The Department of Energy announced $37M available in funding to support small business innovation research and small business technology transfer efforts. This is the second SBIR/STTR funding opportunity announced for fiscal 2019 that finances multiple small business-led research and development efforts in support of nine DOE offices, the department said.

The fund program’s first phase covers 6 to 12 months with up to $200K in awards. Entrants able to complete proceed to develop prototypes in fiscal year 2020 under the second phase with up to $1.6M in grants for each depending on research needs.

“U.S. small businesses are a crucial aspect in driving innovation and creating jobs in our economy,” said Rick Perry, secretary of energy.

DOE components to receive support from the SBIR/STTR projects include:

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• Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response
• Office Of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation
• Office of Electricity  
• Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy
• Office of Environmental Management
• Office of Fossil Energy
• Office of Fusion Energy Sciences
• Office of High Energy Physics
• Office of Nuclear Energy

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Homeland Security help federal agencies build up their capabilities to detect and prevent intrusions and other cyber threats.

Inspectors general at 23 civilian agencies covered under the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 assessed the data security programs of their organizations using performance measures related to five security functions and reported that 17 of those agencies did not effectively implement those programs, GAO said Tuesday.

Those five core security functions are identity, detect, protect, respond and recover.

Of the 23 civilian CFO Act agencies, GAO found that 17 agencies showed internal control-related deficiencies for financial reporting and 10 organizations were at risk for cyber incidents.

Twenty-one of 23 civilian agencies failed to “sufficiently” improve their email protection measures via the implementation of DHS’ email security directive, according to the GAO report.
 

President Donald Trump issued Tuesday a memorandum that orders the establishment of a unified combatant command that would focus on space.

Trump directs Defense Secretary James Mattis to nominate commander and deputy chiefs for U.S. Space Command, according to a White House memo published Tuesday.

Space Command will assume space-related responsibilities previously designated to the head of U.S. Strategic Command, Joint Force Provider and Joint Force Trainer for Space Operations Forces. 

The document noted that a detailed list of the new command’s responsibilities and authorities will be mentioned in the next unified command plan.

Vice President Mike Pence said Space Command will serve as the 11^th combatant command and oversee all military space activities.

The new command “will develop the space doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures that will enable our warfighters to defend our nation in this new era,” he said Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Pence noted the Trump administration has begun to work with Congress to establish the U.S. Space Force before the end of calendar year 2020.
 

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson released the updated version of his strategy document detailing major changes in how the U.S. Navy will acquire and field new technologies, USNI News reported Monday.

Richardson’s Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority 2.0 aims to speed up the development, testing, fielding of tools, weapon systems and ships, among other assets of the service branch. The document also sets goals to acquire technologies to help the Navy deter the growing Russian and Chinese aggression.

Acquisition goals detailed in the new document include contracts for new frigates, unmanned aerial, surface, underwater vehicles, replacement for the F/A-18E/F and EA-18G aircraft, hypersonic weapons, laser technologies and enterprise network modernization. The Navy aims to release the contracts between 2020 and 2030.

The service also looks to establish capability and concept development hubs and a Warfighting Development Directorate to help in the development, acquisition and deployment of new technologies. The Navy released the strategy document in 2016 to guide officials through changes in the fleet, operating environment and in the administration’s priorities.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will host a Proposers Day on Jan. 9 to discuss and develop a contract for a semi-automated system to help the defense community analyze complex events in multimedia platforms. The event at the Holiday Inn in Arlington, Va., will focus on the requirements of a broad agency announcement for DARPA’s Knowledge-directed Artificial Intelligence Reasoning Over Schemas program, according to a notice FedBizOpps posted Monday.

The KAIROS program aims to build a system “that identifies, links and temporally sequences” scenes and automatically sends data to human operators or analysts. “Rapid comprehension of world events is essential for informing U.S. policy, diplomacy and national security,” DARPA said in the notice. The agency said it will seek “revolutionary ideas that use schema-based AI to comprehend events, their components and the participants involved.”

KAIROS will involve a two-stage development to initially focus on automated approaches for learning schemas from big data, followed by the development of automated technologies that apply such schemas to multimedia or multilingual information to extract complex events. Registration for the KAIROS Proposers Day is open until Jan. 2.