Stuart McGuigan, chief information officer of the State Department, said the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the department to accelerate the deployment of collaboration and productivity tools to remote employees in order for them to perform critical work, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

“We had this existential demand that the longer we took to provide access to these applications, the longer people were unable to work at all,” he said Wednesday during the AFCEA Bethesda 2020 Tech Summit. McGuigan said he wants the culture change as a result of the pandemic to continue within the department.

“The ability to dynamically form a team, share information, share analytics, make a decision, and then execute is something we want to continue,” he said.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday asked Rear Adm. Douglas Small, head of Naval Information Warfare (NAVWAR) Systems Command, to lead an effort called Project Overmatch to develop a network that will link manned ships, submarines and aircraft to unmanned vessels to facilitate targeting information and intelligence sharing, Breaking Defense reported Wednesday.

“Your goal is to enable a Navy that swarms the sea, delivering synchronized lethal and non-lethal effects from near-and-far, every axis, and every domain,” Gilday told Small in the Oct. 1 memo obtained by the publication.

“Specifically, you are to develop the networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools, and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable our sustained maritime dominance,” the memo reads. 

Gilday expects Small to come up with a plan by December 2020. During a virtual discussion, Gilday noted that he expects the Navy’s version of a tactical network to connect to the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) system of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force.

The memo comes as the Navy prepares to release a shipbuilding plan, which could include over 200 unmanned ships equipped with sensors and weapons systems.

The U.S. Army has conducted an exercise to test a Raytheon Technologies-built tool designed to handle real-time electronic warfare data from sensor networks to execute battle commands.

The Army assessed the capacity of the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool (EWPMT) to transmit and receive over-the-air data information for command operations during the Cyber Quest 20 exercise, C4ISRnet reported Tuesday.

Col. Daniel Holland, capabilities manager for electronic warfare at the Army, previously said that the tool will support the intelligence, information, cyber, electronic warfare and space (I2CEWS) operations of the service branch's Multidomain Task Force in the Pacific.

“The EWPMT control demonstration was the first time a remote sensor was tasked and re-tasked by EWPMT over the air across a tactical network,” he noted.

To be effective, electronic warfare officers must have the ability to remotely control and manage the sensors.

“Doing this over the air ensures rapid delivery of real-time information, even when sensors are far away, so that Commanders can have a better understanding of the spectrum and make fast and informed decisions,” Raytheon Technologies stated. 

The Department of Defense (DoD), Department Homeland Security (DHS) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) have added the CommonWell Health Alliance to the joint health information exchange network, a platform that facilitates wider health data sharing. 

The engagement with CommonWell adds over 15 thousand medical facilities to the HIE network that supports the Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization, an effort to unify DoD, VA and other federal health records, DoD said Tuesday.

“The CommonWell connection means DOD, VA and USCG (U.S. Coast Guard) providers can access more information about their patients to make the best care decisions,” said William Tinston, FEHRM director.

Patients moving between different care providers benefit from data sharing done through HIE. The network's offered information includes those about a patient's allergies, laboratory results, medical history and past prescriptions.

"As a clinician who is using the joint HIE, the more patient information I have access to, the more I can understand the full picture of my patient's care and better meet their needs," said Dr. Neil Evans, a VA primary care physician and clinical leader with the FEHRM.