Despite providing training and implementing new approaches to prepare federal employees to take on cybersecurity roles, the government continues to face challenges building and retaining its cyber workforce, FCW reported Thursday. Information technology officials from different agencies raised concerns with the effectiveness of the new cyber workforce executive order. 

“What I’m not sure how much will get addressed with the executive order is, what about retention?” Shane Barney, chief information security officer of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said at a recent Government CIO conference. 

The government provides “some really great things” like incentives to attract and retain employees. However, Barney cited he still sees people not taking any cyber-related job after training. “I’m sure any CISO or any CIO could tell you the horror stories of that exact same experience,” he said. “It really hurts us. And that’s a difficult gap to breach.”

Beth Killoran, deputy chief information officer at the General Services Administration, said employees tend to seek other opportunities as the government fails to meet the needs of new workers. 

“If we can either show folks that we can improve their skillset or show folks they’ll have opportunities they’re not going to have at a different agency or the private sector, that’s what’s going to keep them,” she said.

The Air Force Research Laboratory broke ground on a new munitions research facility at the Eglin Air Force Base. The 52.6K-square foot Advanced Munitions Technology Complex will serve to reinforce research on ammunitions and potential warfighter capacities and enable engineers as well as scientists to explore new explosive components, the Eglin Air Force Base said Tuesday.

“The Advanced Munitions Technology Complex is not just a series of buildings. It’s a center that brings minds together to conceive of next generation sophisticated ordnance technologies in an efficient way,” said Michael Lindsay, core technical competency lead for ordnance systems at AFRL.

AFRL aims to use the facility to develop lighter munitions for new aircraft systems to provide space for other weapons and reinforce mission efficiency. The U.S. Air Force is slated to conclude construction of the complex by 2021.

The U.S. Air Force released a document outlining the service’s approach to implement principles to provide airmen access to secure, visible, accessible, understandable, linked and trusted data using open data services technologies and architectural design patterns. The Data Services Reference Architecture was released as part of the Digital Air Force initiative, which seeks to harness the power of data to keep pace with adversaries, the service said Wednesday. 

The document signed by Air Force Undersecretary Matthew Donovan offers guidance about how to design, build, implement and adopt major command and functional data platforms, promotes adherence to common standards and specifications to achieve SVAULT principles and seeks to provide a common language for stakeholders.

DSRA includes four capability layers with microservices and value-added services overlays. These layers are data product consumer services; enterprise data and analytics services; enterprise metadata services and data platform foundation services.

The service said adherence to the document advances the use of cloud services, commercial-off-the-shelf software and open-source software platforms “while remaining product and vendor agnostic,” which could help the Air Force to be more agile and deliver capabilities on a monthly basis.

NASA conducted another test of its Space Launch System vehicle configuration at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., where the agency assessed the space vehicle’s aerodynamics through a set of wind tunnel tests, NASASpaceFlight.com reported Tuesday. 

The space agency launched 700 supersonic test runs using the SLS Block 1 Cargo vehicle at a speed of Mach 1.5 to 4.5. NASA aims to use aerodynamic data from the test to enhance analysis and modeling of the vehicle’s atmospheric trajectories, guidance, navigation, control and structural loading. 

The test included rolling out to the launch pad, liftoff, boost phase, booster separation and return to the launch area.  NASA started testing components of SLS at different wind tunnels across the U.S in 2018. 

The U.S. Coast Guard plans to deploy small drones developed by Boeing’s Insitu subsidiary onto four more National Security Cutters by the end of 2019, Flight Global reported Wednesday. The Scan Eagle unmanned aerial vehicles will contain payloads including sensor systems, communications relay platforms and a laser pointer to support various USCG missions including search-and-rescue, ice-breaking and anti-drug trafficking. 

Insitu staff will operate three UAVs for up to 200 hours every month as part of a contract with the service branch to support the deployment. The Coast Guard intends to field the Scan Eagles along with the NSC fleet once all of the ships have been built.

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command led 10 other commands in promoting the advantages of building a digital Navy during the 2019 Sea-Air-Space Exposition at the Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor, Md. 

“We are facing a culture shift where data is a vital strategic resource in warfare. Networks, communication and data storage with the tools to access and maximize use of the data are all key to our overall mission effectiveness across the Navy from personnel management to logistics to kinetic operations,” SPAWAR Commander Rear Adm. Christian Becker said in a statement Wednesday. He added that the Navy needs accurate information sharing across all warfare domains and platforms to better operate in a data-driven environment.

The Navy Information Warfare Community hosted speaker series, industry engagement and twelve technology demonstrations at the Sea-Air-Space conference. Service officials coordinated the government, military, industry and academia to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to the warfighter. 

General Services Administration officials said they plan to provide federal security officers hands-on training on the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, FedScoop reported Wednesday. 

“We’re going to start bringing security officers into our office, give them some training on FedRAMP, radicalize them to our methodologies,” Zach Baldwin, program manager at FedRAMP, said Tuesday at the Cloud Security Alliance’s federal summit. 

Baldwin noted the training program would be a grassroots initiative allowing the selected officers to work through an authority-to-operate project to “get the FedRAMP way out there.” FedRAMP provides cloud service vendors and third-party assessment organizations online training opportunities to better understand the cloud security compliance program, according to the report.