* Chinese Rear Adm. Zhang Zhaozhong said that Zumwalt ships are vulnerable to being zerged. Well, he didn’t make an actual reference to videogame swarming aliens, but that’s the gist of his position.
* US Navy ship-counting is under scrutiny.
* A declassified version of the final Australian defence force posture review has been made available.
* François Hollande, candidate to the French presidency and favorite in the polls, said during a heated debate with his opponent Nicolas Sarzoky that he will withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012 if he is elected. President Sarkozy had already moved the date ahead by a year to the end of 2013. The 2nd and final round of the election takes place on Sunday.
* The Pentagon’s Developmental Test and Evaluation and Systems Engineering’s FY11 annual report notes that their work now more formally covers cyber defense. Among items to look for in this beefy document, several Assessments of Operational Test Readiness (AOTR) made in the last two years that led to recommendations not to proceed to the Initial Operational Test & Evaluation (IOT&E) phase. One is a case of “I told you so” after the Navy decided to proceed – despite DT&E’s advice – with SM-6 tests that ended up failing in 5 cases of 12 in July last year.
* This slideshow [PDF] from the recent 2012 AcqDemo Conference on the state of the US defense acquisition workforce shows that more than half of the staff is within 10 years of retiring. About 56,000 of them, or more than a third of the total, are within 5 years of being eligible for retirement. See chart below:
(click to view full)
* In light of GAO protests by the companies who didn’t get the business, the Air Force is rethinking its NetCents II awards announced on April 16. At stake, a multiple award IDIQ with a ceiling of $6.9B.
Spotting a trend, through the noise:
* DARPA is interested in Extremely High Frequency (EHF) electronics that are compact enough to be embarked on planes. The goal is to develop a Video Synthetic Aperture Radar (ViSAR) capable of engaging moving targets through obscurants such as clouds or dust. July/August 2013 update: L-3 and Northrop Grumman awards.
* The US Army wants innovative Semi-Active Laser (SAL) signal processing techniques that work in noisy environments.
* The US Navy seeks intelligent agents to predict swarming and other nonlinear, dispersed tactics against surface forces.
