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Air Force Team Launches AI Assistant for Aircrew Chief Fundamentals Course; Maj. Jesse Johnson Quoted
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Air Force Team Launches AI Assistant for Aircrew Chief Fundamentals Course; Maj. Jesse Johnson Quoted

A U.S. Air Force technology team has introduced new artificial intelligence assistants to help train airmen during their virtual reality-enabled fundamentals training course.

Trainees under the Crew Chief Fundamentals Course can ask questions to and receive instructions from a so-called AI Airman about various basic topics, the Air Force said Monday.

Aside from interacting with real airmen, the AI system could continuously measure the trainees' competencies and monitor their performance throughout their Air Force careers beyond the course.

The change by the Tech Training Transformation team is part of an Air Force effort to take the focus of instructions to students away from instructors.

"We’re no longer making you fit our content, we’re changing our content to match your needs," said T3 Commander Maj. Jesse Johnson. "Not only does this program give more resources to students, it also keeps up with a new generation of learners who perform best outside of a traditional classroom."

The Air Force is planning to launch the Crew Chief Fundamentals Course at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas in 2022. The service also looks at adapting the AI system for use in personalized training through smartphones.

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New NASA Drill to Look for Water Traces in Moon’s South Pole; Janine Captain Quoted
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New NASA Drill to Look for Water Traces in Moon’s South Pole; Janine Captain Quoted

NASA is sending a new rotary percussive drill to the Moon as part of the Artemis program to measure amounts of water and other resources on the lunar surface.

The Honeybee Robotics-developed Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain will repeatedly dig about three feet into the soil in the lunar south pole without needing an astronaut operator, NASA said Monday.

Attached to the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 lander, TRIDENT will extract multiple samples for examination by the Mass Spectrometer observing lunar operations for possible traces of water.

"These measurements will help us start to understand the distribution of resources on the lunar surface, a key to enabling a long-term presence on the Moon," explained Janine Captain, principal investigator for MSolo.

TRIDENT will be delivered to the Moon by private companies through NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract. It will reach the Moon more than five decades after NASA first drilled into the lunar surface using the Apollo Lunar Surface Drill in 1971.

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DOE Invests $60M for Assessments Helping Manufacturers Become Energy-Efficient; Secretary Jennifer Granholm Quoted
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DOE Invests $60M for Assessments Helping Manufacturers Become Energy-Efficient; Secretary Jennifer Granholm Quoted

The Department of Energy has invested $60 million into a group of universities to conduct industrial assessments that would help small and medium-sized businesses transition to energy-efficient manufacturing processes. 

The cohort of university-based Industrial Assessment Centers will work on reducing carbon emissions, lowering energy costs and training energy-efficient workers of various manufacturers, DOE said Monday.

Selected IACs will also train students and professionals from various backgrounds to assess the energy rating of small to medium-sized buildings in disadvantaged communities and other areas in the U.S.

"America’s best and brightest university students are successfully helping local manufacturers reduce pollution, save energy, and cut their electricity bills," said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

Among the funded academic institutions are West Virginia University, Michigan State University, the University of Connecticut, the Colorado School of Mines and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

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Rep. Bill Foster Presents Bill to Update DOE National Laboratories
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Rep. Bill Foster Presents Bill to Update DOE National Laboratories

Rep. Bill Foster, D-Ill., has introduced a bill that would task the Department of Energy to modernize and restore national laboratories. H.R.4514 would have the secretary of energy invest funds in national laboratory restoration projects and similar efforts, according to the Congress website.

DOE's 17 national laboratories offer supercomputers, scientific facilities and expertise to address various world challenges such as those related to climate change and nuclear security.

Ames Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory are among these sites.

Foster, who is also a scientist, uses his expertise to contribute to the nation's energy policy. His contributions to U.S. energy and environment can be found here.

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OPM Provides Guidance to Help Agencies Reenter Work Environments
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OPM Provides Guidance to Help Agencies Reenter Work Environments

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has answered frequently asked questions and developed a fact sheet to help federal employees safely return to the physical work environment. 

This new guidance supports a memorandum issued by OPM, the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to assist in work environment reentry, OPM said Friday.

The FAQ set addresses matters related to human resource policies vital to work reentry. These policies include those related to teleworking and remote working.

The fact sheet guides agencies on how to determine official worksites, remote work arrangements and travel benefits, which are factors to consider in work reentry.

The guidance also teaches about the two different types of telework: routine and situational and gives steps on how to properly revoke telework arrangements.

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CAES Wins Multiple Contracts to Advance Missile Seeker Technology; CEO Mike Kahn Quoted
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CAES Wins Multiple Contracts to Advance Missile Seeker Technology; CEO Mike Kahn Quoted

CAES has received multiple contracts from an advanced U.S. missile defense program to provide RF, microwave rotary joints and waveguide products and integrate them into the system’s missile seeker to provide industry-leading performance and reliability.

“When a system must perform in high-stakes situations such as missile defense, customers come to CAES for our engineering and manufacturing expertise in this area,” said Mike Kahn, president and CEO of CAES and a 2021 Wash100 Award recipient.

CAES solutions improve the reliability of transmission and reception to enhance the overall performance of missile seekers and have a long history of innovation that spans more than four decades. 

“We are proud to work with our valued customer to provide high performance, low SWaP (size, weight and power) RF technologies for missile seekers,” Kahn continued.

CAES waveguides can be customized to create integrated assemblies that serve as a complete modular transmit/receive devices. CAES additionally specializes in custom structural solutions and integrated waveguides from cast to 3D printed to hybrid.

About CAES

CAES is a pioneer of advanced electronics for the most technologically challenging military and aerospace trusted systems. As the largest provider of mixed-signal and radiation-hardened technology to the United States aerospace and defense industry, CAES delivers high-reliability RF, microwave and millimeter wave, microelectronic and digital solutions that enable our customers to ensure a safer, more secure planet.

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Tyto Athene Receives $43.5M DOE Contract to Support Oak Ridge Federal-Integrated Communications Network; Operations VP Jason Alexander Quoted
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Tyto Athene Receives $43.5M DOE Contract to Support Oak Ridge Federal-Integrated Communications Network; Operations VP Jason Alexander Quoted

Mutual Telecom Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tyto Athene, received a potential five-year, $43.5 million Department of Energy (DOE) contract to support the Oak Ridge Federal-Integrated Communications Network (ORF-ICN), the company announced on Tuesday.

“Tyto is honored to have been selected to continue its partnership with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge community in providing integrated network maintenance services to the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the nation’s largest multi-program science and technology lab,” said Jason Alexander, vice president of Operations at Tyto Athene.

The ORF-ICN provides comprehensive telecommunications networking services to the DOE and other Government agencies located throughout Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This marks the first time that a company has successfully won back-to-back contracts in support of the ORF-ICN.

Tyto will apply Mission-Focused Digital Transformation, our proven service improvement framework, to deliver innovative and emerging technologies which increase the resiliency of DOE’s IT infrastructure and meet the evolving needs of Oak Ridge’s missions.

“We look forward to continuing to deliver the highest level of service in support of this mission-critical program for the Department of Energy and our nation,” Alexander added.

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Gen. John Hyten on ‘Expanded Maneuver’ Concept
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Gen. John Hyten on ‘Expanded Maneuver’ Concept

Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a two-time Wash100 Award winner, said the Department of Defense (DOD) has developed a concept called “expanded maneuver” to deter Russia and China from future aggression, DOD News reported Monday.

He said expanded maneuver highlights the need for DOD to understand how adversaries operate across all domains and how to deter them while safeguarding Pentagon and coalition forces.

Hyten said there are four functional combat areas within expanded maneuver and those are contested logistics, joint fires, joint all-domain command and control and information advantage. With JADC2, he said there should be a flow of data everywhere.

“The goal is to be fully connected to a combat cloud that has all information that you can access at any time, any place … to be able to act quickly on that,” Gen. Hyten said during his remarks at the launch of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute.

Under the joint fires concept, he said services should be able to fire from all domains while making it impossible for adversaries to defend themselves against those fires.

“That’s a purely aspirational requirement, but I hope everybody can see that if you could do that you would change the equation on any future battlefield,” Hyten added.

POC - Building the Future Battle: The Keys to JADC2

The Potomac Officers Club will host a virtual event on JADC2 on Aug. 31. Register here to join POC’s Building the Future Battle: The Keys to JADC2 event and learn more about the fundamental principles and systems needed to advance JADC2 implementation.

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Michael Weiskopff: DOD Helps Defense Industrial Base Identify Cybersecurity Gaps
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Michael Weiskopff: DOD Helps Defense Industrial Base Identify Cybersecurity Gaps

Michael Weiskopff, a division chief at the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3), said that DC3's Defense Industrial Base Collaborative Information Sharing Environment (DCISE) offers some services intended to help industry partners identify and assess cybersecurity vulnerabilities, Federal News Network reported Monday. 

Weiskopff told FNN in an interview that small companies are trying to address cybersecurity challenges by signing up with a security service provider or adopting a cloud service platform, but not all offerings are “foolproof solutions."

He noted that the DCISE group uses a cyber resilience analysis service in efforts to help smaller companies address security gaps and believes the service could assist vendors pursuing the DOD's Cybersecurity Model Maturity Certification (CMMC) program to potentially gauge their cyber posture.

The group also has a platform, called Krystal Ball, that generates threat scores on specific businesses or answer queries about DIB partners affected by a vulnerability, such as a Hafnium indicator of compromise on systems using the Microsoft Exchange Server, according to Weiskopff.

Michael Weiskopff: DOD Helps Defense Industrial Base Identify Cybersecurity Gaps

ExecutiveBiz, sister site of ExecutiveGov, will host the "Supply Chain Cybersecurity: Revelations and Innovations" event on Oct. 26th. Join the virtual forum to hear from GovCon executives as they share insight on cybersecurity issues facing the public and private sectors.

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Joe Bryan: DOD Works to Become More Energy Efficient in Response to Climate Change
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Joe Bryan: DOD Works to Become More Energy Efficient in Response to Climate Change

Joe Bryan, senior climate adviser to the secretary of the Department of Defense, said climate change has implications for U.S. national security and DOD is initiating efforts to become more energy-efficient, DOD News reported Monday.

"Climate change is going to cost us in resources and readiness and the reality is that it already is," he said at a forum Monday.

As an example, he cited that military installations are advancing energy storage and distributed generation using energy from solar and landfill gas.

"We know that we're not going to get a free pass to push fuel into theater; so we can't be aggressive enough in reducing operational energy demand," he said of the need to ship fuel abroad to power aircraft, vehicles and ships. 

Bryan said the Pentagon is working to lessen the demand for operational energy by reducing aircraft drag, making engine enhancements on ships and fielding hybrid-electric tactical vehicles, among other approaches.

He mentioned the current administration's move to prioritize local production of lithium-ion batteries and how that investment could help advance EV deployment.

"The commercial EV [electric vehicle] industry is actually critical to DOD capability. The scale and shift to electrical transportation is massive and fast," he noted.

POC - Bolstering Climate Resilience for National Security

If you're interested to know about the national security implications of climate change and how data analytics can inform agencies’ climate adaptation strategies, then check out the Potomac Officers Club's Bolstering Climate Resilience for National Security Forum coming up on Sept. 14th. To register for this forum and view other upcoming events, visit the POC Events page.

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