Department of Defense officials said the U.S. Air Force developed the first iteration of a cyber platform designed to help cyber forces perform mission planning, share information and deliver command-and-control systems to support cyber missions, Fifth Domain reported Monday.

A spokesman for the Air Force said the service handed over to U.S. Cyber Command the first increment of the Unified Platform April 9. Increment 1 features capabilities for interoperability and defensive cyber operations.

According to the report, the service plans to allocate $100M in 2020 funds for the Unified Platform, which is meant to serve as a tactical cyber operations system to enable individual cyber teams to facilitate coordination and carry out operations.

The Air Force tapped Northrop Grumman in October to serve as a systems coordinator for the platform. In February, the service selected Northrop, Lockheed Martin, ManTech International, Accenture and General Dynamics’ One Source business for the cyber enterprise services contract.

The U.S. Air Force continues to implement a new process that reduces the time required for securing authority to operate information technology tools from a year to just weeks, FedScoop reported Monday. The service is using Fast Track ATO that Matt Donovan, undersecretary for the branch, unveiled in March to allow officials to speed up deployment and assessment of new software and systems. 

Wanda Jones-Heath, chief information security officer for the Air Force, said Fast Track helped the service improve risk assessment and address vulnerabilities faster than previous processes.  

“The penetration testing finds it and fixes it up front,” she said. “The continuous monitoring actually finds it continuously and then you’re able to keep moving.”

Through the same ATO process, Air Force officials plan to standardize bug bounties and “third-party adversarial testing.” Jones-Heath said the service has a list of additional systems it wants to put under Fast Track for deployment. 

Two years after the launch of the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program’s Tailored baseline for low-impact software-as-a-service, 25 percent of participating agencies secured authorization for their cloud services. FedRAMP announced Thursday that 11 cloud services were implemented with the authorization. 

The program was introduced to speed up process for agencies to partner with cloud service providers and to secure an authorization. In 2018, the government authorized cloud services in less than 90 days.

“Tailored empowers agencies to define the use case for SaaS services, evaluate risk and tailor security requirements,” FedRAMP said. 

The Tailored baseline also guides agencies in risk management, consolidates security and assessment data and assists in managing low-risk SaaS products. To speed up authorization, the FedRAMP Program Management Office said agencies and cloud service providers should focus on public-private partnerships, transparency of software security, security requirements, selecting the right stakeholders and coordination with the program office.

Lynne Parker, assistant director for artificial intelligence at the White House, said a number of agencies launched individual initiatives to educate and prepare employees for future integration of artificial intelligence into their operations, Federal Times reported Friday. 

“Agencies are stepping up on their own to create opportunities for people to maybe enroll in a short-term learning course where they can gain skills in IT areas or cybersecurity areas or AI areas,” Parker said at a recent National Academy of Public Administration event. “Because each agency knows the kinds of skills and the kinds of work that they do, they’re best suited to create these training programs.”

Despite the Trump administration promising AI will not entirely replace personnel in their jobs, Parker admitted the technology may take over some tasks in the future. 

“It’s quite likely that most of us will have some tasks or parts of our jobs that will be impacted by technology, AI, automation and so forth,” the White House official said. There are some areas “where AI is particularly well-suited that there may be some impact in the sense at the job goes away.” 

Parker cited studies suggesting that AI can only replace humans in a small percentage of jobs. However, Karen Shrum, principal for government and public sector at Ernst and Young, said the technology could replace people in millions of jobs. A 2018 future jobs report published by the World Economic Forum estimated that automated technologies could displace 75 million jobs worldwide by 2022. 

Vice Adm. Matthew Kohler, the top information warfare officer at the U.S. Navy, told C4ISRNET in an interview published Monday that the service considers information warfare as decisive both in daily operations and high-end kinetic fight. 

“In information warfare, while the rest of the warfare areas are involved in the high-end conflict [eventually], we consider the high-end conflict now. Constant contact with the enemy in terms of cybersecurity, being able to operate within the [electromagnetic spectrum], all of those. We consider ourselves in contact with the adversary now,” Kohler said. 

Kohler said the Naval Information Warfighting Development Center that was established about two years ago helped the service fill a spectrum of warfighting training and develop warfighting tactics instructors.

“A key part of NIWDC is really getting after advanced tactics, techniques and procedures. Those are capabilities that they have succeeded in the last two years of delivering. That allows you to take the capabilities you have now and use them better; putting them in the hands of soldiers and letting them innovate,” he noted. 

Kohler said the change in operational environment prompted the service to reconfirm its need for information-based skills such as navy cryptologic warfare, naval intelligence, meteorology, space and oceanography. He also cited the need for the service to quickly deliver new capabilities to sailors and other personnel.