The Department of Defense (DoD) has entered into an agreement with six allied counterparts to conduct research into the environmental conditions of the Earth’s polar regions, C4ISRnet reported Sunday. 

The DOD will work with the governments of New Zealand, Canada, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden to study the Arctic and the regions south of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans as part of the International Cooperative Engagement Program for Polar Research (ICE-PPR) program.

ICE-PPR comes as part of the U.S. Navy’s efforts to survey the Arctic landscape to potentially gain an advantage over Russia and China.

The memorandum of understanding, signed in November, tasks the group to conduct environmental observations and modeling as part of initial research activities. The group will also facilitate exchanges and study underwater phenomena as well as human factors as part of ICE-PPR.

“ICE-PPR is unique from NATO working groups and other activities in that the goal is for project work, not just information exchanges,” noted John Woods, deputy director of the Office of Naval Research Global's International Engagement Office.

The agreement will expire in 25 years.

The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) wants to make every non-secret government document digitally available via the govinfo website and the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications. GPO said it will gather these documents from the National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information.

“GPO’s pledge to make every U.S. Government document publicly accessibly is another way GPO is keeping America informed and is an important pillar supporting our democracy,” said Hugh Nathanial Halpern, director of GPO.

The office said it will identify, gather, digitize, authenticate and catalog these publications for public access. The govinfo website is a digital repository compliant with the International Organization for Standardization.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) plans to use the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract for storage, edge computing and other areas and Jack Gumtow, chief information officer of DIA, said storage-as-a-service is one of the capabilities he intends to focus on once C2E becomes ready, Federal News Network reported Friday.

“If a program needs, for example, 100 gigs worth of data, but in reality they only use 10, and we’ve allocated 100, I’ve got 90 gigs that are just spinning and is never used. So we’re buying that much storage when I only need a percentage of that storage. I think storage-as-a-service will help change some of that,” Gumtow said.

DIA also plans to use the follow-on to the Commercial Cloud Services contract to bring cloud to the edge and one of those efforts is the modernization of a classified environment for the intelligence community called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System.

“We’re going to completely modernize that with three levels of effort. The first LoE is a technical refresh because it’s dated and a lot of the equipment is at the end of life. The second one is enhancing security. The third one is the modernization piece,” he said of JWICS modernization.

In November, the CIA awarded the C2E contract to Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

Gumtow was one of the panelists during the Potomac Officers Club’s 2nd Annual CIO Forum. If you missed the virtual event, you can still access the On-Demand footage by visiting the Potomac Officers Club Event Archive.

Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, director of the U.S. Army’s Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO), said the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office and the U.S. Air Force will host a demonstration of counter-sUAS platforms in April at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

JCO will downselect a low-collateral effects interceptor that could be purchased by all services through a contract, National Defense reported Monday. JCO plans to pick an initial capability by fiscal year 2022 for procurement and deployment.

“Ultimately, our goal is to align existing and future counter-UAS solutions to best address warfighter needs while applying more resources effectively,” Gainey said. “We don’t see the counter-UAS problem set as one enduring solution, we see it as a range of capabilities integrated into a common … [command-and-control system] that gives you the ability to address threats across the range of threats out there, and have the ability to keep up with the pace of” evolving challenges.

He added that his office is testing directed energy capabilities against unmanned platforms.

“We have high-energy lasers that have proven successful in the contingency environment,” Gainey noted. “We’re building off of that capability to where you will see high-energy lasers integrated into our architecture — some of them are integrated now — and it is a matter of scaling it up to the ultimate scale that we want.”

In January, the Department of Defense (DoD) unveiled a strategy to establish a framework for addressing and countering small UAS. Ready the Force, Defend the Force and Build the Team are the DoD Counter-sUAS Strategy’s three lines of effort.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville told Government Matters in an interview posted Sunday about the service’s plan to shift to a new talent management system that could help meet the demand for warfighters who are skilled in coding, data management and artificial intelligence.

The plan comes as the Army intends to form two multidomain task forces in the Pacific and another unit in Europe that will provide intelligence, space, electronic warfare, long-range precision fires and other capabilities.

He told host Francis Rose that the new system will enable the Army to manage soldiers and know about their knowledge, behaviors, skills and preferences.

McConville talked about the service’s software factory. Under the Project Convergence, he said the Army realized that it would “need soldiers that can write software on the battlefield.”

“We have a tremendous amount of soldiers that have that talent, that code, that want to write software and now we’re going to bring them in. … Now, we need to have a management capability to make sure they are promoted, they are incentivized for their talents,” McConville said.

To register for this virtual forum, visit the GovConWire Events page.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has launched the Federal Workforce Competency Initiative (FWCI), a workforce data collection effort that aims to support recruitment, training, performance management, career development, job design and other human capital activities by updating agencies' competency models with current data.

Kathleen McGettigan, acting director of OPM, said in a statement published Friday the Federal Workforce Competency Initiative will provide agencies with data needed to strengthen workforce across the federal government and enable effective human capital management.

FWCI will start the phase one survey on April 26 and will engage with employees and supervisors in over 350 occupational series to identify relevant general competencies and tasks across the federal government.

The survey will take approximately three weeks. The initiative is designed to help OPM and agencies enhance efficiency and lower costs, and support the development of Code of Federal Regulations-compliant assessments.

FWCI will also update OPM's Multipurpose Occupational Systems Analysis Inventory—Closed-ended studies.

The Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology directorate will collaborate with the Niceville, Florida-based nonprofit DefenseWerx organization to establish an innovation hub that can support DHS’ mission requirements.

S&T and DWX seek to engage the small business community and the educational sector in efforts to develop, transition and commercialize technology across five task areas under a partnership intermediary agreement, the directorate said Friday.

The nonprofit will help review S&T’s current innovation environment and recommend approaches on how to move homeland security inventions to the marketplace.

DWX also serves as a partnership intermediary for U.S. military organizations such as the Air Force Research Laboratory, Naval Post Graduate School and Army Cyber Command.

Established in 2012, DWX maintains five innovation centers throughout the country.

Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren Division has tested a ground/air radar system designed to detect ground weapons and provide air surveillance for any platform of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Danny Mudd, a U.S. Navy engineer, led a team to test the AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar (G/ATOR) system, Naval Sea Systems Command said Thursday. He leads the program team for G/ATOR and serves as the radar operations manager for NSWCDD’s sensor software engineering branch.

“We provide government support to the program office, located in Quantico, and develop test procedures for the radar system,” said Bill Shea, G/ATOR technical program manager at Mudd’s same branch.

Involved personnel assessed the safety protocols of the new G/ATOR during the first week of testing. The G/ATOR team plans to augment the system’s software capabilities in further testing.