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Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall Vows to Focus on Mission Fulfillment
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Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall Vows to Focus on Mission Fulfillment

Frank Kendall, a former acquisition chief at the Department of Defense (DOD) and a three-time Wash100 Award winner, was sworn in Wednesday as secretary of the Air Force.

“I will be totally focused on ensuring that our Air and Space Forces can fulfill their missions to defend the nation against our most challenging threats, today and into the future,” Kendall said.

He succeeds acting SecAF John Roth two days after the Senate voted in favor of his confirmation and will be working on his agenda in the coming days as the Department of the Air Force’s highest-ranking civilian leader.

A U.S. Army veteran, Kendall previously served as undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics; tactial warfare program director; and assistant deputy undersecretary for strategic defense systems at the DOD.

Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall Vows to Focus on Mission Fulfillment

GovCon Wire, sister site of ExecutiveGov, will hold its Space Acquisition Forum on Sept. 14th. Sign up for the virtual forum to hear from defense officials as they give their perspectives on military acquisition reform and modernization efforts.

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DOD to Develop Additive Manufacturing Tech Guide; Robert Gold Quoted
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DOD to Develop Additive Manufacturing Tech Guide; Robert Gold Quoted

Department of Defense offices have partnered with military services to develop implementation plans and technical guidelines for additive manufacturing technology used to make 3D objects from polymer and metal materials, DOD News reported Thursday.

The collaborative effort comes after the release of the Additive Manufacturing Strategy in January, aimed at laying out a common vision and five strategic approaches for AM, and the Instruction 5000.93 that presented an overarching AM guidance for the department.

Robert Gold, director of technology and manufacturing industrial base at DOD, said that AM technology allows for the production of lighter innovative designs that veer away from traditional processes like lathes and welding. 

"What we're trying to do with this highly flexible technology is to align activities across our enterprise, so that there is a sense of harmony and so that our processes work together and we can exchange lessons learned," Gold added.

Tracy Frost, director of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Manufacturing Technology Program, noted that integrating AM technology into the department and the organic and commercial industrial bases is one of the goals outlined in the DOD AM strategy.

The agency is also looking to partner with the commercial and academic sectors, strengthen the workforce through training and ensure the cybersecurity of AM processes within the defense supply chain.

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Air Force Concludes 5th Architecture Demo, Evaluation for Increased Domain Awareness; Preston Dunlap Quoted
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Air Force Concludes 5th Architecture Demo, Evaluation for Increased Domain Awareness; Preston Dunlap Quoted

The U.S. Air Force has completed its weeks-long exercise aimed at achieving increased domain awareness and decision superiority through a mission architecture powered by commercial innovations.

The fifth Architecture Demonstration and Evaluation event saw various U.S. military organizations integrating artificial intelligence, networking technologies, classified-level mobile devices and other capabilities from the private sector, the Air Force said Wednesday.

ADE combined emerging operational concepts from USAF and the Space Force and lessons gained from the previous third Global Information Dominance Experiment and Pacific Iron 2021 Agile Combat Employment exercises.

The event's objectives were to boost domain awareness, information dominance, decision superiority and global integration with the help of AI, cross-combatant command partnerships, feasibility studies and agile combat employment at the edge.

"Our goal at Department of the Air Force Architecture Demonstration and Evaluation 5 was to move DoD towards an integrated mission architecture that achieves AI-enabled decision superiority anywhere, from combatant commands all the way down to the edge, whether in competition or conflict," explained Preston Dunlap, chief architect of both USAF and Space Force.

The Chief Architect Office performs ADEs to bring together operators and technologies to help transition the DOD from the technology design phase to informed implementation.

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Report: US Eyes Sanction Campaign Against Iran’s Precision-Strike Capabilities
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Report: US Eyes Sanction Campaign Against Iran’s Precision-Strike Capabilities

The U.S. government is planning to impose sanctions against Iran’s precision-strike capabilities using guided missiles and drones citing concerns over the threats pose by such weapon systems to the U.S. and its allies, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Officials said zeroing in on Iran’s suppliers of parts used to make unmanned aircraft systems and precision-guided missiles and others within its procurement networks could result in a disruption to the Middle Eastern country’s activities.

“It’s part of a comprehensive approach so we’re dealing with all aspects of the Iranian threat,” said a senior U.S. official. Another U.S. official said drones from Iran have become an increasing threat to U.S. allies in the Middle East.

Security officials from the West said they view Iran’s precision-strike capabilities as a larger immediate threat than ballistic missile and nuclear-enrichment initiatives to stability in the region.

The planned move comes as the White House considers scaling up enforcement of oil sanctions to prod Iran to comply again with the 2015 nuclear deal. However, some officials said the measures against Iran’s missiles and drones should be viewed as separate from the nuclear accord.

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GAO Offers Recommendation to OMB Over Contractor Paid Leave Reimbursements
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GAO Offers Recommendation to OMB Over Contractor Paid Leave Reimbursements

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has recommended that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) gather and share lessons learned from agencies’ implementation of section 3610 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to reimburse contractors for paid leave in order to inform future federal emergency responses.

Section 3610 of the CARES Act allows agencies to reimburse contractors for paid leave offered to employees who cannot access work locations or telework during the COVID-19 pandemic, GAO said in a report published Wednesday.

GAO assessed the use of section 3610 authorities by NASA and the departments of Defense (DOD), Homeland Security (DHS) and Energy (DOE) and found that the four agencies reported $882.8 million in paid leave costs over a period of 14 months.

The report showed that the agencies implemented policies and monitored paid leave reimbursements in various ways.

The congressional watchdog interviewed 15 contractors about the effect of paid leave reimbursement on workforce retention and 12 of them said such a measure had a “great” or “moderate effect” on efforts to retain personnel.

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GSA Announces April 2022 Transition to New Entity Verification System
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GSA Announces April 2022 Transition to New Entity Verification System

The General Services Administration has set April 4, 2022 as the deadline for transitioning to the new Unique Entity ID to help verify individuals, companies or organizations that want to do business with the federal government.

GSA said Wednesday vendors and other entities that previously registered in the System for Award Management website have been assigned a UEI that can be viewed in SAM.gov’s entity registration record.

Aside from SAM.gov, other Integrated Award Environment systems such as FSRS, FPDS.gov, CPARS and FAPIIS will require entities to use the UEI starting April 2022.

Sub-awardees and other entities with a DUNS number but are not registered in SAM.gov can request a UEI through the website starting this October.

“In preparation for the full transition to the Unique Entity ID (SAM), you should prepare any of your own internal systems to accept the new identifier and to stop using the DUNS number for federal awards processes by April 2022,” GSA said.

GSA added that agencies will start migrating to UEI between now and April of next year and entities should pay attention to instructions from such agencies with regard to the use of the new identifier.

In March 2019, GSA awarded Ernst & Young a contract to provide support for the new entity validation system.

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Army, IBM, University Researchers Pen Book on Network Performance Management Techniques
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Army, IBM, University Researchers Pen Book on Network Performance Management Techniques

Researchers from the U.S. Army, IBM, University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Imperial College London have written a book covering studies about network performance tomography.

The book "Network Tomography: Identifiability, Measurement Design and Network State Inference," published by Cambridge University Press, describes several techniques for indirectly reconstructing a communications network's internal state by examining external information from edge nodes, the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) said Wednesday.

ARL noted the authors also offered best practices and guidelines for using network tomography in various applications such as peer autonomous systems and military coalition networks.

Ananthram Swami, the Army's senior research scientist for network science, said the book "covers all major components of network tomography, from the construction of a measurement system to the computation of the network state of interest."

Researchers plan to expand their work to include inferring link properties to help in resource allocation for tactical network analytics. They are also looking to study network tomography along with topology inference and quantum networks. 

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NASA Tests Imaging System Designed for Moon Landing Safety; Ron Sostaric Quoted
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NASA Tests Imaging System Designed for Moon Landing Safety; Ron Sostaric Quoted

NASA has tested the performance of a hazard detection lidar (HDL) technology in potentially producing images of extraterrestrial planetary surfaces and supporting safe landing for space exploration.

The space agency said Wednesday that its Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) effort prototyped and demonstrated an HDL system at Goddard Space Flight Center.

The HDL operated from a metal rig on a pickup truck and collected 3D images of buildings while traveling at various speeds and angles.

"It can collect 16 million data points in just two seconds, and each range measurement is accurate to about one centimeter,” said Ron Sostaric, SPLICE project manager, said about the HDL prototype.

NASA believes SPLICE's sensors and algorithms could help future Moon missions visualize complex landing sites such as those with shadowed craters and dangerous boulders.

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Army Researchers Develop New ML Framework to Improve In-Vehicle Network Cybersecurity
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Army Researchers Develop New ML Framework to Improve In-Vehicle Network Cybersecurity

U.S. Army researchers have developed a new machine learning-based framework that optimizes the moving target defense method used in protecting in-vehicle computer networks.

The deep reinforcement learning-based resource allocation and moving target defense deployment framework helps identify the optimal internet protocol shuffling frequency and bandwidth allocation for effective moving target defense, the Army said Tuesday.

Frederica Free-Nelson, an Army computer scientist and the DESOLATOR program lead, noted that the framework keeps networks unpredictable for hackers without being costly for operators and affecting computer performance.

By fastly shuffling IP addresses, "the information assigned to the IP quickly becomes lost, and the adversary has to look for it again," explained Terrence Moore, an Army mathematician.

The Army Research Laboratory (ARL) teamed up with Virginia Tech, Australia's University of Queensland and South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology to develop DESOLATOR.

Since it is based on machine learning, the framework can be modified by other researchers to solve various problems.

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DOE Provides $60M to Passenger Car, Vehicle Decarbonization R&D; Secretary Jennifer Granholm Quoted
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DOE Provides $60M to Passenger Car, Vehicle Decarbonization R&D; Secretary Jennifer Granholm Quoted

The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $60 million to 24 research and development projects aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions of passenger cars and trucks. 

The projects will study work on improving electric vehicle batteries and systems, preparing for new mobility technologies, developing lightweight chassis materials, lessening exhaust emissions and understanding the environmental impact of EV innovations, DOE said Wednesday.

Research by General Motors, the University of Pittsburgh and other fund recipients will tackle two of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions in the transportation sector.

"DOE’s investment in these 24 projects will create technologies and techniques that will cut vehicle greenhouse emissions and boost America’s competitiveness in the global clean energy market," said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

The projects, funded through DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Vehicles Technology Office, are in line with the U.S.' goal of maintaining a lead in the battery technology R&D sector.

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