The Depart of Veterans Affairs has formed a commission to search for potential candidates to fill the leadership position for the Veterans Health Administration.

Members of the search commission will work to identify individuals with the required knowledge, vision and dedication to serve as the undersecretary for health, the VA said Thursday.

The department will evaluate potential candidates based on their expertise in medicine, health care administration and policy formulation.

The individual appointed for the position would oversee VHA’s $74B annual budget covering health care programs catering to over 9 million veterans at 1,200 facilities.

The search commission consists of: \n

• Anthony Principi, commission chairman
• Don Wright, deputy assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services
• Garry Augustine, executive director at nonprofit Disabled American Veterans
• James Adams, senior vice president and chief medical officer at Northwestern University
• Jim Byrne, VA acting deputy secretary
• Jon Perlin, chairman at the Special Medical Advisory Group
• Jonathan Simons, president and CEO at the Prostate Cancer Foundation
• Sarah Verardo, executive director at the Independence Fund
• Thomas McCaffery, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense health affairs at the Defense Department

The Defense Information Systems Agency has begun an effort to align the architecture of the Acropolis cyber defense network with the agency’s latest operational requirements.

The Where We Fight program involves adding non-classified and classified cloud environments, a private network and a data brokering program in Acropolis to increase the productivity of cyber analysts and save costs, DISA said Thursday.

Matthew Matzer, program manager Acropolis and chief of operations for DISA’s CENTAUR infrastructure, explained cloud environments will also support the initiative of the Defense Department‘s chief information officer to leverage cloud computing systems.

“Conducting a cloud migration at the same time will help us meet DoD requirements, reduce operating costs and speed up the availability of services for analysts,” he added.

DISA is also redesigning Acropolis with the ability to collect data with cross query capabilities and enable analysts to use the cyber defense network’s workstations through a virtual desktop architecture. 

The agency plans to wrap up WWF in 2021.

Acropolis is designed to collect, store and analyze network traffic on non-classified and secret internet protocol router networks and DoD enterprise services to detect and counter cyber attacks on the DoD Information Network. 

The Senate has passed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018, which renames the Department of Homeland Security‘s National Protection and Programs Directorate as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.

Christopher Krebs, undersecretary for the NPPD, approved the bill’s passage, saying that the new name “clarifies and clearly signifies our mission” and will “help significantly in terms of recruiting.”

The piece of legislation will also reorganize NPPD. What will eventually be known as CISA will be made up of three divisions: the Cybersecurity Division, the Infrastructure Security Division and the Emergency Communications Division.

Meanwhile, some offices currently placed under the NPPD will be relocated to other parts of the DHS.

The piece of legislation, however, will have to go back to the House for another vote, the House Committee on Homeland Security press office said. The version of the bill that the Senate had approved came through with two amendments.

Katerina Megas, program manager for National Institute of Standards and Technology‘s Cybersecurity for Internet of Things program, said in a recent summit that agencies must be aware of challenges that IoT brings in cybersecurity, FCW reported Thursday.

Megas leads a program seeking to establish cybersecurity standards that would guide federal agencies’ usage of IoT devices.

The agency opened the draft of these standards for comments and suggestions and will continue accepting responses through Oct. 24.

“We plan on starting to release iterative discussion documents to talk about if there were a baseline for IoT devices,” Megas told FCW at the Internet of Things Global Summit.

These discussion documents are intended for release before the final version of the IoT standards undergoes publishing, the report noted.

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has announced that the Pentagon has completed a review that examines the country’s capabilities against missile threats, Defense News reported Thursday.

Shanahan said Wednesday at a media roundtable that the Defense Department has not yet scheduled the release of the missile defense review, which he said has been finalized “for quite some time.”

He noted that DoD is working to integrate the findings of the MDR strategy into its fiscal 2020 budget proposal that is expected to be completed in the next couple of months.

He hinted that the budget request will be based on DoD’s National Defense Strategy, National Posture Review and the White House’s National Security Strategy.
 

NASA and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency have agreed to collaborate on space exploration and human spaceflight missions under a new arrangement.

The agreement allows the two agencies to conduct research in space biology, physical sciences and human research at UAE’s Mars Scientific City, NASA said Thursday.

The IA also includes training UAE astronauts, as well as allowing the Middle Eastern nation to access the International Space Station and participate in lunar exploration operations.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that the partnership comes as the American space agency plans to relaunch crewed missions to the moon for long-term exploration and utilization.

He added that UAE is expanding its capabilities on Earth and in space with initiatives such as the Emirates Mars Mission, which is scheduled for launch in 2020.

The IA follows a framework agreement that the two agencies signed in 2016 to collaborate on ground-based and sub-orbital research, research and flight activities in low-Earth orbit and human and robotic exploration on the moon, among other things.

Frank Konieczny, chief technology officer of the U.S. Air Force, has said the service could reform its cyber acquisition process based on results from the Kessel Run Experimentation Lab, FCW reported Wednesday.

Konieczny explained during the Dell Digital Transformation Summit that the Air Force seeks to obtain an authority to operate within three or four weeks instead of six years.

He added that the service plans to revive programming as a career to sustain agile software development in the long run.

Standardization should be implemented across the code so that work turned over to new programmers will be easily understood, according to Konieczny. This will help speed up the delivery of products,