The U.S. Air Force plans to work on three “vanguard” programs encompassing technologies such as next-generation munitions, navigation satellites and unmanned aircraft, National Defense Magazine reported Thursday.

The Golden Horde program will focus on using precision-guided munitions for teaming operations, while Navigation Technology Satellite 3 will serve as a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit that will handle position, navigation and timing functions. The Skyborg effort will revolve around the deployment of a large number of artificial intelligence-based unmanned aircraft for future missions.

“We believe they can dramatically change the way that we fight and the way that we employ air power,” said Gen. Arnold Bunch, commander of Air Force Materiel Command, at a press briefing in Washington, D.C. “We’ve funded those for the next couple of years to make sure we’ve got all the efforts for the prototyping and experimentation that we want to move forward.”

Bunch’s comments come after former Air Force Secretary and 2019 Wash100 winner Heather Wilson announced plans to resume vanguard programs in line with the Air Force’s science and technology strategy in April.

The Department of State is establishing a new office for the data-driven procurement of enterprise information technology services, Fedscoop reported Thursday.

A new IT Acquisitions Office within the department will operate by spring 2020, according to the official in charge of managing the future organization.

Ken Rogers, acting deputy chief information officer of business management and planning at the Bureau of Information Resource Management, leads the future office’s creation.

The new organization’s establishment stems from an inspector general review that recommended IRM to realign strategies. IRM is the state department’s IT management agency.

IAO will consist of four main units: IT acquisition, a contracting technology office, service execution and vendor performance management.

Rogers is now working to transition contracting personnel into IAO, with updated policy and professional functions.

The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to deploy a Cerner-developed platform that will handle the processing of electronic health records starting March 28, Nextgov reported Thursday.

Robert Fischer, director of Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center, said at a hearing with the House Veterans Affairs subcommittee on Technology Modernization that the augmentation plan is “under execution” and the facility is continuing to recruit personnel ahead of the launch.

Fischer noted that the center has recruited around half of the required 108 full-time personnel ahead of the launch at the Spokane, Wash. facility.

According to John Windom, executive director of the VA Office of Electronic Health Records Modernization, officials from the department’s headquarters, medical centers and technical units are in constant communication to support the initiative.

The U.S. Army seeks to modernize its cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and training via application of industry-made 5G cellular technologies, C4ISRNet reported Thursday.

Col. Schawn Branch, who leads the Army’s 5G and enterprise information technology as a service program, told C4ISRNet the service branch is focusing 5G efforts on augmented and virtual reality, global asset management and smart technology depots.

“In order to really use artificial intelligence you’re going to require a lot more bandwidth than we currently have with our 4G network,” the colonel added.

The service branch is getting industry support to implement 5G modernization and achieve related goals. Branch said the Army wants industry parties to demonstrate both commercial and military applications of 5G technologies.

The Army’s other 5G application goals include the development of software-defined networks that allow for high-bandwidth activities, Branch noted.

Judith Zawatsky, assistant commissioner in the office of systems management at General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, told Federal News Network in an interview posted Thursday about the efforts of GSA’s information technology team to address the issues following the transition from FedBizOpps to the cloud-based System for Award Management beta website.

Vendors and other users encountered infrastructure problems, slow load times and other issues during the first few days of the betaSAM.gov portal’s launch. To address such concerns, Zawatsky said GSA “had pre-positioned a team offsite of the operational team, the product owners, the product managers, our technical team with GSA IT and our customer service [experts] … They worked and went through the system constantly. They brought in some extra engineers, GSA IT was fabulous.”

Despite the initial issues, she noted that more than 20K users visited the new portal in the first week, while agencies used the platform to post over 2K business opportunities.

Zawatsky said she and Dave Shive, chief information officer at GSA, will work with operational and technical teams to conduct a retrospective of the beta’s launch to figure out the causes of the problems and address potential concerns for future migrations.