A panel of military and legislative leaders and an analyst have said the U.S. Navy needs to control long-term costs for maintaining and modernizing weapon systems as the service adopts new acquisition processes, USNI News reported Friday.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, noted during a recent Defense News conference that the Navy should form a plan for when it needs to sustain or replace its assets.

He added that maintenance costs for ships or aircraft will continue to increase after 15 to 20 years of service.

Vice Adm. William Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, also said that it is difficult to maintain big assets such as ships, planes and weapons unless they can be modified during their service life.

Some of the new procurement vehicles the Navy is leveraging to develop or field new equipment include a mid-tier acquisition authority, an Accelerated Acquisition Board and rapid prototyping, according to Allison Stiller, deputy assistant secretary for the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

“All of these activities are intended to increase our agility and improve affordability,” Stiller added.

Vicki Hildebrand, chief information officer at the Department of Transportation, has said DOT has started to design a new “cleansing program” to facilitate crowdsourced cyber vulnerability hunting activities at component agencies, Nextgov reported Friday.

Plans for the cleansing program came after bug hunting services provider Synack identified vulnerabilities in computer systems at the department’s headquarters.

“We started with software we thought was rock solid,” she told reporters at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit.

“There were vulnerabilities we didn’t realize.”

FedScoop reported that Hildebrand aims to speed up cyber threat detection at the department through crowdsourcing methods.

“It goes back to being proactive. I don’t want to wait for a bad actor to tell me I’ve got a vulnerability,” she added.
 

Rep. Mike Coffman, R.-Colo., has said the U.S. Air Force should expand its current fleet by procuring a light attack platform that can support strike missions.

He wrote in an opinion piece published Sunday on Air Force Times that such vehicle has the potential to target hostile adversaries who do not employ anti-aircraft tools and mechanisms.

Coffman, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, proposed a measure for inclusion in the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that would help the service branch pursue light attack aircraft procurement and deployment efforts.

He added the aircraft should include a system designed to deliver rockets and bombs, an airframe built to withstand small-arms fire and a capability to operate from an unimproved airfield or an austere location.

Andrea Thompson, undersecretary for arms control and international security at the State Department, has said she believes there should be discussions about acceptable norms of behavior and rules in space for nation states, SpaceNews reported Saturday.

Thompson told reporters Friday that space security has become a regular topic at National Space Council meetings and that she looks forward to hearing the outcome of the United Nations’ inaugural conference on space policy and law in Moscow.

She noted that the State Department will need to strengthen its expertise once space becomes a diplomatic priority.

“We need to start bringing in folks now,” said Thompson.

“We will need a team in place working space policy years from now.”
 

John Zangardi, chief information officer of the Department of Homeland Security, believes the General Services Administration’s $50B Enterprise Infrastructure Services contract will help the DHS effectively reform its IT systems, FedScoop reported Thursday.

Zangardi announced during the Billington Cybersecurity Summit that he has formed a group to oversee the overhaul.

He added that the DHS will work to leverage the EIS contract to distribute IT modernization benefits throughout the entire department. 

“As we move out into the future with [Internet-of-Things devices], it’s going to be greater in an even greater capacity,” Zangardi said.

Zangardi is coordinating with Acting DHS Deputy Secretary Claire Grady and the deputies of the department’s component agencies to implement the modernization plans.

​The DHS will leverage the EIS procurement vehicle in the second or third quarter of 2019, using funds from the agency’s budget for fiscal year 2020.

The GSA tapped 10 companies in 2017 to vie for task orders to deliver telecommunication services such as cloud infrastructure and network security under the potential 15-year EIS contract. 

James Gfrerer, President Trump’s nominee for assistant secretary for information and technology at the Department of Veterans Affairs, has disclosed his plans for the department, FCW reported Thursday.

Gfrerer told lawmakers during a hearing with the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that he intends to boost coordination between the OI&T and the department’s health and benefits agencies, as the VA implements a 10-year plan to adopt a modern commercial electronic health record platform.

The U.S. Marine Corps veteran expressed interest in sustaining the Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture during the health record modernization effort.

Gfrerer will also work to address the cybersecurity weaknesses in the VA system; the issue has been mentioned in reports from the department’s inspector general.

If confirmed, Gfrerer will succeed Camilo Sandoval, a U.S. Air Force veteran and former senior advisor to the undersecretary for Veterans Health Administration.

House lawmakers are expected to combine the fiscal 2019 defense spending measure with appropriations bills for the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Education in order to gain bipartisan support and pass the package before the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, Bloomberg Government reported Thursday.

“They did it in the Senate. We don’t have much choice,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chairman of the House Appropriations Labor-HHS subcommittee, told reporters Wednesday.

“If you want the defense bill, you’re going to have to deal with the `Labor-H’ bill.”

The Senate passed in August a package of appropriations bills that would earmark $854B in fiscal 2019 funds for the four departments.

The report said lawmakers aim to approve up to nine appropriations measures by the end of this month and tackle the remaining bills after the midterm elections in November, including the homeland security bill that contains funds for the proposed border wall.
 

Heather Wilson, secretary of the U.S. Air Force and a 2018 Wash100 awardee, warns the service branch must modernize its software acquisition process to keep up with the technological advances of adversaries.

Wilson noted during an Aug. 27th conference that documents such as the U.S. Air Force Weapons Systems Software Management Guidebook contain outdated practices that inhibit modernization, the branch said Thursday.

“We’re going to accelerate to a new future driven by the threat that we face and move to a new paradigm for software development,” Wilson commented.

The Air Force is working to adopt new acquisition strategies such as employing Software-as-a-Service to create a faster decision-making and assessment process. Adopting a modern hardware and software acquisition plan will also lead to quicker implementation of the National Defense Strategy.

Wilson added that the strategy directs the Air Force to maintain its competitive edge in every domain and prepare for peer-to-peer conflict.