The U.S. Navy on Tuesday christened its latest “Overlord” unmanned surface vessel during a ceremony held at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Gulf Craft-built Mariner is managed by Leidos and is the third Overlord ship that has been added to the service’s fleet of USVs.

Mariner is equipped with a virtualized form of the Aegis Combat System, autonomous navigation platform and a command-and-control system.

Rear Adm. Casey Moton, program executive officer for unmanned and small combatants at the Navy, said the ship will move to California and kick off operations in fiscal year 2023.

Moton said the new USV will bring new capabilities and volume as the service works to learn more about operating unmanned systems and plans for its future fleet of hybrid manned and uncrewed platforms. 

He noted that the Navy’s test plan for the Mariner vessel includes at-sea and land-based testing and that the service expects the virtualized Aegis Combat System to allow the new Overlord ship to exercise control over another USV.

“Now we can take two of our USVs and go out and do multi-vessel ops and control and not necessarily have to take a [destroyer] off of actual fleet operations to go do that. It gives us that ability to just get there that much more quickly,” Moton added.

Information technology services provider NTT DATA has opted to build a research and development hub in Plano, Texas principally to demonstrate and test its products for clients.

The North American Innovation Center will add to NTT DATA’s global network of technology study and implementation facilities, the company said Tuesday. There are currently six ICs established throughout the world and the new IC will be adjoined to NTT DATA’s Innovation Studio in Plano.

Eric Clark, chief digital and strategy officer at NTT DATA Services, shared that the new IC comes out of a drive to offer forward-thinking technology services to customers and is intended to accelerate “research, development and experimentation of advanced technologies into our program to drive rapid evolution and effective digital transformation strategies for our clients.”

The Innovation Center concept centers on the identification, genesis and concerted growth of evolving technological strategies. Team members working in the ICs prime these nascent tools in order to match the needs of businesses. The ICs are also built to assist with digital transformation processes and ease the burdens of technological advancement that befall many organizations.

With a wide scope that touches on a number of focus areas, the North American IC will concentrate on subject fields such as 5G, city planning and digital humans. The hub’s technological development will span the full lifecycle, from conception through proof of concept and full realization.

The IC’s Boston, Massachusetts staff is partnering with the MIT Media Lab, a prestigious academic and research outfit that plans to work closely with the new IC as a whole.

NTT DATA’s IC announcement follows the company’s March acquisition of the digital transformation-specializing company Vectorform. The North American IC’s work in digital transformation will likely compound with their portfolio-add of Vectorform.

The latest variant of the U.S. Army’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter has completed an initial operational test and evaluation at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, enabling the service branch to set requirements for the aircraft’s full rate production, DVIDS reported Friday.

Five UH-60V helicopters flew a total of more than 120 hours under realistic battlefield conditions during the three-week preliminary testing that began on July 5.

The Utility Helicopters Project Office then performed record testing from July 28 through Aug. 5, concluding with more than 200 flight hours in total.

The V-model Black Hawk utility helicopter replaces the Army’s legacy Black Hawk L-model helicopter fleet and includes a digital glass cockpit and integrated avionics suite.

The aircraft secured an Instrument Flight Rules certification to fly in national airspace at any time of the day and under instrumented meteorological conditions in April.

Air Force Materiel Command has fielded a modernized logistics planning and analysis system designed to enable the Cryptologic and Cyber Systems Division to manage the wholesale item management and repair storage of cryptologic assets.

AFMC said the Integrated Logistics System – Supply Program Management Office has verified 284,000 assets migrated to the ILS-S and user transaction has begun on July 26.

In 2017, AFMC’s Strike Team One determined that the CCSD’s capability requirements for managing the repair of cryptologic assets should be incorporated into the ILS-S application as part of an departmentwide overhaul initiated by the Department of Defense.

Beginning in April 2021, the ILS-S PMO worked with the CCSD to consolidate the full range of the directorate’s functional capability requirements and incorporate them into the modernized ILS-S application.

The ILS-S PMO then tested the new capabilities, validated the data incorporated into the system and provided hands on-training to the CCSD team.

“CCSD is looking forward to a continued partnership to ensure the Air Force cryptologic assets are available and accountable for the warfighter,” said Barbara Craig, program manager of the Cryptologic Depot Accountability System.

More than 190 commercial companies have participated in an industry engagement day hosted by the Department of Defense to discuss the vision and technical priorities of the Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve initiative.

Participants of the event held at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory gained first-hand knowledge of how the RDER enables prototyping and experimentation to support joint warfighting concepts, the Pentagon said Monday.

“RDER is part of a Defense-wide effort to engage our innovative industry partners to rapidly develop and field capabilities needed to build an enduring advantage, and support campaigning as well as the Joint fight,” said Bruce Juselis, division chief for RDER technical accession and proposal development.

The industry engagement day included several classified briefings on the RDER program, proposal criteria and technology capability requirements.

The RDER program is a multi-year campaign that solicits feedback from the services and combatant commands to address capability gaps in joint warfighting.

In November, Heidi Shyu, undersecretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner, said her office has selected 32 ideas for funding that could address the identified warfighting challenges.

Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Army’s G-6 office, said the service has performed cybersecurity assessments to prepare for a pilot program that will allow some personnel to connect their own devices to the branch’s internal network, Signal Magazine reported.

“We have layered in the security, all based off of zero-trust principles, and that notion of knowing who that individual user is,” Morrison said Tuesday during a media roundtable held at the TechNet Augusta event.

He told reporters the Army’s bring-your-own-device initiative could begin within the next two months and would use a Department of Defense cloud hosting infrastructure.

Army Reserve and National Guard members are the initial participants in the upcoming BYOD program and an accompanying virtualization effort.

“We have established the foundations for how to do cloud,” Morrison added. He expects the branch to eventually involve active-duty personnel worldwide in its BYOD program.

Join the Potomac Officers Club’s 5G Forum on Sept. 13 to hear from Lt. Gen. John Morrison as he shares his perspective on the fifth generation of cellular technology. Morrison has been confirmed to act as keynote speaker at the virtual event. Visit the POC Events page to learn more about upcoming forums for government and GovCon leaders.