Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

“The Moroccans are fully integrated” in the exercise, said Lt. Col. Aaron Ritzema, helping hunt simulated “enemy” transmitters with high-altitude balloons and four different types of drones.

“This is the starting gun for what may be the single largest overhaul of US government communication systems since the adoption of the Internet, as ordered by the President in National Security Memorandum 10,” said RAND scientist Michael Vermeer. “It will probably go on for decades and will cost billions of dollars.”

The newly released “ISV 2.0” builds on the broad-brush original vision from 2020, with a new emphasis on the unglamorous groundwork of getting the Navy’s data right.

By 2026, the entire Navy will have an Enterprise Resource Planning system that can track “every single transaction,” comptroller Russ Rumbaugh told Breaking Defense.

“Many of the right things were said publicly,” Warren Katz, chairman of the Alliance for Commercial Technology in Government, told Breaking Defense. “However, those sentiments do not seem to have translated into the RFI and directive documents.”

The US is still great at designing chips but has offshored the ability to build prototypes, which slows innovation and risks IP theft, said OSD’s Dev Shenoy.

With Large Language Models, “you can make more of everything — misinformation, disinformation — but it doesn't mean it'll be very good,” said Clint Watts, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center.

Boeing's approach goes beyond Chinese experiments with space-based Quantum Key Distribution and could enable ultra-precise timing and sensing, said chief engineer Jay Lowell.

“We're going to do our best to disprove anybody who steps through our door,” said DARPA’s Joe Altepeter, “[but if] you convince my team, we will be your advocate inside the government, in rooms you can’t go.”

“I describe PWSA, the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, as the Android model,” said Space Development Agency director Derek Tournear. “If we get vendor lock, if only one works, or if they can't talk to each other, that falls apart pretty quickly.”