Gen. Robert Brown, U.S. Army Pacific’s commanding general, said during the Association of the U.S. Army Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Ala., that the service must prepare for multidimensional combat, National Defense magazine reported Wednseday.

Brown noted that all Army units will eventually cover capabilities to handle threats such as electronic warfare, drone swarms and unmanned aerial vehicles. “All formations will have to become multidimensional or they will be irrelevant in the future,” he added.

The Army previously established the intelligence, information, cyber, electronic warfare and space battalion to support its pilot program for multi-domain operations. The service has a four-year approach to achieve readiness in multi-domain warfare.

The U.S. Air Force plans to designate Ellsworth AF Base in South Dakota as the location of its B-21 Raider bomber aircraft, the service branch said Wednesday. The Air Force chose Ellsworth AFB to host the first operational B-21 and its related training operations due to the installation’s capacity to handle simultaneous missions with reduced costs and minimal impact on operations. 

Subsequent Air Force installations will get B-21 aircraft upon availability ahead of the service’s plans to phase out its B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit aircrafts. The Air Force will make a formal B-21 basing decision in 2021 following environmental and regulatory procedures. Northrop Grumman won a $511 million contract in 2015 to produce 100 of the B-21 bombers for the Air Force.

Federal Chief Information Officer and 2019 Wash100 Award winner Suzette Kent hinted the White House is prioritizing citizen privacy, research, economy, geospatial data, transparency and modern technology in its first Federal Data Strategy, FedScoop reported Wednesday. The administration plans to release the document in the coming weeks to guide agencies in their data priorities for 2019.

The Federal Data Strategy will focus on preserving individual privacy, building citizen trust, continuing research on data, promoting fiscal data transparency, expanding ethical frameworks and building reusable data and access tools.

“We’re ensuring that we’re using federal data to grow the economy and increase effectiveness in government,” Kent said. “We’re also expanding some of the things that we have done in the geospatial area, which is one of the most successful areas of open data so far,” she added.

Kent cited artificial intelligence would be a key part of the government’s data strategy to help agencies manage information. Following the release of the strategy, the White House plans to issue a one-year plan detailing the actions set out in the document.

The Wash100 award, now in its sixth year, recognizes the most influential executives in the GovCon industry as selected by the Executive Mosaic team in tandem with online nominations from the GovCon community. Representing the best of the private and public sector, the winners demonstrate superior leadership, innovation, reliability, achievement and vision.

Visit the Wash100 site to learn about the other 99 winners of the 2019 Wash100 Award. On the site, you can submit your 10 votes for the GovCon executives of consequence that you believe will have the most significant impact in 2019.

The U.S. Army earmarked funds for the development of a land-based, anti-ship missile as part of the Precision Strike Missile program, Defense News reported Wednedsay. Col. John Rafferty, director of the Army’s long-range precision fires cross-functional team, said the service is accelerating efforts for the first PrSM spiral of capability that will apply cross-domain functions to attack maritime targets.

According to Rafferty, technology maturation activities for missiles that can handle maritime targets may begin by 2025. The Army’s fiscal year 2020 budget proposal covers potential full-rate production work for PrSM weapons in the third quarter of 2024.

Both Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are developing PrSM weapons with prototype test flights scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2019.

Margaret Weichert, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, told Federal Times in an interview published Tuesday about the role of workforce in technology change initiatives and the agency’s plan to focus on performance management.

“Performance management is an area where we’re looking very closely at things that are in the regulatory realm: areas where there are perhaps artificial barriers to rewarding people, limits imposed on how much they could be given a bonus — or how bonuses are distributed between, let’s say, SES and our senior technical leaders, the SL cadre of folks,” Weichert said.

She mentioned OPM’s efforts to bring in government professionals with skills in science, technology, engineering, math and cyber. Weichert, who also serves as deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, discussed the need for the government to attract young professionals and exercise flexibility when it comes to core pay and benefits programs.

“In the end, we are still able to attract people, because they’re attracted to the mission, but, overall, we need to be able to be more flexible and respond to the changing nature of the way rewards and recognition work in the broader economy,” she noted. She also shared her thoughts on funding for major change initiatives.

Gen. John Murray, commander of Army Futures Command and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said the U.S. Army plans to finalize a new modernization strategy over the summer providing “a holistic solution” to update military capabilities amid the changing warfare, National Defense Magazine reported Tuesday. He announced the plan at the recent Association of the United States Army’s Global Force Symposium and Exposition in Huntsville, Ala. 

The Army’s new strategy will focus on doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel and facilities opposed to last year’s approach that prioritized materiel alone, Murray said. The service this time will look at the “budget reality” to properly plan its modernization initiatives. 

“It will start to drive how we’re organized. It will start to drive the leader development process,” Murray said. “It will start to drive the facilities that we’ll need to either be capitalized or build new.”

Part of the strategy is establishing a multi-domain “capable” force by 2028 and a multi-domain “ready force” by 2035, the general said. The service wants to determine how to organize and equip its forces to prepare for adversaries in the future. The Army also intends to continue working on its top modernization priorities focusing on long-range precision fires, next-generation combat vehicle, future vertical lift, the network, air-and-missile defense and soldier lethality.