The U.S. Air Force’s Operation Flamethrower will work to get rid of outdated IT policies that challenge network modernization. The initiative has worked to modernize IT policy, and will shift its force to discard policies burdens the Air Force’s move to an enterprise IT-as-a-service model, FedScoop reported on Friday. 

“Operation Flamethrower is all about creating offsets,” said Brig. Gen. Chad Raduege. Flamethrower will leverage offsets to create policy changes that would reduce the network operations stress with automation and secure endpoint weaknesses.

The Air Force have driven a multi-year network transformation journey. The service branch has driven the enterprise IT-as-a-service model to replace outdated legacy systems that are less secure and limit connectivity. 

Operation Flamethrower is also looking to reduce the redundancies created in the transition. “We are trying to figure out how to get from the legacy network where we are today into the future,” Raduege said.

Lauren Knausenberger, deputy chief information officer with the U.S. Air Force and 2021 Wash100 Award recipient, recently discussed how the service branch has leveraged new tactics to increase cybersecurity, modernize its IT framework and launch new platforms that support emerging technologies during GovConWire’s Air Force: IT Plans and Priorities Forum. 

If you missed the Air Force: IT Plans and Priorities Forum, you can still access the OnDemand recording by visiting GovConWire’s Event Archive. 

The Air Force has adopted four main pillars to drive the service branch’s strategy: Digital Foundation, User Experience for Warfighter Effect, Enabling Digital Talent and Attack on Outdated Policy and Redundant IT. 

“From the network layer, zero trust, cloud and DevSecOps, we want to drive new ways of IT and advance our cyber landscape. The threats are more persistent and advanced, so we want to rapidly adopt emerging technologies to protect ourselves,” Knausenberger added. 

In regards to removing and replacing redundant IT, Knausenberger discussed Operation Flamethrower. Led by Raduege and Knausenberger, the project was developed to abandon legacy network-related policies, processes or equipment that are not working. 

In Nov. 2020, Raduege said, “We are going to rapidly identify legacy network things that have run aground. It could either be policy limitations or redundant capabilities, any tools that are providing us with the things we don’t need, we are going to burn to the ground with a flamethrower.”

The Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) has completed three tests of a new anti-jamming capability for satellite communications at the end of 2020, C4ISRNet reported on Friday. 

The Mitigation and Anti-Jam Enhancement (MAJE) Program will provide advanced anti-jamming support for Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS), which provides satellite communications to warfighters. SMC expects to complete the transition of the anti-jamming system to the U.S. Army for operational use in spring 2022.

Once integrated the capability will enable the WGS constellation to pinpoint and mitigate attempts to jam its signal. “The MAJE system will double the anti-jam capabilities for 16,000+ users,” Maj. Shawna Matthys, WGS-11+ program manager, said in a statement.

The system will provide software and hardware upgrades to the Army’s Global SATCOM Configuration Control Element. The ground system will be leveraged to detect, identify, locate and mitigate interference with WGS satellites.

The three tests were conducted virtually with support from prime contractor Boeing. SMC said that the tests “verified system design and MAJE’s ability to provide telemetry and successfully locate signals interfering with WGS satellites.”

The three tests conducted were the maintenance engineering evaluation, the payload application software formal qualification testing, and first article test (FAT) increment 4. 

The last in that list is the test that demonstrated the system’s ability to geolocate signals interfering with WGS. A fifth increment will complete multi-capability and end-to-end testing, which will enable the system to begin interface verification with U.S. Army subsystems.

“The teamwork and transparency between Boeing and the combined government teams to get these capabilities verified in a virtual environment was truly impressive. It shows how dedicated we are to getting these capabilities out to the war fighter despite an ongoing pandemic,” WGS chief engineer Steve Hayden said.

During Potomac Officers Club’s 2021 SDA Forum, notable public and private sector leaders will unite to address the latest initiatives, efficiencies and challenges facing the nation, as we compete to maintain space superiority.

Since its inception in 2019, the Space Development Agency (SDA) has continually worked to develop and modernize architecture concepts, systems designs, innovative technologies and emerging capabilities to enable leaders across the space domain to leverage next-generation space capabilities that increase warfighters’ lethality, maneuverability and survivability.

To register for the 2021 SDA Forum, as well as view upcoming opportunities, visit Potomac Officers Club’s Event Page.

Brandon Wales, who leads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on an acting basis, said CISA must make some changes to prevent federal network breaches, much like an incident that was discovered in Dec. 2020.

He said at a Business Council for International Understanding event that CISA is already working to improve the monitoring of federal network endpoints, FCW reported Thursday.

Wales' statement follows a cyber attack done in late 2020 with the SolarWinds Orion software. He acknowledged that Einstein, a critical part of the National Cybersecurity Protection System, was not enough to prevent the attack.

The acting CISA leader said the agency is now looking for ways to bolster visibility over potentially threatening internal network systems.

Gen. Charles Brown, chief of staff at the U.S. Air Force, said the Joint Chiefs of Staff is creating digital architecture standards as the Department of Defense (DOD) seeks to implement an integrated system of sensors in the battlefield, Nextgov reported Thursday. 

Brown said Wednesday at a Defense Writers Group meeting that chief data officers from all U.S. military service branches are talking about how they would transmit information under the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept.

He noted that JADC2 revolves around how data moves in the multidomain battlefield in support of military readiness. The standards in development would guide how data can rapidly move back and forth as needed, he said.

Frederick Moorefield, a deputy chief information officer at the Department of Defense (DOD), told FCW in an interview published Thursday that spectrum information technology modernization would be one of the first priorities of the newly created Command, Control, Communications Leadership Board at DOD.

“We need to update and modernize our spectrum tools, as an example,” said Moorefield, deputy CIO for command, control, communications and computers and information infrastructure capabilities at DOD. “We believe that automation and tools are one of the biggest things that bridge between today and the future … ultimately going to fully autonomous capabilities in the future … where the machines will be talking to each other, sensing the environment, and moving across different spectrum bands.”

He said the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and other federal agencies will play a role in advancing automation and spectrum IT modernization.

Moorefield also shared his thoughts on the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept and the need for a “flexible and adaptable, software defined kind of operations” to support JADC2.

“One of the things that we're thinking about on the spectrum side is what kind of policies and what kind of acquisition changes need to be made in acquisition policy and strategy to allow for flexible, adaptive, software defined spectrum operations to allow systems operate across a variety of different frequency bands even within their own frequency allocation, if that's what they decide,” he said.

Moorefield also discussed the challenge posed by regulatory spectrum policy and the need for spectrum sharing to be the “new normal.”

“I really believe whoever figures out how to share is going to own the spectrum space,” he said. “The U.S. wants to be the lead for this. We think there's a lot of business in that space. We're trying to push that from an industry perspective. We think there's an opportunity there from an economic perspective, but also from a national security perspective.”