The Defense Department has created a road map meant to help military services align unmanned technology projects and goals and with DoD’s strategic vision.

The document obtained by USNI News cites interoperability, autonomy, network security and human-machine collaboration as four themes that can serve as the foundational areas of interest for accelerating the use of unmanned systems.

DoD said interoperability will provide the basis for future advances in warfighting as it has already contributed to the deployment of autonomous technologies.

The road map also noted that advances in autonomy will help boost the productivity of manned and unmanned systems.

The department additionally stressed the need to encourage human-machine teaming in combat operations, as well as address vulnerabilities to prevent attacks on networked connections.

Lastly, DoD said supporting policy, requirements and acquisition environments should match advancements in technology.

“To ensure our military advantage, emphasis should be placed on the evolution, availability and employment of unmanned technology,” the agency said in the road map.

Rosetta Lue, senior contact center adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Information Technology, said the department plans to employ artificial intelligence tools to reform its customer service operations, Federal News Radio reported Friday.

Lue said during the Digital Government Institute’s 930Gov conference that the federal agency will possibly rely on AI to analyze data from numerous call centers and websites, as well as automate tasks to further serve veterans and their families.

She added that there is still a need for the VA to standardize its data collection and storage processes to allow AI systems to correctly analyze the information.

“Besides the technology and websites, I really have to say, the place that we’re finding all those nuggets of information is in that data and that data management approach to analytics and AI, natural language and robotics,” the VA official explained.

The effort comes after the Office of Management and Budget required the VA and other agencies to modify their public service offerings under the President’s Management Agenda.

VA Secretary Robert Wilkie recently announced that he will prioritize the overhaul of the department’s customer service operations, which presents administrative and bureaucratic problems.

Gen. James McConville, vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army, said the service will look into how the civilian sector applies innovation and modernization with the aim of applying the same methods in the military.

McConville noted in an interview with Army Sustainment Magazine that adopting modern technologies such as autonomous vehicles, additive manufacturing and artificial intelligence will help boost logistics and accelerate production and maintenance processes, the service said Friday.

He added that modernization is “extremely important” in military logistics, which involves feeding soldiers, fueling and arming vehicles and helicopters and arming warfighters in the battlefield.

McConville also explained that the Army Futures Command will help bring new systems into the military over the next three to eight years, as well as shorten development and acquisition timelines.

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Lastly, the Army has formed cross-functional teams consisting of operators, sustainers and acquisition officials to develop requirements for the service’s modernization priorities. 

“The fact that we’re keeping the operators and acquisition professionals together throughout the process is allowing us to get a product that the operators want and that acquisition professionals can acquire in a timely manner,” the Army official said.

Four senators have asked the chief financial officers of 13 agencies to address their “use it or lose it” spending at the end of the fiscal year.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs said Wednesday that Sens. Ron Johnson, Claire McCaskill, Rand Paul and Gary Peters expressed concerns that agencies may possibly spend more money by the end of fiscal year 2018 compared to previous years.

The legislators found in a study that agencies spent a total of $11.1B in the final week of fiscal year 2017, which is almost five times higher than their average weekly spending throughout the year.

“Although not a new phenomenon, use it or lose it spending can lead to waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars,” the senators wrote in their letter to David Norquist, CFO of the Defense Department.

They asked the 13 agencies to provide information ensuring that they will not make wasteful or “abusive” spending in the last quarter of 2018.

The agencies of the chief financial officers the four senators approached are:

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• Department of Defense
• Department of the Treasury
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Energy
• Department of Justice
• Department of State
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Health and Human Services
• General Services Administration
• NASA
• National Science Foundation
• Social Security Administration

The Government Accountability Office has pointed out that the Census Bureau has yet to address more than 3K security issues afflicting multiple systems that the bureau will use to carry out the 2020 Census.

GAO said in a report published Thursday that among the unresolved security problems detected during the Census Bureau’s systems assessment process, 43 were deemed either “high risk” or “very high risk,” while more than 2.7K had to do with infrastructure components under development by the technical integration contractor.

The government audit agency noted that majority of the bureau’s systems will use personally identifiable information, and that such information will be collected from “over a hundred million households across the country,” underscoring the importance of ensuring security.

With a handful of systems still in the development phase, the watchdog emphasized the need for the bureau to provide enough time to conduct the requisite security assessment and “ensure that risks are at an acceptable level before the systems are deployed.”