The U.S. Army established earlier this year a new office to build and extend enterprise cloud services to the tactical edge and Paul Puckett, director of the service’s Enterprise Cloud Management Office (ECMO), said ECMO has three primary goals, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

Puckett said those goals are providing cloud-based shared services for use by the entire service, offering software development tools that allow the military branch to easily field cloud-native applications and providing end users access to data analytics and management tools.

“Those three technical capabilities put together is what we see as a foundational element that all of the Army needs to lean into,” he said at an AFCEA-hosted online event. “What we find is that leveraging common services allows us to stop toiling with basic technology, configuration management, and starts to allow us to really start to focus on our applications and our data.”

Puckett cited the need for the Army to facilitate data sharing by having a cloud architecture that would serve as a “global asset and not just a capability at the enterprise." He said the service should reassess its approach to software development as it ramps up its move to the cloud.

The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy has published a book about the danger of biological threats and to explain what lessons can the U.S. learn from the coronavirus pandemic to build up the country's biodefense strategy.

In the book, titled "Defending Against Biothreats," 11 national security experts offer their perspectives on the spread of COVID-19 to help government leaders beef up measures to address natural and man-made biothreats.

Frank Gaffney, a former Department of Defense official, established the center in 1988 to explore policies, resources and actions that are relevant to national security.

The U.S. Intelligence Community has introduced a new framework and a set of guiding principles for IC agencies to follow in order to promote the ethical development and use of artificial intelligence.

“The IC leads in developing and using technology crucial to our national security mission, and we cannot do so without recognizing and acting on its ethical implications,” National Intelligence director Rep. John Ratcliffe said in a statement published Thursday.

“These principles and their accompanying framework will help guide our mission leads and data scientists as they implement technology to solve intelligence problems,” he added.

The Principles of AI Ethics for the IC document seeks to ensure that AI platforms are developed and implemented in a way that respects the law and safeguards privacy and civil rights. The principles also call for the community to consider transparency and accountability, apply human judgment, adopt best practices to build up security and resilience and engage with the scientific and technology communities when it comes to AI development and use.

The AI Ethics Framework sheds lights on the factors the community considers when it comes to using AI in addressing national security threats. The framework includes policy considerations and legal obligations governing AI and data, questions to ask to ensure objectivity and mitigate undesired bias and documentation of purpose, limitations, parameters and design outcomes.

“The use of AI provides new opportunities, but we must decide how to best use it to advance our mission. The Principles and Framework will provide a consistent approach,” added Ben Huebner, ODNI Civil Liberties protection officer. 

The Naval Information Warfare Systems Command tested a wireless tracking technology that aims to help the U.S. Navy decrease the spread of COVID-19 during the Trident Warrior 2020 event.

The Testbed for Internet of Things-based Privacy Preserving PERvasive Spaces system is a tool designed to trace the location of personnel and various equipment through the use of tagging technologies and wireless communication systems, the Navy said Wednesday.

A team comprised of Expeditionary Strike Group 3 and USS Boxer personnel moved through defined zones at Naval Base San Diego while carrying radio frequency identification stickers and smartphones. TIPPERS tracked the devices via wireless sensors and beacons installed on the pier.

The Navy plans to demonstrate the system aboard a vessel and carry out experimental efforts through October. Trident Warrior is a yearly large-scale event that demonstrates various technologies in operational naval environments.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has partnered with the University of California San Diego to explore the use of unmanned systems in ocean observation operations.

NOAA said Wednesday its Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography will jointly support research and development activities for the agency's Unmanned Systems Operations Program over 10 years.

“Innovative use of unmanned systems will benefit many NOAA programs—augmenting data collection often at a lower cost, increased safety and reduced risk, especially in remote or extreme environments," said retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet, who serves as assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA's deputy administrator.

The effort also supports 2018's Commercial Engagement Through Ocean Technology Act that directs NOAA to engage in collaborative unmanned marine technology research with entities from the government and other sectors.

The partnership will include a project that focuses on OMAO's workforce, training and structural needs with regard to unmanned maritime systems. NOAA will perform its unmanned maritime systems activities at a new Mississippi-based facility.

The U.S. Air Force's integrated program office for enterprise information technology-as-a-service has fully linked Offutt and Buckley Air Force Bases to AT&T-managed commercial networks.

The EITaaS office, managed at Hanscom Air Force Base, will go on to migrate users at Alaska-based Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson to an AT&T-provided network in August, the U.S. Air Force said Wednesday.

Ten percent of Maxwell Air Force Base's network users have also migrated to a Microsoft-delivered wide area network.

“Migration to a commercially-provided network is a paradigm shift and a key component in testing the ability of the Air and Space Forces to fully embrace, adopt and consume services from a commercial partner,” said Col. Robert King, senior materiel leader at the Command, Control, Communications, Intelligence and Networks program executive office's enterprise IT and cyberspace infrastructure division.

EITaaS aims to implement modern digital infrastructure in support of user experience and joint, multi-domain operations.

NASA’s Perseverance rover for the Mars 2020 mission has completed flight readiness review activities ahead of final launch assessments scheduled for July 27. The agency said Thursday the launch window for the Perseverance mission will begin at 7:50 a.m. EDT on July 30.

The assembly, test and launch operations team at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is expected to begin final checkouts for the rover’s systems and subsystems following the completion of integration activities with United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket.

The astrobiology mission requires Perseverance to probe Mars for microbial life and collect data on the planet’s geological and climatic elements.

"The launch operations team will continue to monitor the health of the spacecraft to ensure it’s 'Go' for launch – nothing glamorous, but an important part of the job,” said Dave Gruel, head of the Mars 2020 ATLO team.

"At present, everything is green across the board," noted Matt Wallace, deputy project manager for the mission at NASA. "Everyone involved with this endeavor, from the spacecraft team to the launch vehicle team to those working the range, are looking forward to seeing Perseverance begin its long-awaited flight to Mars."

According to NASA, subsequent Mars missions with the European Space Agency (ESA) are “currently under consideration”.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected 15 algorithm submissions for the third phase of a research competition focused on quantum computing-based cryptography.

NIST said Wednesday it narrowed down a pool of 69 proposals for Phase 3 public reviews for the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process, which seeks to establish algorithms to combat quantum decryption threats.

The Phase 3 selection culminates the three-year effort and is expected to result in a small subset of cryptographic algorithms to support quantum concepts like public-key encryption and digital-signature creation for electronic documents.

“At the end of this round, we will choose some algorithms and standardize them,” said Dustin Moody, a mathematician at NIST. “We intend to give people tools that are capable of protecting sensitive information for the foreseeable future, including after the advent of powerful quantum computers.”

Moody noted that the selected algorithms will fill an interim role for standardization procedures and that NIST plans to “look at newer approaches too.”

NIST expects the review round to run throughout a one-year period ahead of the initial standard’s planned release in 2022.