President Biden plans to issue an executive order that will focus on addressing recent cybersecurity issues that could impact the software supply chain, Defense One reported Thursday.

Jeff Greene, acting senior director for cybersecurity at the National Security Council (NSC), told attendees at a Cybersecurity Coalition event that binding requirements under the executive order will be established after at least six months.

He added that the criteria will likely fall under the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) purview. The White House is also rolling out a program to address potential issues associated with the order’s scope, said Greene.

“We're going to need all developers who are selling software to the government to implement more rigorous and predictable mechanisms to ensure that their products and their software behave, both as intended and as designed,” said Greene.

If you're interested in the federal government's cybersecurity initiatives then check out GovCon Wire's Defense Cybersecurity Forum coming up on May 12. Click here to learn more

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced the general availability of Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a new service that uses AWS-developed machine learning models to help customers perform predictive maintenance on the equipment in their facilities.

Amazon Lookout for Equipment ingests sensor data from a customer’s industrial equipment (e.g. pressure, flow rate, RPMs, temperature, and power), and then it trains a unique machine learning model to accurately predict early warning signs of machine failure or suboptimal performance using real-time data streams from the customer’s equipment.

With Amazon Lookout for Equipment, customers can detect equipment abnormalities with speed and precision, quickly diagnose issues, reduce false alerts, and avoid expensive downtime by taking action before machine failures occur.

There are no up-front commitments or minimum fees with Amazon Lookout for Equipment, and customers pay for the amount of data ingested, the compute hours used to train a custom model, and the number of inference-hours used. 

The U.S. Air Force has introduced a new mission statement to highlight the capabilities and competitive advantage that airpower brings to the country and joint operations as they counter near-peer adversaries.

“To fly, fight, and win…airpower anytime, anywhere” is the Air Force’s new mission statement, the service said Thursday.

Gen. Charles Brown, chief of staff of the Air Force, said the service consulted enlisted airmen, officers, guardsmen, civilians and reservists to come up with the mission statement. He also highlighted the role of the total force in advancing airpower.

“Delivering airpower for our nation requires more than just aircraft,” Brown added. “It requires Total Force Airmen – active duty, Guard, Reserve, civilians – in all Air Force specialties working together as a seamless team to operate, maintain and enable our mission and bring the unique capabilities and effects of air power to bear.”

The service has five core missions for airpower and those are air superiority; command and control; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; rapid global mobility; and global strike.

The Department of Commerce (DOC) has named to the entity list seven Chinese institutions for activities that threaten the country’s national security and foreign policy interests. The entities are supercomputer developers that support China’s military modernization and other destabilizing efforts, the department said Thursday.

“Supercomputing capabilities are vital for the development of many – perhaps almost all – modern weapons and national security systems, such as nuclear weapons and hypersonic weapons,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“The Department of Commerce will use the full extent of its authorities to prevent China from leveraging U.S. technologies to support these destabilizing military modernization efforts,” Raimondo added.

The entities added to the list are Shanghai High-Performance Integrated Circuit Design Center, Sunway Microelectronics, Tianjin Phytium Information Technology and national supercomputing centers in Jinan, Shenzhen, Wuxi and Zhengzhou.

The department’s bureau of industry and security uses the entity list as a tool to control the in-country transfer, export and re-export of products subject to the Export Administration Regulations to organizations, companies, or individuals that pose a risk to U.S. national security.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) posted the National Intelligence Council's (NIC) Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, a quadrennial report that details factors that could affect the national security environment over the next two decades.

Demographics, the environment, economics and technology are the four structural forces highlighted in the Global Trends 2040 report, ODNI said Thursday.

According to the release, a major demographic shift is considered as one of the trends that will have an impact on national security because governments face issues of anticipated slow down in global population and economic growth while seeking to enhance productivity through education and infrastructure.

Global Trends 2040 also warned about an increase in the physical effects of climate change that could result in more risks to economic prosperity, energy security, food, health and water.

Rising national debt, a more complex and fragmented trading environment and several other global economic trends are also likely to lessen the flexibility of governments, according to the report.

Technology, on the other hand, is seen as having the potential to help address climate change. The report also claimed that technological developments over the next 20 years will likely increase ever faster and that effort to achieve technological dominance will have economic, military and societal security implications.

The research and development arm of the Department of the Navy has launched an Amazon Web Services-supported cloud environment where Impact Level 6-classified information can be stored and processed.

AWS said Thursday users of the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific’s Secret Wide Area Network and external customers of the Navy and Department of Defense can now access the AWS Secret Region IL-6 environment, enabling classified secret level workloads to be tackled through the commercial cloud.

Delores Washburn, chief engineer of NIWC PAC, said the move is aimed at expanding cloud service coverage from IL-4 and IL-5 to IL-6 projects.

Cloud services with provisional authorization from the Defense Information Systems Agency for secret workloads are provided through the AWS Secret Region.

The environment is in line with a Navy policy aimed at optimizing use of commercial cloud hosting services for operation, sustainment, design and transfer of information technology capabilities.

AWS received a blanket purchase agreement in June 2019 for  DOD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide IL-6 cloud services.

Jump Aero and the California Institute of Technology will develop a machine learning-aided flight controller designed to help the U.S. Air Force boost the safety of emergency response aircraft.

This project supports USAF's Agility Prime program, which aims to speed up the development of commercially made air mobility vehicles applicable to civilian and military use cases, Jump Aero said Wednesday.

The adaptive flight controller would allow pilots to rapidly recalibrate the JA1 electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft when taking damage. JA1 transports first responders for emergency response missions.

USAF expects the new technology to increase the probability of a safe recovery when the aircraft is damaged in battle.

"We look forward to working with Professor Soon-Jo Chung's world-class autonomous systems controls laboratory at Caltech to mature this exciting new technology in the hope that a future electronic parachute will make our aircraft even more damage-tolerant," said Carl Dietrich, founder and president of Jump Aero.

The team will develop the technology under a phase one contract with USAF's Small Business Technology Transfer program.