David Johnson, formerly an FBI special agent in charge of the San Francisco Division, has been appointed as associate executive assistant director of the bureau’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch.

The FBI said Wednesday Johnson will be responsible for cyber policy and strategy development functions at the branch and will serve as the bureau’s operational lead for the Five Eyes Law Enforcement Group.

Johnson will also support the FBI’s cyber and criminal investigations, international operations, critical incident response and victim assistance areas.

In 1991, he joined the FBI’s San Jose Resident Agency, San Francisco Division, with a focus on crime, drug trafficking and activities that involved high-technology firms.

The 25-year FBI veteran led the agency’s San Francisco Division, the Criminal Investigative Division and the Salt Lake City Division, where he was the special agent-in-charge between July 2011 and February 2013.

He also formed the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment teams tasked to assist FBI field offices and state and local law enforcement after a child abduction incident.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has said he has concerns on the House Armed Services Committee’s defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2017 that would move $18 billion from the overseas contingency operations budget to the Defense Department’s base funding, DoD News reported Wednesday.

“It’s gambling with warfighting money at a time of war — proposing to cut off our troops’ funding in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria in the middle of the year,” Carter said in a testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subpanel.

“It would spend money on things that are not DoD’s highest unfunded priorities across the joint force,” he added.

Jim Garamone writes Carter told the Senate committee about the Pentagon’s efforts to counter the Islamic State militant organization.

These include plans to deploy 250 additional military personnel in Syria and 215 additional advisers in Iraq as well as field AH-64 Apache helicopters in support of the Iraqi forces’ offensive campaign in Mosul.

Carter also noted the need to invest in technology platforms that will work to help the U.S. counter the challenges posed by violent extremism, Russia, Iran, China and North Korea across land, air, sea, cyber, space and electronic warfare domains, Garamone reports.

The Defense Department has given the Verdure Award to Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command Office of Small Business Programs in recognition of its efforts in promoting small businesses through SPAWAR acquisitions in fiscal year 2015.

The U.S. Navy said Tuesday the Verdure Award is part of DoD’s Vanguard Awards Program which aims to acknowledge individuals and team members that contribute to small business opportunities in defense contracts.

The service branch said SPAWAR OSBP team members are each assigned a point of contact for each program office within the command.

Faye Esaias, SPAWAR director of small business programs, said the integration of OSBP members into acquisition teams helps foster active engagement in procurement processes and advocate small business opportunities.

To further support small business engagement in defense contracts, SPAWAR OSBP has established a procurement center representative office which collaborates with local industry organizations.

They have also developed a tool that will help the government track small business contributions in large contracts.

U.S. Air Force Col. Scott Jackson, chief of the Defense Information Systems Agency‘s Joint Information Environment Solutions Division, addressed common misperceptions regarding DISA’s Joint Regional Security Stacks program.

Jackson spoke at the 2016 Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s Defensive Cyber Operation symposium in an effort to address questions about the power of the platform, the perception that the single security system offers a single point of failure and the versioning confusion among users, DISA said Tuesday.

The JRSS is comprised of 20 racks of equipment which support the ingest of large sets of data, provide the platforms for processing the data, and provide the mechanisms to help analysts make sense of the data.

It works to perform firewall functions, intrusion detection and prevention, enterprise management, virtual routing and forwarding, and provides a host of other network security features.

Jackson noted that JRSS provides user an option to define its own security processes and controls such as a virtual routing and forwarding feature that works like a “safe deposit box” for the user.

He also added that version 1.5 looks to cater to Air Force baseline requirements while version 2.0 will work to accommodate U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps requirements.

The Air Force’s implementation should be completed by the end of fiscal year 2017.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with top Egyptian defense officials in Cairo Saturday to discuss how the U.S. and Egypt can increase their collaboration to address regional threats, DoD News reported Tuesday.

Jim Garamone writes Dunford discussed U.S.-Egypt military cooperation with Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Hegazy, the Egyptian defense chief, during his trip to Cairo.

“Although we have a broader relationship between our two countries that is bigger than security, the military-to-military relationship can be a foundation,” Dunford noted.

He flew to London Tuesday to discuss ongoing campaigns against the Islamic State militant organization with British Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Nicholas Houghton and other military leaders, Garamone wrote in a subsequent report.

The report said he aims to collaborate with the U.S.’ coalition partners to develop and implement a transregional framework to counter violent extremism.