Sailors learned how to use additive manufacturing or 3D printing equipment with the help of Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Crane Division.

Steven Seghi and Eric St. Ours, engineers at NSWC Crane, stayed at the USS Boxer amphibious assault ship for two weeks to help onboard sailors gain oh-hand experience with AM technology, Naval Sea Systems Command said Thursday.

“We provided AM and Computer Aided Design (CAD) training, which provided the sailors with the skills and best practices required to design and print needed parts onboard ship,” St. Ours said.

Sailors demonstrated their learnings by producing a 3D printed small plastic closure found in washing machines. The training effort made use of funds allotted for Naval Innovative Science and Engineering.

The Navy began installing AM systems aboard ships in 2018, and ended up having the technology on eight vessels in 2020.

Lori Mongold, chief of strategic operations enterprise at the U.S Army Management Office, said she expects the service to prioritize enterprise-level data and cloud strategies within five years, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

Mongold told the publication in an interview aired Thursday that she envisions the Army to develop its abilities to execute seamless data management and stay ahead of adversaries in that domain.

She noted that the Army takes a hybrid approach to data gathering and storage in line with other strategic efforts such as appointing a chief data officer. Data governance also serves as a cultural issue in the military branch, which must work to drive data-sharing efforts to really benefit from data, according to Mongold.

“An Army is structured to make life and death decisions. So if we can have data available, we understand that data and we use that data in a way we become data dominant. And that means we have leverage over our adversary and our senior leaders can make risk-informed decisions,” she said.

NASA has invested $45 million in 365 small business projects that support the areas of space science and technology, aeronautics and human exploration.

The space agency said Thursday it funds these companies with up to $125,000 each for the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program's first phase, where they demonstrate the feasibility of proposed technologies.

“This year, to get funds into the hands of small businesses sooner, we accelerated the release of the 2021 SBIR/STTR Phase I solicitation by two months,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for the NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

Initial phase contracts under SBIR are effective for six months, as STTR contracts last for 13 months. NASA awards STTR contracts to partnerships between a small business and a research institution.

Awardees include Connecticut-based Syrnatec, which will develop radiation-tolerant diodes with the potential to enable environment-friendly high power in space.

California-based Qubitekk will work with the University of New Mexico under STTR to develop a compact hardware package for securing satellite communications.

Gen. Richard Clarke, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said the command is looking into encryption and electronic warfare techniques to advance military communications operations, FedScoop reported Thursday.

Clarke said at a hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee that he “personally changed" the command’s priorities and restructured its funding operations to modernize encryption-related concepts.

USSOCOM is also prioritizing initiatives involving data management and artificial intelligence, including a pilot effort on AI-driven “pathfinder” technology for large-scale use, he added.

“We also have to have encrypted communications and electronic warfare capabilities so that our forces…reduce the probability of them to be targeted,” said Clarke.

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Lookout for Metrics, a new fully managed service that detects anomalies in metrics and helps determine their root cause. 

Amazon Lookout for Metrics helps customers monitor the most important metrics for their business like revenue, web page views, active users, transaction volume, and mobile app installations with greater speed and accuracy. 

The service also makes it easier to diagnose the root cause of anomalies like unexpected dips in revenue, high rates of abandoned shopping carts, spikes in payment transaction failures, increases in new user sign-ups, and many more—all with no machine learning experience required. 

With Amazon Lookout for Metrics, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee, and customers pay only for the number of metrics analyzed per month. 

The U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command assembled a group of technical professionals to help update infrastructure that interconnects service personnel, architecture, processes, physical and logical topology and cyber operations.

Task Force Aquila (TFA) has been tasked to monitor changes to the Marine Corps Enterprise Network (MCEN) through a process-based method, perform technology assessments and provide recommendations on system performance and security, USMC said Thursday.

“Because the MCEN is a complex system of systems, assessing changes requires pooling technical expertise, and test infrastructure and resources from across the naval enterprise,” said Mike O’Neil, senior engineer for emerging technology at the Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity.

David Goosman, lead architect for TFA, said the task force will employ architectural analysis and data-driven models to help inform the branch’s decision-making process.

The group aims to build a digital twin of the network for its efforts to replicate components and assess complex systems before implementing a technology product. The team will also propose possible MCEN enhancements that could support tactical operations.

The U.S. Space Force is allowing the loan of precise positioning service receiver cards for use in military GPS capability testing work in partner nations as part of a three-year multinational initiative established by USSF's Space and Missile Systems Center.

Project Arrangement took effect when Canada co-signed the document in Dec. and the Canadian government received the initial M-code PSS receivers last month, USSF said Thursday.

The arrangement calls for U.S. allies to test Increment 1 Military GPS User Equipment at laboratories and on the field and share data from MGUE performance and compatibility tests.

USSF projected that France, Germany, South Korea and the U.K. will receive Increment 1 MGUE technology. The military branch noted that Australia, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands intend to join the loan program later this year.

Space and Missile Systems Center coordinated with the Department of Defense's chief information officer and the U.S. Air Force's deputy undersecretary for international affairs to create the program.

M-code technology is designed to help secure positioning, navigation and timing systems against jamming or spoofing attacks.