Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, told attendees at a recent Atlantic Council event that the Department of Defense will conduct a series of experiments on 5G communications technology, Defense One reported Monday.

The DoD’s research and engineering arm will oversee the experiments scheduled for later this year. Discoveries may help the Pentagon’s advisory boards develop policy recommendations in line with 5G implementation. According to Lord, the department’s 5G research and development activities will focus on latency, interference and related equipment.

“5G is a national security issue for us, especially because we have to rethink our industry base as we move forward,” she noted.

Previously, Lord and other defense officials expressed concerns over Chinese telecommunications companies such as Huawei using their products to obtain U.S. data.

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. Marine Corps intends to implement a new grenade launcher to support long-range and short-range infantry engagements and performed tests to evaluate the weapon’s technical characteristics.

The M320A1 weapon is geared for standalone and rifle-mounted use during day and night operations, the service branch said Friday. Maintainers, engineers and logisticians tested and analyzed the grenade launcher earlier this month to identify its provisioning, sustainment and training requirements.

The first of two evaluation procedures sought to determine whether a component would require replacement or repair. This process, known as the level of repair analysis, helps with data collection for the development of support tools that would address issues with the weapon.

The second procedure, known as the job training analysis, developed training instructions on how to properly utilize the weapon during battlefield operations.

“We got the system in Marines’ hands, worked out the kinks and began to understand how we’re going to use this moving forward,” said Lt. Col. Tim Hough, program manager for infantry weapons in Marine Corps Systems Command’s ground combat element systems.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency unveiled an initiative that seeks to automate the integration of scalable cyber security defense mechanisms into chip-based designs with less effort.

The Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon program aims to develop an autonomous tool and internet protocol ecosystem that will help maintain chip design security as it moves within the ecosystem, DARPA said Monday. The planned system will leverage a security segment and an application-specific processor partition to deploy the chip design’s security functions.

“Strategies for resisting threats vary widely in cost, complexity and invasiveness,” said said Serge Leef, a program manager at DARPA’s microsystems technology office. “As such, AISS will help designers assess which defense mechanisms are most appropriate based on the potential attack surface and the likelihood of a compromise.”

The program is under the second phase of the five-year, $1.5B Electronics Resurgence Initiative that works to examine the development of defense electronics platforms to reinforce privacy and security.

Mark Esper, Secretary of the Army and a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, called on the private sector to support the service’s plans to dedicate most of its upcoming budget to next-generation systems and less for legacy platforms, National Defense Magazine reported Monday.

The statement was made in response to some contractors and lawmakers who are expected to oppose the Army’s new spending plans, Esper said at a recent meeting hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association in Arlington, Va.

“My ask of all of you is that you focus less on resisting cuts to legacy programs and more on future growth opportunities,” he said. “The Army is moving out rapidly to equip the force for the future conflicts and we want all of you to move with us.”

The secretary noted that companies will have the opportunity to participate in development of next generation systems including vehicles, weapons and platforms. The Army Futures Command is expected to manage over $57 billion in the military’s future years defense program that will run from fiscal years 2020 to 2024.

The Army also plans to eliminate, reduce or delay 186 legacy programs to generate up to $30 billion over the next five years for six modernization priorities focused on long-range precision fires, next-generation combat vehicles, future vertical lift, network, air-missile defense and soldier lethality.

“Our legacy combat systems, designed for high-intensity conflict, entered service when I first joined the Army in the early 1980s,” Esper said. “While they dominated in past wars, incremental upgrades to some of these systems are no longer adequate for the demands of future battlefields.”

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 General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service office launched a four-phase program to solicit, fund and test ideas from federal employees seeking to improve government services through the use of technology, Nextgov reported Monday.

The 10x program “is designed to find, fund, grow and sustain new technology products and services,” Nico Papafil, acting lead director of the initiative, told Nextgov. “In other words, we incubate and accelerate great proposals to help move government IT forward.”

Will Cahoe, 10x project coordinator, said the agency asks its employees to provide two or three sentences on a problem they want to address through the use of a Google Form as part of the “10x Mad Libs” process. The agency’s 10x program has four phases – investigation, discovery, development and scale – and allocates funds ranging from $20,000 to $1.28 million as the project progresses into each phase. GSA supports the 10x program, focusing on cross-agency initiatives with broader impact, through the Digital Services Fund.

“One of our goals in the next few months is that we really want to publish and make public a lot of the research that comes out of these projects,” Cahoe said.