Adm. Charles Richard, head of U.S. Strategic Command, has called for an integrated multi-domain deterrence to avoid being overtaken by modernizing China and Russia, DOD News reported Thursday.

He suggested investing in a secure nuclear architecture, improve conventional forces, field emerging weapons technologies and stand up the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) system, the Department of Defense said Thursday.

Speaking at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Alabama, the U.S. Navy admiral also stressed the importance of experts’ output, the timely delivery of military capabilities and interoperability with allies and partners in discouraging adversarial threats.

He warned that Russia and China’s efforts, which include the development of hypersonic weapons and the enhancement of nuclear capabilities, would render U.S. strategic deterrence useless.

“And if strategic deterrence, and in particular nuclear deterrence, doesn’t hold, none of our other plans and no other capability that we have is going to work as designed,” explained Richard.

In July, U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command chief Gen. Glen VanHerck called for Pentagon leaders to use artificial intelligence in developing a comprehensive deterrence strategy.

Three Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) divisions have worked with Lockheed Martin to help the U.S. Navy field a laser control technology the company developed to support the branch's combat identification, threat engagement and battle damage assessment efforts.

The NSWC Crane, Dahlgren and Port Hueneme divisions support initiatives to develop and deploy the High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system to the fleet, Naval Sea Systems Command said Thursday.

Lockheed won a $942.8 million contract in January 2018 to provide two HELIOS units to the Navy for testing on a DDG 51 Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyer ship and at a ground facility.

“A distinguishing factor for HELIOS is it can engage with both a high-energy laser and lower power laser in the same system,” said Tyler Fitzsimmons, an NSWC Crane engineer.

The system is designed to help protect the naval ships from missiles, unmanned air vehicles and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance sensors.

Crane, Dahlgren shared experiences in low-power and high-energy technology with the project, while Port Hueneme provided test and evaluation management services to the effort.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has launched a virtual testing ground that supports simultaneous experimentation of emerging technologies across different sites in the U.S.

The facility provides an architecture where personnel can connect to highly distributed testbeds, shortening the duration a research innovation leaves the laboratory for an experiment field from weeks to hours, the Army said Thursday.

The testing ground, a part of ARL's Internet of Battlefield Things Collaborative Research Alliance (IoBT CRA), enables researchers to perform collecting sensing experimentation and other study efforts in a virtual common operating environment without spending money on converged field experiments.

"[It] delivers immediate capabilities to provide a means to stimulate basic research collaborations; reduces the time and cost for integrated distributed experimentation; and gives focus to research artifacts, allowing concepts to become tangible," explained Stephen Russell, manager of IoBT CRA.

To demonstrate the facility's use, Army researchers recently teamed up with counterparts from the Naval Research Laboratory and NATO and connected innovations in various fields together despite their separate geographical locations.

The U.S. Navy is looking to replace its legacy small and medium unmanned underwater vehicles for mine countermeasure missions as early as 2023, Defense News reported Thursday.

Capt. Dan Malatesta, a program manager in the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Unmanned and Small Combatants, said at a Navy League conference that an Expeditionary Mine Countermeasure Company finished a user operational evaluation activity in the small UUV program, dubbed Lionfish.

The branch is eyeing the Iver4 platforn from L3Harris Technologies and the Remus 300 system from Hydroid, a marine robot developer that Huntington Ingalls Industries acquired in March 2020, as potential replacements for the 150-pound Mk 18 Mod 1 Swordfish.

For the medium UUV program, the Navy started its process of identifying potential sources to replace the 600-pound Mk 18 Mod 2 Kingfish.

Malatesta said the branch will merge its Remus 600-based Kingfish and Razorback platforms into one replacement effort, called Viperfish, according to the report.

The Federal Risk and Management Program (FedRAMP) has issued Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) validation rules to help automate reviews of security packages and speed up authorizations.

The OSCAL validation rules will enable cloud service providers and third-party assessment organizations to perform self-testing to see whether all the required data is included in their security packages prior to submission to FedRAMP, the program said in a blog post-Thursday.

FedRAMP said its review teams will also use the automated validation rules to assess initial packages from CSPs.

“When both FedRAMP and industry utilize automated validation rules, FedRAMP reviewers will spend less time on packages that do not pass initial criteria, and therefore, are not ready for review,” the post reads.

The FedRAMP program management office worked with the General Services Administration’s 10x program on the automated validation rules.

Sonny Bhagowalia, chief information officer of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), said the agency has transitioned 45 percent of its information technology applications to a cloud environment and that the remaining migration work will support non-commercial mission systems, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

He said at an FCW-hosted virtual forum that CBP also produced 110 bots through its center of excellence for robotic process automation and will establish an innovation hub for artificial intelligence as part of digital transformation efforts, according to Bhagowalia.

An innovation team under the CBP commissioner office will lead efforts at the agency's AI center to help personnel process huge amounts of mission-critical data, according to Bhagowalia.

Bhagowalia, who also serves as assistant commissioner in the CBP Office of Information and Technology, added that the agency will create a marketplace for the procurement of IT products such as desktop and laptop computers.