The House Armed Services Committee has suggested the establishment of an artificial intelligence support council under a recent draft of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, C4ISRNet reported.

Once approved, the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Policy and Oversight Council will be formed to supervise development of research and applications supporting the Defense Department‘s AI and machine learning capacities.

The group will also be responsible for implementing AI and machine learning across the DoD.

The undersecretary of defense for research and engineering will be appointed to lead this council.

The legislation is a result of the U.S. government’s goal to keep up with China’s efforts to boost AI capacities.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency will reduce the administrative services fee for foreign military sales from 3.5 percent on every transaction to 3.2 percent.

DSCA said Wednesday the surcharge reduction will take effect June 1 and supports the Trump administration’s conventional arms transfer policy that seeks to increase sales of U.S. defense products and service offerings to international partners.

Lt. Gen. Charles Hooper, director of DSCA and a 2018 Wash100 recipient, said the initiative demonstrates the Defense Department‘s commitment “to charge only what is needed in order to support the administration of the FMS program.

The agency reviews the administrative surcharge account of the program annually and every five years before making a fee adjustment.

The Defense Information Systems Agency will update the Defense Information Systems Network ‘s current packet-optical transport platform that provides a capacity of 10 gigabytes per second in aims to address growing bandwidth demands.

DISA said Wednesday the Next Generation Optical Transport network upgrade project is intended to provide bandwidths with capacities of 100 gigabytes per second to the Joint Information Environment, Enterprise Data Centers and Joint Regional Security Stack locations.

Johnathan Bunting, chief of global projects at DISA’s Infrastructure Directorate, said network infrastructure outages from single-event occurrences will be reduced and access to DoD applications and services will be enhanced through the implementation of multiple diverse paths.

Updates include additional fiber paths and optical equipment.

The effort is meant to enhance encryption and the resiliency of service delivery nodes and the infrastructure and to migrate critical legacy components to an ethernet platform that employs internet protocol.

The Next Generation Optical Transport will help combatant commands with missions that include cybersecurity; mobility; missile warning; command and control; communications; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; and space control.

DISA will support DoD’s efforts to provide an international infrastructure, implement and mature JIE initiatives and modify the department’s information network and the DISN through the update of the packet-optical transport system.

President Donald Trump has nominated Lt. Gen. Bradford Shwedo, chief information officer of the U.S. Air Force, to be CIO at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Shwedo will also serve as JCS director of command, control, communications and computers/cyber, the Defense Department said Wednesday.

As USAF CIO, he oversees portfolio management, enterprise architecture delivery and Freedom of Information Act and Privacy Act implementation efforts across the service branch.

He also leads the integration of the branch’s warfighting and mission support systems, as well as the creation of strategy, doctrine and policy for its cyberspace operations.

Shwedo concurrently serves as chief of information dominance at USAF and previously commanded the 25th Air Force at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas for nearly two years.

The Defense Innovation Unit Experimental encourages defense companies to work with nontraditional contractors through the organization’s technology development programs, SpaceNews reported Tuesday.

DIUx has awarded 67 contracts over the past three years and majority of the contract awards went to companies that do not generally function as government contractors.

The organization selects contractors to build prototypes through “other transaction” agreements as part of a procurement strategy called Commercial Solutions Openings.

Col David Robinson, acting military director and U.S. Army lead for DIUx, told SpaceNews that the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act has expanded OTAs to allow further involvement of conventional defense firms.

The report said DIUx’s programs covers the areas of cyber; space and information technology; autonomy and counter-unmanned aircraft systems, human systems augmentation and artificial intelligence.