U.S. officials recently held a closed-door meeting at NATO headquarters to brief European alliance members on President Trump’s intent to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Reuters reported Friday.

Washington had earlier announced its plan to pull out of the 1987 pact prohibiting land-based short and intermediate nuclear and conventional missiles due to alleged Russian violations.

Meanwhile, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg seemed to echo the U.S. position by accusing Moscow of having breached treaty terms by developing the intermediate-range SSC-8 cruise missile.

Nevertheless, NATO diplomats present at the recent classified proceedings in Brussels revealed that European envoys sought to prevent the U.S. from leaving the INF.

Alliance members reportedly encouraged American officials to either persuade Russia to cease activities allegedly in treaty violation or renegotiate the treaty altogether so that China would be included.

The U.S. Air Force is looking to boost the readiness rates of its F-22, F-35 and F-16 aircraft squadrons, according to a recently submitted plan, Defense News reported Saturday. These squadrons are currently at readiness levels below Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ required rate of 80 percent.

Heather Wilson, secretary of the Air Force, discussed the plan in an interview at the Airlift Tanker Association’s annual symposium which took place in Grapevine, Texas. She said that the plan entails maintenance staffing, spare parts allotment and logistics efforts across the service branch.

The plan also includes efforts to augment some units within the Air National Guard.

“That includes plussing up our supply accounts, that includes making sure that we prioritize our maintainers for those particular fighter units,” Wilson told Defense News.
“That will mean shifting some money around in our budget, but we’ve put a plan together to do that.”

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently described the U.S. global system of alliances and partners as the country’s “strategic source of strength,” the Defense Department reported Sunday.

U.S. Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, speaking at the Military Reports and Editors Conference held Friday, told attendees that Russia and China also recognize the fact that “it is our network of allies and partners that makes us strong.”

America’s two main competitors are seeking to disrupt that network, Dunford observed. Russia and China are working to sow doubt among U.S. allies in Europe and in the Pacific.

Dunford said that such efforts, coupled with growing military capabilities, constitute adversarial strategies that aim to deny U.S. forces access to different parts of the world.

Subsequently, for Dunford, the core issue is maintaining U.S. “ability to project power where necessary to advance our interests.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials have concluded that no pertinent tax, health or banking information have been divulged during an Obamacare website hack early October, the Washington Examiner reported Friday.

The officials added that a portion of the healthcare.gov website, which was called the “Direct Enrollment pathway,” has already been back online.

CMS previously reported that data from around 75,000 people might have been endangered.

The information was lodged in a part of the Obamacare website that provides a direct link for customers to connect with agents and brokers selling health insurance.

 

The Department of Homeland Security aims to develop an approach for government chief information security officers to assign and compare risk scores to agency networks, Federal News Network reported Friday.

Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary for the DHS’ cybersecurity and communications office, told the station in an interview the department will work with federal agencies to create an algorithm to identify information technology vulnerabilities through the next phase of the Continuous and Diagnostics Mitigation program.

“We do intend for it to be a tool for agencies to understand where they are and have a measureable way of demonstrating progress in a simpler to understand score,” Manfra added.

The report noted DHS intends for the risk scoring system to improve how the government manages network security vulnerabilities.

 

Brig. Gen. Steven Blaymaier, director of Air Mobility Command’s logistics, engineering and force protection, has said the C-130J military transport aircraft and the KC-135 refueling tanker are scheduled to enter the U.S. Air Force’s conditions-based maintenance program in 2019, Defense News reported Saturday.

CBM aims to increase mission-capable rates by predicting problems in aircraft components through the use of data analytics.

“As we move forward with conditions based maintenance plus (CBM+) and predictive analytics, we’ll be able to know by tail number which parts are going to fail on certain aircraft,” Blaymaier said in an interview at the Airlift Tanker Association symposium.

“It’ll be much more surgical [and] operational.”

He noted that the command will implement the CBM program for the KC-135 fleet in the spring of 2019 and C-130J by summer with plans to roll it out to other aircraft such as KC-10s and C-17s.

The service has fielded the CBM concept to AMC’s C-5 transport aircraft fleet and Air Force Global Strike Command’s B-1 bombers.
 

The Office of Management and Budget has issued an updated guidance that outlines new Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program requirements for agencies to comply with the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014, FedScoop reported Friday.

The memo now directs agencies to submit justification should they choose to buy continuous monitoring tools and capabilities outside of the General Services Administration’s IT Schedule 70 CDM tools special item number, CDM Dynamic and Evolving Federal Enterprise Network Defense and other contract vehicles.

The justification should be submitted to the CDM program management office at the Department of Homeland Security, OMB resource management office and the federal chief information officer’s cyber team, according to the document signed by OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.

Under the guidance, CDM PMO will pay for licensing and maintenance costs of agencies’ cyber tools under the program’s one-year base term and first option year.

After the two-year period, agencies will be asked to fund the maintenance and operation of their CDM capabilities.

The memo requires agencies to include CDM-specific line items in their budget plans for fiscal 2021 and beyond.

The document also states the deployment of a federal dashboard to facilitate sharing of cyber threat data among agencies; FISMA reporting requirements and deadlines; and implementation of the Federal Cybersecurity Risk Determination Report and Action Plan.
 

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has said drafting the budget for fiscal year 2020 calls for the Pentagon to “put the resources in place” in order to operationalize the national defense strategy.

“We are not going to reverse course on all that planning but we will build two budgets,” Shanahan said Friday at the Military Reporters and Editors conference in Arlington, Va.

The Defense Department plans to have two budget requests in place by Dec. 1 – a $733B spending plan and a $700B budget.

He told attendees the proposed “space force” will have three components: space operations; technology development for space operators; and headquarters to oversee resources and training.

Shanahan also noted that the space development agency will focus on capability development to ensure U.S. dominance in space.
 

The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have facilitated a workshop focusing on the future of airport security.

Professionals in the aviation industry convened at the second annual Aviation Security Futures Workshop in Reston, Va., to address issues in various aspects of airport security as part of the Apex Screening at Speed program, DHS said Thursday.

Apex SaS Program Manager John Fortune noted that the project coordinates with the Transportation Security Administration to procure modern technologies to sustain aviation security in the short and long run.

The event also built on the first workshop held in September 2017, addressing issues in biometrics, human factors, big data, location and tracking technologies, autonomous vehicles and future airport design.

Lt. Col. Steven Webber, deputy chief of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s nuclear detection division and Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Project on Speech, Privacy and Technology led discussions about innovation and civil liberty issues related to physical security.

DHS is planning to administer a third Aviation Security Futures Workshop in 2019.