Lt. Col. Joseph Carr, 340th Expeditionary Air Refueling Squadron director of operations, has said that the 340th EARS unit continues to offer air refueling services in support of various U.S. Air Force missions.

The Defense Department said Wednesday that the 340th EARS team helps the Combined Forces Air Component Command and Combined Joint Special Operations Air Component meet their respective objectives.

“Air-to-air refueling extends joint and coalition receivers’ on-station loiter ability, expanding the time of opportunity to observe, target and destroy enemy assets or provide overwatch protection of our ground forces,” said Carr.

Carr added that the 340th EARS unit supports approximately 67 percent of the Central Command‘s air-to-air refueling activities for joint, coalition and NATO partners.

DoD noted that the 340th EARS has contributed to various major operations in the last decade including Operations Enduring Freedom, Iraqi Freedom, Freedom Sentinel and Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa.

The 340th EARS unit also celebrated its 75th year anniversary in September.

Rob Joyce, White House cybersecurity coordinator, has said U.S. companies could fall victim to intellectual property theft when revealing their source code to foreign governments in order to do business in other countries, FCW reported Tuesday.

Joyce said at the Washington Post’s Cybersecurity Summit that the security aspects of source code disclosures are “problematic” but he is more concerned about IP theft by U.S. companies’ foreign competitors.

The cybersecurity chief made the comments in response to a Reuters report that says Hewlett Packard Enterprise let a Russian defense agency see the code of the ArcSight cyber defense software that works to secure the Pentagon’s computer networks.

HPE said that for years the source code reviews have been conducted by a Russian testing company at the former’s research and development center outside of Russia, where HPE personnel oversee the process and do not allow code to be taken out of the facility, Reuters reported Wednesday.

HPE added that the code inspection is required to obtain authorization to sell software in Russia from the country’s defense agency in charge of countering cyber espionage, Reuters noted.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has said he has been authorized by the White House to reassess and change the rules of engagement in Afghanistan to help expedite the campaign against the Taliban group, Defense News reported Tuesday.

Mattis told Senate Armed Services Committee members during a hearing Tuesday that some of the changes he has implemented include the dispersal of U.S. and allied advisers among Afghan units and the removal of proximity requirements for launching air strikes against Taliban forces.

“You see some of the results of releasing our military from, for example, a proximity requirement — how close was the enemy to the Afghan or the U.S.-advised special forces,” Mattis said.

“So these kind of restrictions that did not allow us to employ the airpower fully have been removed, yes.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), SASC chairman, said Tuesday he is delaying the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominees for civilian posts at DoD due to the administration’s failure to inform Congress about the details of its Afghanistan strategy, according to The Hill citing a Defense News report.

In an Aug. 21 announcement of his Afghanistan strategy, Trump said he would send 3,000 additional U.S. warfighters to the country to help train Afghan troops to carry out counterterrorism efforts.

“In the six weeks since the president made his announcement, this committee and the Congress, more broadly, still does not know many of the crucial details of this strategy,” McCain said at the Senate hearing.

“We expect — indeed, we require — a regular flow of detailed information about this war,” he added.

The Department of Homeland Security‘s inspector general has found that the Customs and Border Protection’s information technology infrastructure failed to support its goal to prevent the entry to the U.S. of foreigners who may pose national security threats.

U.S. international airports also experienced system outages in its incoming passenger screening processes that resulted in passenger delays and risks to public safety, DHS IG said in a report published Thursday.

CBP’s office of field operations also encountered inefficiencies in its passenger screening procedures due to slow performance of its pre-screening platform.

Air and marine operations have also been plagued by unstable networks and inadequate performance of IT systems, leading to backlogs and failure of border patrol agents to meet deadlines set by courts for the submission of potential criminal prosecution cases associated with foreign passengers.

CBP also experienced lapses in situational awareness over cargo and inadmissible passengers that approach U.S. borders due to frequent outages in IT networks.

The report called on CBP to create a plan to address maintenance and dependencies on external platforms and carry out a user evaluation of its TECS Portal to help address concerns with passenger pre-screening activities.

TECS Portal is a system designed to help CBP officers screen and determine the admissibility of incoming travelers.

CBP should also develop programs to build up its backup processes, such as establishing a dashboard to monitor outage status and system latency, the report added.

Defense Secretary James Mattis has said defense panels in Congress have approved the Pentagon’s plan to shift approximately $440 million in unspent fiscal 2017 funds from operations and maintenance accounts into missile defense initiatives amid North Korea’s nuclear weapon pursuit, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

Mattis announced the approval at a Senate hearing on Afghanistan Tuesday.

The report said Raytheon, Boeing and Orbital ATK are among the contractors that are likely to benefit from the Defense Department’s reprogramming request.

A six-page reprogramming request prepared by Mattis and obtained by Bloomberg listed approximately $416 million in total funding shift requests in support of missile defense programs.

The funding shift request would reprogram $16 million in funds to extend a radar platform, $13 million to advance Baseline 9.2 updates to four U.S. Navy ships to facilitate launch of Raytheon-built Standard Missile-3 Block IIA anti-missile interceptors and another $15 million to fund software upgrades to the Boeing-made Sea-Based X-Band radar that works to monitor an intercontinental ballistic missile.