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.

The Air Force Research Laboratory is implementing a new feature to support the development of semiconductor materials for lighter and smaller electronics. The emerging Oxide Molecular Beam Epitaxy laboratory will house a new MBE chamber to create gallium oxide semiconductors for use in aircraft electronics, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base said Friday.

Don Dorsey, materials research engineer at AFRL, said that gallium oxide still holds a lot of unexplored potential as a semiconductor material. Gallium oxide has also displayed the capacity to withstand higher voltages than common silicon-based semiconductors, and allow for aircraft electronic components to be made in smaller sizes.

“We are able to produce extremely pure samples and have the assurance that our material formulations are exactly as we intend them,” he said.

The MBE technology also fosters collaboration with other AFRL directorates, industry firms and centers of excellence at universities.

“The capability to produce up to four-inch wafers enables us to work with university centers of excellence as well as industrial research organizations to advance the material capabilities and open new doors for this technology,” said Shin Mou, materials researcher at AFRL.

The First Responder Network Authority launched new initiatives to partner with the public and industry in planning public safety investments and creating a new roadmap to enhance the FirstNet network.

The FirstNet Authority Board announced the plans at a meeting on Wednesday in Jackson, Miss. The event focused on how the public can help improve critical communications and safety.

“This is the only nationwide broadband network that public safety has a voice in,” said FirstNet Board Chair Edward Horowitz. “From the earliest consultation days through the launch of the network, public safety has been and will continue to be at the center of everything we do.”

The FirstNet roadmap will use information from the private sector, academia and industry association to follow trends in the tech market.

“We will continue to engage with public safety to learn and understand their needs and collaborate with them so they can maximize the benefits of FirstNet for their life-saving mission,” said FirstNet Authority Acting CEO Ed Parkinson.

The FirstNet Authority is currently developing a new experience program that would help first responders leverage existing and future technologies through hands-on educational experiences. It also completed an agreement with the University of Mississippi Medical Center to promote innovation in emergency medical care and response in rural areas.

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.