The U.S. Navy is looking to reevaluate its structure next year for a potential long-term reorganization of budget, National Defense Magazine reported Monday.

The service branch’s 2019 force structure assessment will focus on the fleet’s composition and determine the need in adjustments for each type of ship, said  Vice Adm. William Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems.

The upcoming assessment follows a previous 2016 iteration that indicated an annual need for $20B in funds to increase the fleet’s size to 355 ships.

“We’re still very committed to that [355 ship] number, but we’re only committed to the point where it’s the right mix of ships,” Merz said.

Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that the upcoming study may not significantly change the number of sought ships, but may likely augment the projected fleet composition.

The National Science and Technology Council recently released a document describing the government’s strategy to maintain and expand U.S. leadership in quantum information science.

The document, entitled “National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science,” identifies QIS as the field in which the next technological revolution will take place, and through which the U.S. “can improve its industrial base, create jobs, and provide economic and national security benefits.”

In pursuit of the national QIS strategy, the document proposes several recommendations grouped under six categories, namely: approaching QIS from a scientific perspective; creating a future workforce that is knowledgeable in QIS; fostering deeper connections between government, the QIS industry and other partners; providing infrastructure necessary for QIS R&D; pursuing economic growth and preserving national security; and promoting international cooperation in the field of QIS.

The NSTC document also acknowledges that the growth of QIS in the next ten years will likely bring about various challenges and underscores the need for the U.S. to “improve our capacity for cutting edge research and development, expand the QIS-literate workforce, and seamlessly coordinate between government, academic and private sector players.”

The General Services Administration has announced plans to implement changes to a special item number for cloud platforms and services on the Information Technology Schedule 70.

A FedBizOpps notice posted Monday says the proposed changes to SIN 132-40 include the addition of IT professional services to help agencies facilitate cloud adoption and migration efforts.

Those professional services will include cloud platform assessments; workload refactoring for cloud platforms; cloud tool preparation; cloud platform migration; and cloud governance support.

The updated cloud SIN seeks to clarify the “measured service” characteristic for cloud products.

“In short, SIN 132-40 now clarifies that cloud products must have discrete ‘pay as you go’ measurements of appropriate compute resources to ensure the government realizes the benefit of cloud deployments,” according to the request for information.

The proposed changes to SIN 132-40 also intend to remove and transition evaluation factors to CI-FSS-152-N additional factors for new offerors under IT Schedule 70.

Responses to the RFI are due Oct. 9.
 

NASA has recently published a roadmap detailing space exploration objectives, Space Policy Online reported Monday.

The 21-page “NASA Space Exploration Campaign Report” provides updated mission plans, which include: shifting U.S. human flight in low-Earth orbit to commercial operations; developing a cislunar and beyond cislunar habitat; uncovering lunar resources through autonomous instrument explorations; and holding expeditions to the moon and Mars.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a Washington Space Roundtable on Monday that SpaceX and Boeing will be able to send astronauts to NASA’s International Space Station by 2019.

A proposal in President Trump’s fiscal year 2019 budget request ceases funding allocation for the ISS in 2025, prompting NASA to encourage commercial space operations so that space crews can have ongoing access to LEO platforms.

Additional goals outlined in the NASA report include: the creation of human lunar surface architecture to propel U.S. astronauts on the lunar surface by 2029; and the modification of a Mars-centric research and development portfolio by 2021.

President Donald Trump has signed into law a package of bills that would allocate fiscal 2019 funds for the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction and energy and water infrastructure.

A White House fact sheet published Friday says the minibus legislation would appropriate $86.5B in funds for VA, including $1.75B for MISSION Act programs, $1.1B for electronic health record system modernization and $8.6B for mental health services.

The measure would also allocate $15.14B for the country’s nuclear security strategy and $10.3B for 174 domestic and overseas military construction projects.

The Army Corps of Engineers would get $7B in fiscal 2019 budget to maintain the country’s water infrastructure.

The Energy Department would receive $13.4B in funds for energy initiatives, such as research-and-development work on nuclear and fossil energy technologies.

The Defense Department‘s Strategic Capabilities Office has identified programs wherein SCO believes it can apply artificial intelligence to assist military operations, C4ISRNET reported Friday.

SCO Director Chris Shank said nearly one-third of the office’s projects cover AI, machine learning or autonomous technology and seek to advance prototypes into tools.

“My job is to keep momentum going,” Shank told C4ISRNET in an interview.

“What I am trying to do is take it from a startup organization to a long-term sustainable one.”

The office supports the U.S. Navy‘s efforts to sustain fourth-generation fighter aircraft with technology under the Paladium initiative. A sub-project called Jarvis looks to implement a robotics platform for field maintainers to sustain and rebuild equipment parts.

The U.S. Navy would get $350M in fiscal 2019 funds to acquire a variant of the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock under a minibus spending measure that passed the Senate on Tuesday, Defense News reported Friday.

The LPD-17 Flight II ship is designed to replace legacy dock-landing vessels used to launch amphibious vehicles onto the shore and helicopters.

The service would get $350M in additional funds to procure the Landing Helicopter Assault Ship 9, an additional $182.5M to purchase three more ship-to-shore connector vessel and $225M to buy an expeditionary fast-transport ship.

Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a retired submarine officer, said the congressional move to boost funding for amphibious shipbuilding efforts seeks to support the Navy’s goal to achieve a 355-ship fleet.

The minibus measure is now headed to the lower chamber for a final vote, according to the report.

The U.S. Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center recently held its fourth annual open house where it demonstrated its investments in modern technologies for telemedicine, Federal News Radio reported Friday.

TATRC Director Col. Gina Adam explained that the center is leveraging innovations in computer and information technology, ultra-wide band as a communications network and artificial intelligence to boost medical care for warfighters.

The technologies that TATRC is experimenting with include drones for conducting medical operations and fetching injured soldiers from remote areas.

“The devices [we are working on] span from near-term emergent capabilities where we are looking to provide a telemedicine capability that would essentially allow the medic to phone a friend, a doctor,” said James Beach, research and development program manager at the TATRC’s Medical Intelligent Systems Lab.

He added that the Army intends to use AI to support medics when communication lines are tampered with.