mix of manned HADES [High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System] aircraft and unmanned platforms; and then a terrestrial layer that has terrestrial layer sensing at the brigade level and echelons above brigade.”

The ISR Task Force is considering whether to continue using traditional means of obtaining data and analysis or purchase them from commercial satellite providers, which are increasingly deploying their systems on orbit.

“We’re talking about swarming using autonomy as fast as we can and proliferating it as wide as we can. Autonomy is gonna be key in the future,” Evans said. “We’re also talking about how we manage all of the data, because that’s going to be a tall order.”