Air Force Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, said the Navy intends to equip its submarines with the future low-yield nuclear missiles replacing large weapons that adversaries could easily detect, USNI News reported Thursday.

“We’ll actually remove big weapons from the submarines and put small ones in,” Hyten told the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. “We think that smaller yield actually gives us a better chance to deter our primary adversary.”

The plan comes amid growing concern across the Department of Defense and Congress that the U.S. is lagging behind Russia, China and other nations in developing nuclear weapons. DoD has yet to secure approval from lawmakers to start building its own low-yield nuclear weapons.

“There is a concern that we might not retaliate, because if all of our weapons are such a large size, that we would be deterred because we’d be seen as escalating to their escalate,” said Rep. Michael Turner, R-Ohio.

If confirmed, the program would fall within the limits set by the New START nuclear arms treaty signed by the U.S. and the Russian Federation in 2010. The agreement provides both governments a specific number of nuclear warheads that each nation can only deploy. 

Patrick Shanahan, acting secretary of defense and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said the government will name nominees for the U.S. Space Force leadership post in the coming weeks, Defense News reported Thursday. Pentagon officials propose the new service branch operate directly under the leadership of a senate-confirmed, space-focused U.S. Air Force undersecretary.

Lt. Gen. David Thompson, vice commander of Air Force Space Command, told reporters that the DoD is considering a limited number of space-specialized general officers in the process of developing the structure of new organizations on Wednesday. “With these organizations growing, it does put a stress on the inventory, as it would in any case,” he said.

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.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security discussed the functions and responsibilities of two new organizations created to address cyber vulnerabilities in the technology supply chain during an Atlantic Council event, FCW reported Thursday. DHS formed a supply chain task force, while the Secure Technology Act passed by Congress created the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Council intended to build cybersecurity resilience into federal acquisition rules.

“The council is intended to harmonize supply chain risk management choices across government, to work on acquisition regulation and to really help set a standard, create a mechanism by which we can more reliably identify exclusions or major threats to federal supply chain,” John Costello, a senior adviser to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS, told the publication.

The supply chain task force aims to address long-term issues related to supply chain risk management and collaboration between industry and government, according to the report.

Bob Kolasky, co-chair of the task force, said the group has divided into several work streams to advance information sharing, establish an inventory of supply chain activities across the government and suggest lists of qualified manufacturers and bidders, among other efforts, as it plans to release a set of recommendations by summer.

The Department of Defense divided the potential $8 billion Defense Enterprise Office Solution cloud contract into three phases as part of a revised contracting strategy, Nextgov reported Thursday. 

DEOS will serve as the initial phase of DoD’s Enterprise Collaboration and Productivity Services program and will be competed through the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70, while the second and third phases will cover video, voice and assured voice services.

“DEOS really is the mother of all enterprise IT contracts, it’s the largest contract you’ve probably never heard of,” a former senior defense official told the publication.

Elissa Smith, a spokeswoman for DoD, said the Pentagon envisions DEOS replacing all disparate collaboration tools across the department and service branches.

“It is expected that DEOS will be designated as an enterprise solution for DOD-wide adoption and organizations,” Smith told Nextgov. “Components that have already implemented different solutions with similar functionality will be required to migrate to DEOS.”

GSA officials told the publication they expect to open DEOS for competition by mid-April.
 

The U.S. Census Bureau is testing systems to ensure the office can handle the expected volume of responses its web site will get for the 2020 population count, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

Michael Thieme, assistant director for systems and contracts for decennial census programs, said at the recently held Census Scientific Advisory Committee meeting that the bureau completed the first phase of system performance and scalability testing.

The agency is working on unit testing, which aims to study the amount of users that can access self-response forms online and end-to-end scalability assessments. Thieme noted that the agency will seek to complete a fourth phase that evaluates how systems handle a high workload.

Kevin Smith, chief information officer for the Census Bureau, said the agency conducted cloud component testing and will proceed to testing cloud architecture deployment.

The federal government plans to construct a new FBI field office at the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency campus in St. Louis, according to a St. Louis Business Journal report Thursday.

The planned 40.4K-square foot facility is intended to accommodate information technology equipment and FBI cyber mission servers and unify all field offices across St. Louis. The agency plans to build a visitor screening area, a vehicle repair center, an office building, a 20-spot parking area and a garage facility for 385 vehicles.

“The next step in the process is to develop a concept design to determine feasibility,” said Rebecca Wu, spokeswoman at the FBI. “To that, all parties are committed to working toward a plan that will work best for all.”

The construction project has a value of $128.9M, and the General Services Administration requested $8.9M for the development of concept designs.

The Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is seeking network, data and access management capabilities to support its new approach to continuous diagnostics and mitigation, Government CIO Media reported Thursday.

Kevin Cox, CDM program manager at CISA, noted during the 2019 RSA Federal Summit in Washington, D.C., said the agency wants to provide the necessary capabilities for protecting  systems and data as technological threats continue to evolve. Officials want to ensure that agency systems are integrated with diagnostic tools and sensors to have standardized and searchable data.

CISA is planning to award a contract in May for the development of a “federal dashboard” focused on CDM integration. The agency is also considering partnerships with industry on mobile data protection efforts.

“It’s not just security value. It’s operational value. It’s awareness value. We really want to expand what the agencies will be able to do there,” Cox said.

Margaret Weichert, deputy director of management for the Office of Management and Budget, said at the FedScoop IT Modernization Summit that agency leaders will have direct-hire authority for information technology talent soon, FedScoop reported Thuirsday.

Weichert noted the regulation, which will enable IT managers to approach agency heads for direct-hire authority when there is a shortage of critical IT staff, will be published as a final rule on the Federal Register during the next few days.

She is also serving as acting director of the Office of Personnel Management and said progress is being made on the OMB GEAR Center, which covers test-and-learn skill building activities.

“There will be a lot more coming in terms of changing this very antiquated set of policies we have around people,” Weichert  said.