The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) could further test air launch and recovery of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles with an industry team led by Leidos' Dynetics subsidiary in October or Nov., Military.com reported Friday.

Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson, deputy commander of Air Mobility Command, hinted at the next demonstration for DARPA's Gremlins program during a Defense News-hosted event and he said the effort is an example of how a military asset like cargo aircraft can be used for a different mission.

Dynetics bested three other participants to win a contract in 2018 to help DARPA build and fly drones for the third phase of the program.

The Gremlins team conducted its third test flight of X-61A UAVs with the manned C-130 transport aircraft in late 2020 to demonstrate system safety and aerial docking operations.

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions performs fabrication, assembly, integration and testing work on the air vehicle as a key member of Dynetics' team.

Military.com quoted Steve Fendley, president of Kratos' unmanned systems division, as saying the government is looking to add mission requirements to the drone swarming concept.

The Department of Defense rolled out its electronic health record system to 25 additional military installations in 12 states as part of the Wave Carson Plus deployment effort, Federal News Network reported Friday. DOD’s deployment of the Cerner-built MHS Genesis EHR system is about 33 percent complete with 42,000 active users.

“This was really a good experience for us to learn how to navigate those geographic challenges because it was the broadest geographic range we had done to date,” said Holly Joers, acting program executive officer for defense healthcare management systems.

“Coming out of that deployment, we’re able to look at how we can leverage virtual support as much as practical. We’re also using our ‘pay it forward’ campaign to get folks who actually use the system today to go forward to the new sites, so they can lend help to their peers to understand the nuances of using the system,” Joers added.

DOD will next field the EHR system at all military treatment facilities in Hawaii and expects those rollouts to conclude by the end of September. Joers said the department has begun preparation work for those deployment waves.

The Pentagon plans to conduct eight implementation waves in 2022 to install MHS Genesis at military health facilities at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland Air Force Base, Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas; Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Eglin Air Force Base in Florida; Fort Gordon in Georgia; and Navy facilities in Jacksonville, Florida.

“We’re going out next week to kick off the Eglin Air Force Base and Jacksonville waves, and we start this process about 18 months out with a kickoff discussion with the commanders,” Joers said.

“While we may discover things that we can learn along the way, the process itself is standardized. We know what to expect; we know how to convey to the commander what to expect as part of the deployment and adoption. Those are the things that give us confidence that we can handle the stacked waves,” she added.

Military and civilian security researchers discovered 238 vulnerabilities within a range of two applications during the third iteration of the Hack the Army challenge of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) and the U.S. Army.

Of those vulnerabilities, 102 were designated critical threats that require immediate remediation, HackerOne said Thursday. The Army and DDS awarded over $150,000 in bug bounties to civilian hackers during the six-week Hack the Army 3.0 challenge that started in Jan. 2021. 

Maya Kuang, Army product manager at DDS, told HackerOne in an interview that the rise in identified vulnerabilities during the challenge could be looked at as an increase in the testing surface and could be attributed to two factors.

“One factor is that the hacker community is pushing the boundaries of what we know in cybersecurity on every engagement and do not hesitate to test out different processes. The other factor on our side when we work with internal partners is the increased understanding of the vetted, crowdsourced testing model and the receptiveness toward it,” Kuang said.

Johann Wallace, compliance division chief at Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), cited the advantages of conducting Hack the Army to the service branch.

“Hack the Army does a tremendous job of exposing content and coding errors that our normal compliance-based scanning had overlooked. Just because a system is patched doesn’t mean that it’s secure, and an engagement like Hack the Army allows us to leverage additional subject-matter expertise to look at more assets faster than we do with our internal vulnerability assessment teams alone,” Wallace said.

If you want to know more about the latest updates about the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, then check out Potomac Officers Club’s CMMC Forum coming up on June 16th. 

CMMC Accreditation Body Chairman Karlton Johnson will serve as the keynote speaker for the Forum to provide his overview and vision of the CMMC Rollout as well as the top priorities for the board and how industry feedback will help to improve the vision behind how the organization develops for the first 100 days.

To register for this virtual forum and view other upcoming events, visit the POC Events page.

Iridium Communications Inc. announced the launch of Operation Arctic Lynx (OAL) on Thursday. The Operation is a series of partnership-driven field exercises deploying Iridium and Iridium-connected technologies that involve over 20 organizations, primarily focused above 60 degrees north latitude and stretching as far as 82 degrees north latitude.  

During the Operation, Iridium and Iridium-connected weather resilient satellite communications technology will be deployed by a mix of on-base, communications-on-the-move (COTM), at-the-halt (ATH) and remote environment applications.  

"Iridium's Arctic and Antarctic communications capabilities have long been a part of the fabric of government, NGO and civil enterprise activities in those regions and now with our upgraded constellation and new technologies developed, we have turbocharged our portfolio of solutions to address an increasing range of polar communication requirements," commented Scott Scheimreif, Iridium’s EVP. 

OAL will take place between June 11th and June 26th, 2021. The international contingent of organizations participating in the Operation includes existing Iridium customers such as the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. federal agencies, Alaska state and local organizations, Canadian government organizations, scientific research organizations and many aerospace industry companies.

The technologies that will be featured include weather-resilient broadband (Iridium Certus), Iridium Push-To-Talk, various unattended sensors capable of tracking, environmental monitoring, remote control functions and managing data and image delivery and beyond-visual-line-of-sight (Iridium Global Line of SightSM).

Iridium is the only commercial satellite communications company with global coverage and a 20-plus year pedigree of providing reliable Arctic communications.

 "With more than 20 participating organizations, Operation Arctic Lynx will exercise the ability to provide real-time interoperability, communications-on-the-move, command-and-control and develop and maintain a common operational picture in austere polar regions. We're proud to have so many esteemed organizations participating," added Scheimreif. 

The U.S. Army and its partners from the University of Texas at El Paso have developed an integrated platform designed to help analysts evaluate the performance of cybersecurity algorithms in specific situations.

The repeatable experimentation system (RES) virtualizes, emulates, simulates and contains algorithms to help analysts run situation-based assessments, the Army said Thursday. Analysts can use RES to simultaneously run multiple experiments with algorithms in a parallel manner, then render the results for the use of other security researchers.

“This technique constantly shuffles or changes system properties in order to nullify any intelligence information that an adversary may have and that may be used to compromise systems," said Jaime Acosta from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) within the service branch's Combat Capabilities Development Command.

Acosta and his team also developed a standard mechanism that would allow RES users to produce and share experimentation workflows. The International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Systems scheduled for Sept. will virtually feature the team's research.

David Koch, chief of research and development at the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), said DLA will use artificial intelligence to determine an item's demand in supply chain activities, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

Koch said at the Federal Drive show that AI has the potential to help the agency predict warfighters' future demand for items that are currently low-demand.

The future demand of currently high-demand items are easier to predict compared to low-demand items. Koch said AI technology may help DLA reduce the prediction gap between high-demand and low-demand items.

The Department of Defense's Joint AI Center (JAIC) will help DLA harness the technology to forecast item demands. The logistics agency also eyes using AI to manage supply chain risks.

The General Services Administration (GSA) held a virtual event to foster discussion on the federal fleet of service vehicles, with topics that tackle the fleet's electrification.

The FedFleet 2021 event ran from June 7th to 10th with the participation of over 2.200 professionals in the areas of automotive and fleet management, GSA said Thursday.

GSA is working to electrify its fleet, which currently consists of 600,000 non-tactical vehicles in total. The agency has so far implemented 455 charging stations at U.S. federal buildings, as the fleet's electric vehicle infrastructure continues to develop.

Katy Kale, acting GSA administrator and a 2021 Wash100 Award winner, delivered the event's closing remarks.

“GSA is embracing this opportunity to do our part to help make America the global leader in electric vehicle fleet production and adoption,” said Kale. “And we are keeping equity at the center of our work. We want everyone to have access to the benefits and opportunities that come with electrifying the federal fleet including good-paying jobs, improved air quality, and better quality of life.”