Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch, military deputy for the office of the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, has said he has ideas of how the service would move forward with the light-attack experiment, Defense News reported Friday.

“We are planning to broaden the experimentation out and carry the experimentation forward, and I think when our budget hits, you’ll understand more of what we’re doing,” he said Friday at an Air Force Association event.

Bunch said the experiment has helped the service verify the requirement for a light-attack aircraft designed to fight threats posed by violent extremism in a low-cost manner.

He noted that he considers the experiment a success because it enabled the Air Force to build a partnership with industry.

“We learned a lot, and we got to the point where we weren’t ready to make a large buy decision at this stage. I still believe that is learning,” Bunch added.
 

President Trump has signed a new executive order encouraging companies to “buy American” products as they receive contracts to work with the federal government on infrastructure projects. The White House said Thursday that the policy’s goal is boosting the use of U.S.-made goods, products and materials. In particular, iron, steel, aluminum and cement, in federal contracts and financial assistance programs.

Trump said the order comes as the result of the growing number of jobs in the manufacturing sector that is expected to reach 700,000 in the near future. He also highlighted the recent growth seen by the steel industry in the U.S. 

“We want American roads, bridges and railways and everything else to be built with American iron, American steel, American concrete and American hands,” said Trump. 

The “buy American” executive order requires all heads of federal departments and agencies to provide a report to President Trump detailing their plans to encourage industry partners to use products produced in the U.S. in every contract, subcontract, purchase order or sub‑award. Officials have 120 days from the release of the order to submit the report.

The Government Accountability Office has called on the Pentagon to implement joint oversight of military services’ pre-positioned stock programs to improve management of supplies across the world. The Department of Defense has been failing to synchronize how each service branch manages deployed supplies and equipment, which could lead to duplication of effort and inefficiency, GAO said in a new report issued Thursday. 

GAO highlighted that DoD was unable to address some of the requirements set by the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2014. The Pentagon failed to provide all the information required by the NDAA in program planning and that defense officials also let military services work on their own to implement their programs. GAO said the service branches to date manage their programs with little joint oversight.

To help improve management of military supplies, the government watchdog recommended that DoD provide the information required by the NDAA, a more detailed implementation plan and establish a joint oversight of pre-positioned stock programs. GAO added the Pentagon should also update Congress on the progress of its efforts.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched the Competency-Aware Machine Learning program intent on developing autonomous systems that can continuously and rapidly perform self-checks in unpredictable situations, DARPA said Thursday. The agency is looking for proposers to provide machine learning, artificial intelligence, pattern recognition and other capabilities for autonomous technology as part of the project.

According to DARPA, the program will result in a “force-multiplying effect” where humans and machine-learning based systems would collaborate efficiently in time-critical and constantly changing scenarios. Jiangying Zhou, program manager for DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said the dynamic can be useful for technologies such as self-driving vehicles, which require performance assessments while traveling in fluctuating natural conditions.

DARPA will hold a proposer’s day via pre-recorded webcast on Feb. 20. The research entity expects to release a broad agency announcement in mid-February.

The Department of Defense’s inspector general said there’s a growing interest across the Pentagon to conduct another agency-wide audit following the first assessment that found pervasive weaknesses, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

Carmen Malone, deputy assistant IG for audit and financial management readiness at DoD, said defense officials now understand the impact of the audit. “The biggest thing we’ve seen this year was tone at the top, from the secretary of defense all the way down to the commanders at the bases,” she said.  

DoD’s first agency-wide audit reported over 2,400 findings and recommendations, with nearly half of that number related to financial issues and the other focused on weaknesses of information technology systems. Malone said the Pentagon has required its components to have corrective action plans and timelines to resolve the issues. DoD has also established a centralized database to track the efforts and to maintain accountability over the deficiencies.

“Seeing that process that we’ve never seen before is huge,” Malone said. “If you’re making people focus on the corrective actions and ensuring that those corrective actions address the problem, you will make progress both in readiness towards the audit, in operations, in saving money.”

However, the DoD IG office warned the next audit might reveal more issues in 2019.

Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Calif., who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives’ Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, listed a number of democrat-supported border security proposals. The proposals intend to balance investments within the Department of Homeland Security given a limited budget, Roybal-Allard’s office said Wednesday.

Proposed efforts include the addition of 1,000 new customs officers, new imaging technology to scan vehicles entering the country, new situational awareness technology and entry point repair projects. A number of proposals also aim to support programs of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Transportation Security Administration. Among these programs are ones that may not receive funding if President Trump pushes through with the $5.7B allotment for border construction.