The U.S. Navy's four public shipyards have adopted corporate best practices as part of an initiative to address challenges associated with the aircraft carrier and submarine maintenance process.

Naval Sea Systems Command said the service worked with Boston Consulting Group to review the production workflow at each facility and determine how approaches used by industry could help shipyard personnel complete work on schedule through the Naval Sustainment Systems – Shipyard program.

The dockyards are Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & IMF, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Norfolk Naval Shipyard.

These facilities kicked off NSS-SY pilot projects earlier this year, using submarine availability projects as testing platforms for process improvement tools and methods.

“These efforts are tied to our foundational elements which are ‘get real,’ which means understanding our current levels of performance; and ‘get better’ in improving our cost and schedule performance to deliver every ship on time, every time,” said Vice Adm. Bill Galinis, commander of NAVSEA.

Galinis added that other shipyards can apply approaches applied under the initiative to improve business operations.

The NSS-SY program supports the branch's Public Shipyard Improvement Plan and builds on the Naval Sustainment System–Aviation effort by the naval fleet readiness centers.

If you're interested in Navy initiatives, check out the Potomac Officers Club's 2021 Navy Forum coming up on May 12. Click here to learn more.

U.S. Space Command has put emphasis on ensuring the domain's security and availability for all nations for transportation and operation, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt, commander of the Combined Force Space Component Command (CFSCC) at Spacecom.

Speaking at a virtual space forum, Burt added that Spacecom prioritizes space domain awareness as intelligence enables the combatant command to know adversaries, Defense.gov reported. "Intell is the baseline for everything that we do," she said.

The combatant command also aims to build up space capabilities to support sea, land, air and cyber space domains while considering space-based electronic warfare to deny enemy capabilities, if necessary.

Other Spacecom priorities are maintaining alliances and partnerships with the U.K., Canada, Australia and other nations, working with NASA, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and other government agencies, and collaborating with industry partners via the commercial integration cell. 

Spacecom currently has 10 commercial partners. "They continue to work with us every day to help us to bring on more combat capability," said Burt.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aims to increase artificial intelligence-related research coordination and partnership efforts through its own virtual AI hub, CIO Journal reported Wednesday.

NOAA intends for its AI center to serve as a data resource that government personnel and the general public can access for purposes such as algorithm and application development.

“We aim to dramatically expand the application of AI in every NOAA mission area by improving the efficiency, effectiveness, and coordination of AI development and usage across the agency,” Sid-Ahmed Boukabara, principal scientist for strategic initiatives at NOAA’s Center for Satellite Applications and Research.

Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., introduced legislation in Sept. 2020 to establish a Center for Artificial Intelligence for NOAA, the provisions of which were incorporated into the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021.

In October, the agency’s Satellite and Information Service signed an agreement with Google to explore the potential of AI and machine learning tools for environmental and weather research data processing.

The three-year other transaction agreement covers joint efforts to offer AI training opportunities for NOAA employees and integrate the technology into agency processes.

Michael White, principal director for Hypersonics at the Office of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering OUSD (R&E), said the Department of Defense’s (DOD) modernization strategy considers hypersonics as one of the top priorities in order to ensure edge on the battlefield, DOD News reported Monday. 

"[Hypersonics] capability is so important [that] the 2017 National Defense Strategy establishes [DOD's] need to deter and, if necessary, defeat our great-power competitors, China and Russia,” White said. "And for more than a decade, these great-power competitors have been rapidly developing highly capable systems that challenge our domain dominance on the tactical battlefield."

Systems that pose a challenge to U.S. weapon platforms include hypersonic missiles, air-missile defense platforms, anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles and systems that compress the timelines of a tactical battlefield.

White said the Pentagon came up with the Hypersonics Modernization Strategy to advance the development of hypersonic-based warfighting capabilities in order to address the challenges posed by adversaries’ weapon systems.

"This strategy consists of a long-range responsive strike against time-critical, high-value targets where we are fielding a family of air-, land- and sea-launch, conventionally armed hypersonic strike weapons," White said. “These weapons will be designed for the defeat of maritime coastal and inland targets of critical importance on a timescale of relevance for the tactical battlefield.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected eight teams that will compete in the systems competition final event of DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge. 

The DARPA- and self-funded teams will have their robots look for trapped survivors, invisible gas, cell phones and other common items in underground environments at the Louisville Mega Cavern in Kentucky as part of the SubT Challenge final event that will take place from Sept. 21 to 23, DARPA said Monday.

The eight teams are the CollaborativE walking & flying RoBots for autonomous ExploRation in Underground Settings or CERBERUS; Coordinated Robotics; Collaborative SubTerranean Autonomous Resilient Robots or CoSTAR; CSIRO Data61; Czech Technical University – Center for Robotics and Autonomous Systems – Northern Robotics Laboratory or CTU-CRAS-NORLAB; Explorer; Multi-agent Autonomy with Radar-Based Localization for Exploration or MARBLE; and Robotika.

The CERBERUS team includes the University of Nevada, Reno; University of California, Berkeley; Sierra Nevada; Flyability; Oxford Robotics Institute; and Norwegian University for Science and Technology.

Coordinated Robotics is composed of California State University; California State University, Channel Islands; Oke Onwuka; Sequoia Middle School in Newbury Park, California; and Coordinated Robotics.

The CoSTAR team consists of Jet Propulsion Laboratory; California Institute of Technology; MIT; KAIST in South Korea; and Lulea University of Technology in Sweden.

Czech Technical University and Universite Laval constitute the CTU-CRAS-NORLAB team, while the Explorer team is composed of Carnegie Mellon University and Oregon State University.

The MARBLE team includes the University of Colorado in Boulder and Denver, Scientific Systems and the University of California in Santa Cruz.

Robotika International, Robotika.cz, Centre for Field Robotics Czech University of Life Science and the Cogito team in Switzerland constitute the Robotika team.

“Complex underground settings present significant challenges for military and civilian first responders,” said Timothy Chung, a program manager at DARPA’s tactical technology office. “The DARPA SubT Challenge is looking for novel approaches to rapidly map, navigate, and search underground environments during time-sensitive combat operations or disaster response scenarios.”

The teams will compete across Tunnel, Cave and Urban subdomain circuits. First place winners will get a prize of $2 million, second will receive $1 million and third place winners will get $500,000.

DARPA will also hold a virtual competition for the SubT Challenge and will accept entries through June 29 with plans to announce qualifiers by summer.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has begun to assess its efforts to address cyber threats coming from foreign entities potentially involved in supply chain disruption and ransomware cases, CyberScoop reported Friday.

The review, which is set to run for four months, will tackle the ransomware cryptocurrencies employed by enemy nations and criminal organizations. Ransomware uses encryption to block a victim from accessing files unless a demanded amount of money is paid.

Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said at the Munich Cybersecurity Conference that the government has to work with the private sector and other partners to cope up with challenges brought by malicious actors.