The global small drone market will reach $10 billion by 2020 according to a forecast by research firm MarketsandMarkets – this reflects a compound annual growth rate of 11.6 percent from 2015. Drone manufacturers who to date have been feeding the huge defense market are being joined by an ever increasing number of non-defense drone developers who are targeting the potentially enormous markets for civil and commercial capabilities. The a...

Additive Manufacturing – Revolutionizing Aerospace and Defense Innovation, Production, Logistics, and Readiness Unlike traditional manufacturing, which involves creating a smaller object from a larger source material, additive manufacturing takes raw materials, feeds them through a digital manufacturing system and creates a customized object from that material, eliminating excess material waste. This potential ability to exchange AM desi...

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs) and Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) have seen a golden age in the last decade growing to an annual budget of $7 billion. Most of this growth has been through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but with the drawing down of troops, what’s next? Analysts still predict growth in this industry, estimating a total increase to just over $89 billion in the next decade. Not only is the military expected to sustain...

In March 2012, the White House announced funding for a large new research and development initiative aimed at extracting and exploiting the “knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data to help solve some of the Nation’s most pressing challenges.” This is in addition to numerous ongoing “Big Data” programs that have been initiated across the Federal Government, including Homeland Secur...

Exploiting the Cloud for Defense, Intelligence and Homeland Security The federal government has embarked on an ambitious plan to transform IT acquisition and management, with a goal of instituting cloud computing in every federal agency to provide on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable resources that can be quickly established and quickly dismantled. The savings in DoD, IC, and DHS IT spending could total more than twenty percent of...

Big Data and Government R&D – Turning Overload into Exploitable Information Assets Earlier this year the White House announced funding for a large new research and development initiative aimed at extracting and exploiting the “knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data… to help solve some the Nation’s most pressing challenges.” This is in addition to numerous ongoing “Big...