The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command will operate under a new name as Naval Information Warfare Systems Command as part of increased focus on information warfare. Adm. John Richardson, chief of naval operations, announced the name change during a recent Information Warfare Senior Leadership Symposium in Washington, D.C., the U.S. Navy said Monday. 

“This new name more accurately describes the full totality of the mission, supporting naval warfare — from seabed to space,” Richardson said. 

NAVWAR will focus on providing the Navy with new information warfare capabilities along with sustainment efforts to help in naval, joint, coalition and other national missions.

“In this era of great power competition, information is a fundamental element of warfare, an essential concept of the Navy’s strategy, and a warfare area that transcends the traditional domains of air, sea, land and space,” said NAVWAR Commander Rear Adm. Christian Becker. 

The Navy hopes renaming SPAWAR would help clarify the command’s mission and purpose for service members, stakeholders, industry partners, the information warfare community and the Naval Research and Development Establishment.

The House Armed Services Committee released its draft fiscal 2020 defense policy bill directing the comptroller general to report on the Department of Defense’s electronic warfare and electromagnetic threat mitigation efforts, C4ISRNET reported Monday.

The draft defense authorization bill directs the comptroller general to provide updates on matters such as the electronic warfare executive committee’s progress and the implementation of the 2013 Electromagnetic Spectrum Strategy. The House panel intends to receive such updates by March 2020.

According to the draft legislation, the committee is concerned over the Pentagon’s efforts to fortify its defenses and “operate in an environment where peer and near-peer adversaries could use existing and emerging capabilities that degrade use of the electromagnetic spectrum.” 

The final defense policy act for fiscal 2019 included provisions for electronic warfare initiatives which cover joint electromagnetic spectrum activities and the development of an electronic warfare mission area.

House lawmakers want to retain the 18,000 military medical billets that the Pentagon plans to close to transfer personnel to other operational and modernization priorities, Federal News Network reported Monday. The House Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee issued its marks of the 2020 defense authorization bill to prevent the Department of Defense from reducing or realigning military medical personnel. 

Lawmakers expressed concern that the agency is cutting the billets too soon. Through the defense bill the personnel subcommittee wants to require DoD to study the manpower and availability of healthcare services in local areas before approving the realignment plan. However, DoD already started reducing military medical billets, with 2,000 areas already left vacant in April. The agency intends to move the remaining 16,000 into other non-medical areas in early 2020s. 

“We’re working with our personnel command to identify those that have got critical impact to the fleet and to remote areas and put personnel in those locations as we work through this,” said Vice Adm. Forrest Faison, surgeon general of the Navy. 

The Department of Commerce is set to publish in the Federal Register a request for public comments on the draft action plan for the Federal Data Strategy on Tuesday. The department said in the notice that the strategy seeks to help agencies leverage mission-support, statistical and program data as a strategic asset to promote transparency, facilitate oversight, build up the economy and increase the effectiveness of the federal government. 

Using data as a strategic asset is one of the cross-priority goals in the President’s Management Agenda. The agency wants stakeholders to identify additional measures to implement the strategy that are not cited in the draft action plan, determine actions that would complement current federal data programs, pinpoint actions in the draft plan that should be omitted and offer information about implementation resources needed to ensure the success of action steps.

The notice marks the third phase of the comments request. The department sought feedback for the strategy’s draft principles and draft practices in 2018. Officials with the Office of Management and Budget told Nextgov the draft action plan is expected to be released this week.

Navy Vice Adm. Robert Sharp, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, appeared Monday at the GEOINT Symposium to discuss the four strategic goals – people, partnerships, mission today and mission tomorrow – of NGA’s Strategy 2025. Sharp talked about NGA’s efforts to recruit, develop and retain talent as well as its focus on inclusion and diversity.

Sharp said the agency is onboarding 300 employees this year. He noted that the agency is advancing data interoperability and international partnerships through several initiatives including the International Program for Human Geography and the TanDEMx High Resolution Elevation Data Exchange program. For the strategy’s Mission Today goal, Sharp discussed the agency’s use of technologies in its Enterprise Engine – Notice to Mariners initiative to speed up data analysis. 

“It now uses translation algorithms and optical character recognition to read documents in different formats, and it puts maritime symbols, numbers, and words into a GIS-enabled workspace,” he said. “That means analysts don’t need to scrutinize pages of source data and charts by hand anymore — they have electronic records that are way easier to work with than manually annotated hard copy records.” 

To achieve the Mission Tomorrow goal, Sharp asked interested stakeholders to partner with NGA on projects related to artificial intelligence, automation and augmentation. “Our goal is to partner with machines so that we can make best use of the exponential growth in volume and source of data, letting machines do what machines do well and analysts do what analysts to even better — think critically and solve problems,” Sharp added.