Acting Defense Secretary and 2019 Wash100 Award winner Patrick Shanahan told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Pentagon could integrate the National Reconnaissance Office into the Space Force into the future, Defense News reported Thursday. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), SASC ranking member, asked about the Department of Defense’s reason for not putting NRO under the new service branch and Shanahan said DoD didn’t want to delay the formation of the new force. 

“The bias in the proposal is towards speed. The proposal we submitted really represents the stakeholders that we have control of,” said Shanahan. “When we look at the many stakeholders, there is real work to be done there to negotiate. So we thought about it as a multi-step process where eventually there would be more alignment, but not in the first phase,” he added.

NRO is an agency within the intelligence community with approximately 3,000 employees and oversees several classified satellites for reconnaissance operations, according to the report.

The Government Accountability Office issued a report highlighting the slow progress in the Office of Management and Budget’s Data Center Optimization Initiative. GAO said Thursday that of the 24 agencies participating in the program, 11 did not create a plan to meet their goals to close or improve data centers in 2018.

OMB required agencies to complete efforts under DCOI in September 2018. However, as of August only 13 either achieved assigned closure goals or established plans to meet the deadline.

“The 24 agencies reported limited progress against OMB’s five data center optimization targets for server utilization and automated monitoring, energy metering, power usage effectiveness, facility utilization and virtualization,” GAO said.

In August, 16 of the agencies reported meeting cost savings targets of a total of $2.36 billion between fiscal years 2016 and 2018. GAO recommends that agencies improve performance in the DCOI, prioritize their remaining data centers’ operational efficiency and identify further savings. Only 11 participating agencies agreed with the recommendations.

The U.S. Marine Corps is planning to update its Kaman K-Max helicopters to incorporate autonomous capabilities intended to support experimental cargo delivery operations, Flight Global said Thursday. 

Lt. Gen. Steven Rudder, the Marine Corps’ deputy commandant for aviation, said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last month that the service branch plans to modernize its two K-Max aircraft as part of its K-Max autonomy research effort and Marine Air Ground Task Force – Unmanned Expeditionary Capabilities program. Rudder noted that the initiatives can help the Marine Corps conduct operations amid pilot shortages. 

USMC began the K-Max effort in 2011 before transferring the helicopters to the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona for further experimentation in 2016. Kaman and Lockheed Martin previously teamed up to jointly develop a flight control system that can autonomously power a K-Max helicopter.

The Department of Homeland Security in partnership with FBI identified the malware potentially used by the North Korean government to hack into federal and industry targets. The agencies released the Malware Analysis Report on Wednesday providing information on the malware variant, called HOPLIGHT, which is linked to the Pyongyang-tied cyber attack HIDDEN COBRA.

“DHS and FBI are distributing this MAR to enable network defense and reduce exposure to North Korean government malicious cyber activity,” the report states.

The document includes malware descriptions, response actions and mitigation techniques to help users and systems administrators deter any malicious activities involving HOPLIGHT. DHS and FBI found nine malicious files involving the malware, seven of which were used to mask traffic between the malware and remote operators.