Navy Vice Adm. William Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems (N9), has said the service will carry out a force structure assessment in 2019, Defense News reported Wednesday.

Merz said Wednesday at the Defense News Conference the FSA will call for regional threat commanders to gauge the perception of threat and subject that evaluation to war games for potential analysis by independent study teams.

He noted the Navy will also conduct an interim evaluation “a little but quicker — a review of any indications of changes.”

The report said the planned FSA is expected to offer details on the types of ships the service requires.
 

The Department of Homeland Security‘s Science and Technology Directorate is working with the U.S. Coast Guard‘s Research and Development Center to administer a boater safety competition.

Participants in the U.S. Coast Guard Ready for Rescue Challenge are tasked with developing concepts to help the USCG locate people in bodies of water, DHS said Wednesday.

The $255K prize competition will be divided into three phases.

The first phase calls for concepts on life jackets, floatation devices or supplementary items for boater safety. Winners will receive a combined total of $25K.

Qualifying entries will advance to the second phase wherein participants will pitch proposed technologies at a Piranha pool. Winners who succeed in this phase will receive a combined total of $120K that they may use to create prototypes.

In the final phase, USCG will field qualifying prototypes with standard safety equipment and award a total of $110K for winning entries.

“Partnering with DHS S&T allows us to increase the Coast Guard’s access to innovations that make people in the water more detectable,” said Bert Macesker, executive director at USCG RDC.

The House on Tuesday passed by a voice vote a proposal to start negotiations on the proposed $675B defense appropriations measure with the Senate, The Hill reported Tuesday.

The Senate approved in August a package of appropriations bills that would authorize $854B in fiscal 2019 funds for the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor and Education.

The House passed its $675B defense policy bill in June that would allocate $9.4 billion for 93 F-35 fighter jets and earmark $22.7 billion for 12 new Navy ships.

The report said the House has yet to approve its own domestic spending legislation and lawmakers expect to have a final appropriations bill in place before the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

David May, senior intelligence adviser at the U.S. Army Cyber Center of Excellence, has said there are five design updates the service has started to implement in order to counter adversaries across space, electromagnetic spectrum and cyber domains, C4ISRNET reported Tuesday.

May said at TechNet Augusta in August that one of those updates is the service’s plan to launch cyber and electromagnetic activities sections to facilitate spectrum management as well as the integration and synchronization of electronic warfare and cyber operations.

Other updates include the Army’s plan to establish electronic warfare platoons within brigades to work with signals intelligence groups; EW companies within expeditionary intelligence brigades; and a multidomain detachment at Fort Lewis in Washington.

May said the service will set up a cyber support battalion within Army Cyber Command that will integrate signals, intelligence, information, fires and cyber operations into a single formation.

The House of Representatives has unanimously passed a bill that would support the development of the Department of Homeland Security‘s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program.

The Advancing Cybersecurity Diagnostics and Mitigation Act would require the government to develop procedures for systemic cybersecurity risk reporting, regularly deploy new technologies and implement a strategy to grow the program, Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas’ office said Tuesday.

Ratcliffe, who introduced the bill, said that codifying CDM would help federal network protection efforts keep up with the progression of cyber threats.

The CDM program was designed to provide the federal government with technologies that continuously detect and address cyber threats.

The Government Accountability Office has said that the U.S. Coast Guard’s plan to develop three new icebreaker ships runs the risk of exceeding projected costs and breaching production timetables.

In a report published Tuesday, the GAO pointed out that USCG establish acquisition baselines—which include schedule, cost and performance indicators—for the Heavy Polar Icebreaker Program even before conducting a preliminary design review, which, according to the HPIB framework, will be done after the shipbuilding contract is awarded in 2019.

The government audit agency warned that failing to conduct a design review first “puts the Coast Guard at risk of breaching its established baselines and having to revise them later in the acquisition process, after a contract has been signed and significant resources have already been committed to the program.”

Although the USCG’s plan does conform to the Department of Homeland Security’s acquisition policy, the GAO noted that it had previously called on the DHS to require the conduct of technical reviews like preliminary design reviews prior to the approval of a program’s baselines.

The watchdog also recommended that the DHS require the Coast Guard to revise the HPIB program baselines after the design review is completed and before ship construction begins.

John Rood, defense undersecretary for policy, has said building a network of space-based sensors designed to detect and track missile threats is “not a provocative act” and would allow the U.S. to prepare for possible attacks, SpaceNews reported Tuesday.

“If the U.S. pursues a space sensor layer, it watches, it detects what others are doing,” he said Tuesday at a Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance-organized forum on Capitol Hill.

“If we’re attacked, we can deal with it, that’s what we want,” he added.

Rood noted that the Defense Department has started to consider the potential security and technological implications of having space-based missile interceptors but is not yet ready to advance the concept.

“Those are bridges yet to be crossed,” he added.

Rood joined Michael Griffin, defense undersecretary of defense for research and engineering; and Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, director of the Missile Defense Agency; at the forum.

The Department of Energy has chosen 36 projects worth a combined value of $80M to support a research and development program that aims to reduce the cost of bio-based drop-in fuels by 2022.

The department said Tuesday it expects the bioenergy effort to allow consumers to choose from a range of low-cost transportation energy resources.

“Developing all of our domestic energy resources is critical to keeping our nation prosperous and secure,” said Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.

Sixteen of the projects will focus on fostering catalysts and new biological systems, identifying ways to leverage waste streams and developing co-products for biofuel production, in an effort to reduce the cost of fuels from biomass and waste feedstocks.

The DOE added that 10 selections will study integration processes for biopower production, while seven will boost the uptake and conversion of carbon dioxide emissions to maximize carbon utilization and the productivity of algae systems.

Lastly, three initiatives will examine affordable and sustainable non-food dedicated energy crops that can be used as feedstocks to produce of biofuels, bioproducts, and biopower.

The National Defense Industrial Association has found that the revised Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement and continued development of the National Institute of Standards and Technology cybersecurity framework create burdens on defense contracting, National Defense reported Tuesday.

The study, “Implementing Cybersecurity in DoD Supply Chains,” describes how defense contractors are responding to increasing regulation requirements.

The findings also show that the majority of respondents do not have high understanding of the NIST cybersecurity framework and DFARS.

Michigan State University’s Department of Supply Chain Management conducted the study in partnership with NDIA.