Gen. David Goldfein, Air Force chief of staff and a previous Wash100 Award winner, said the service plans to use a chunk of its fiscal 2021 budget to establish the digital foundation, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.

“If you want to get artificial intelligence, if you want to get hypersonics to work, if you want to go into defendable space, if you want to get directed energy where it needs to go, you can’t skip the step of building a digital architecture and getting a common data cloud architecture going forward,” he said at an Air Force Association event in Washington D.C. 

Goldfein said the Air Force will make a $9 billion investment in cloud and digital architecture in the next five years. The report said the service branch will also allocate in the next five years $9B in funds to pursue the development of offensive and defensive space capabilities as part of its digital initiative.

The U.S. Air Force tested a plasma reactor device designed to degrade and break perfluorooctanoic and perfluorooctane sulfonate acids in groundwater during a field demonstration on Sept. 25.

Clarkson University and GSI Environmental partnered with the Air Force Civil Engineer Center to evaluate the Enhanced Contact Plasma Reactor’s treatment functions for PFOA and PFOS-filled water, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base said Tuesday.

The device uses electrical discharge plasma to degrade PFOA particles and mitigate PFAS molecule chains into smaller elements and compounds without the use of additives and chemicals.

“The argon gas concentrates PFAS at the gas-liquid interface and plasma is generated at that interface, which then destroys PFAS,” said Selma Mededovic, a principal investigator at Clarkson University.

Efforts under the demonstration are in line with the Environmental Protection Agency’s drinking water health advisory and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act.

The U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Development Planning and Experimentation office has tested the use of broadband communications through SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to help operate C-12J Huron turboprop aircraft, Space News reported Tuesday. SDPE’s “Defense Experimentation Using the Commercial Space Internet” effort saw download speeds of 610 megabits per second throughout the series of tests.

The Air Force and SpaceX first announced plans to test Starlink’s capacity for interoperability with C-12 aircraft in October. Greg Spanjers, chief scientist at the SDPE office, said the service is “not just focused on any one company” and seeks to work with satellite communications providers for services in low and medium-Earth orbit.

Brian Beal, program manager for the Air Force, noted that the service seeks to install a Starlink terminal onto an AC-130 gun-attack aircraft. The Air Force also plans to facilitate a similar demonstration on a KC-135 tanker. “We are setting up prototypes so we are ready as soon as the commercial offers are ready,” he said.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., plans to establish a unit under the National Science Foundation that will focus on collaborations with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Defense News reported Tuesday.

Schumer said at a  National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence conference that the proposed NSF component would funnel $100B for projects with academe, industry and other government agencies focusing on AI and other new technologies.

“The kind of research that needs to be done would have a long revenue stream,” he said. According to Schumer, the U.S. will lag behind China if the latter out-invests the former in AI efforts.

“We need to match and exceed their level of commitment, which thus far we have not done,” he noted.