Federal technology officials called on the government to implement changes that would speed up the hiring process and make it easier for job seekers to navigate government agency web sites, Federal News Network reported Friday.

The call comes as the Federal Cyber Reskilling Academy is set to begin its first classes with 25 students in April, according to Jason Gray, chief information officer at the Department of Education. The program will focus on training for federal employees outside of IT to handle  cyber defense analyst positions in the future.

Gray spoke at a recent AFFIRM cybersecurity conference in Arlington, Va. Several panelists suggested agencies should accelerate the hiring process. The Office of Personnel Management should overhaul the usajobs.gov site to make it easier for job seekers to

The Department of Energy is utilizing partnerships with academia to recruit the right talent. The agency launched the CyberForce competition in 2018 that gathered students to defend servers and virtual machines from cyber attacks. The goal was to introduce cybersecurity to students, said Adrienne Lotto, the department’s deputy assistant secretary for infrastructure security and energy restoration.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency completed a demonstration of its new collaborative operations in denied environment system which enables drones to perform tasks in areas without communications systems and GPS.

DARPA said Friday it tested the CODE with six RQ-23 Tigershark unmanned aerial vehicles at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground.

Aside from working in a denied environment, the new system also enabled Uthe AVs to be controlled by a single person compared to traditional systems that require at least one operator per drone, according to Scott Wierzbanowski, program manager for CODE at the DARPA Tactical Technology Office.

The system allowed the Tigersharks to autonomously share information and collaborate even after operators lost communications with the UAVs.

“CODE can port into existing UAV systems and conduct collaborative operations,” Wierzbanowski said.

The demonstration used software and algorithms built by Raytheon and the White Force Network from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to create a live, virtual test environment. DARPA said it will transfer ownership of the system to the Naval Air Systems Command by late 2019.

A senior defense official said the Department of Defense’s decision to procure a new variant of Boeing-built F-15 fighter aircraft hopes to demonstrate DoD’s desire to keep two U.S.-based jet manufacturers in business in the next 10 years, Defense One reported Friday.

“One of the considerations was the diversity of the industrial base,” the senior official said. “If we look at something as important as the tactical aircraft industrial base and we look forward into sixth-generation [fighter] production and competition and that kind of stuff, … gaining diversity in that industrial base is going to be critical,” the official added.

The report noted that the fiscal 2020 budget includes $1.1 billion in funds for the acquisition of eight F-15X jets and the official said Acting Defense Secretary and 2019 Wash100 Award winner Patrick Shanahan was not involved in the decision to procure the new aircraft.

The Department of Defense’s Mobility Unclassified Capability unit approved a mobile application to streamline maintenance operations for the U.S. Air Force, FedTech reported Thursday. Al Smith, program manager for DMUC, said the mobility service is quickening the process of approving mobile apps for government use.

He added that the six-year-old unit approved some requests provided that the applications run on MobileIron’s MDM platform, while others were certified as safe even without using the DMUC security architecture. The unit also has a list of apps that must be banned on government devices, due to reasons such as the app’s place of origin.

Smith has cited security requirements and digital interface preparation as some of the challenges that DMUC faced in the vetting process. DMUC, which supports over 130,000 military and civilian personnel, provides access to the DoD Information Network as well as critical encryption technologies.

Michael Duffy of the Department of Homeland Security said there are only “a handful” of agencies that still need to comply with the requirements of an emergency directive that DHS released in January to address Domain Name System tampering activities, FCW reported Friday.

Duffy, acting deputy director of DHS’ federal network resilience division, said during a Thursday meeting of the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board that those agencies deal with “external dependencies” on DNS providers that make the process challenging to adopt multifactor authentication. DHS believes no agencies were directly impacted by the DNS hijacking campaign.

The department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is requesting $4.4 million in fiscal 2020 funds for a DNS name resolution service and Duffy explained how that service could help in the early detection of agency domain tampering attempts.

“One of the things I mentioned [in the briefing] is that we didn’t have the visibility that would have been beneficial to know what was happening, so this service would sit on top of traditional DNS and give us that level of visibility of the DNS traffic and where it’s moving,” Duffy said.

An Air Force official said service leaders and Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment and a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, are scheduled to meet on Thursday to discuss the details of the final request for proposals for the Launch Service Procurement program, SpaceNews reported Saturday.

The report said the service issued draft RFPs in December and February with plans to release the final solicitation on Friday, March 29, for the LSP program. Under the initiative, the Air Force will pick only two companies in 2020 to compete for up to 25 national security launch services missions over five years. Sources say Will Roper, the service’s top acquisition executive and a 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, and officials of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center approved the final RFP for LSP.

The Air Force selected Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin in October to build rocket prototypes under separate launch service agreements in support of the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, which is now known as National Security Space Launch. Air Force officials expect the three vendors to submit proposals for the LSP Phase 2 competition.

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.