“We also had a non-pilot with all of 45 minutes of training take the aircraft up and operate for almost an hour,” said Sikorsky’s autonomy director, Igor Cherepinsky.

HackerOne, Synack, and newcomer Bugcrowd split up to $34 million.

Besides digging out ineptitude with a sharp spade, the DIB guide also offers constructive suggestions, even including 16 specific software programs to use for specific purposes, from version control to bug reports.

Hollywood gives us the idea that US troops control their weapons with the latest video game-style graphics in glorious, full-color 3D. The reality is more like Pong — only with life and death at stake.

Chief of Staff Mark Milley declared air and missile defense the Army’s No. 5 priority — one of the Big Six which the service is pushing to accelerate, if necessary at the expense of everything else in their budget.

The actual Robotic Combat Vehicle that gets mass-produced and fielded by 2028 will be an all-new design, not a converted M113. But why wait for someone to design and build the perfect hardware, when you can start testing the software and the tactics on something cheaply available today?

It’s all part of a wider effort to rebuild the Army’s command, control, and communications (C3) networks for war against a high-tech great power.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, told a small group of reporters here Friday morning that her office is trying to put rules in place to protect against buying “software that has Russian or Chinese provenance, for instance, and quite often that’s difficult to tell at first glance because of holding companies,” that move the software through the open market.

Will this result in more operations like the Kessel Run Experimentation Lab in Boston, where coders join airmen to build useful software? Perhaps it will mean the service will hire civilian coders or train airmen to write code.

“What’s missing at this point is what the Navy’s modernization strategy is,” the staffer said. The ships in question have enough margin for growth that they could accommodate upgrades, but how much does it cost to keep upgrading old ships? How does the cost:benefit ratio of such upgrades compare to spending the same amount on new vessels? The Navy’s plan is appealing “philosophically,” the staffer said, “but the devil’s in the details.”