Heidi Shyu, undersecretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense and a 2023 Wash100 winner, has issued a memorandum announcing the establishment of a new task force within the Defense Science Board tasked with identifying operational and weapon system concepts as part of efforts to restore the U.S. armed forces’ operational dominance.

The task force on strategic options will operate as a subcommittee of DSB and will look at advanced undersea assets and operational concepts, new countermeasures for electronic warfare, new uses of space assets and cyber weapons employment, according to the memo publicly released Monday.

“Additional considerations should include the adversary’s use of countermeasures to undermine U.S. dominance in the air, space, sea and cyber domains,” the document reads.

The task force will conduct a study within 30 days of the initial appointment of members and will present its findings and recommendations to Shyu and to the board for deliberation.

Shyu said she will sponsor the task force, whose members will be given access to DOD officials and data for them to carry out their activities.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown said the service branch intends to commit more funding in future budgets to the use of unmanned aircraft that will fly alongside with crewed platforms, Breaking Defense reported Monday.

“We’re getting down the path to to have much more capability for uncrewed aircraft,” Brown said at an event Monday.

“I think you’ll you’ll see as we start looking at our future budgets and the analysis we’re doing as part of the operational imperatives that we are committed to more uncrewed capability,” he added.

USAF’s Next Generation Air Dominance program includes the development of a Collaborative Combat Aircraft or a set of semi-autonomous drones that would fly with a sixth-generation fighter aircraft.

Brown noted that the service intends to have the Collaborative Combat Aircraft fly alongside F-35 and other fifth-generation fighter jets.

“As we look into our future budgets, there’s three aspects of this. There’s the platform itself, there’s the autonomy that goes with it, and then there’s how we organize, train and equip to build the organizations,” Brown said. “And we’re trying to do all those in parallel.”

He also offered updates on the Department of Defense’s progress in implementing the Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept.

The U.S. Army’s software factory has partnered with U.S. Army Europe and Africa Mission Command Support Branch to develop new applications intended to address challenges facing the U.S. military and its allies, DVIDS reported Monday.

During an interoperability exercise at 7th Army Training Command, ASF helped modernize an application developed to connect data between U.S. and NATO systems from the Army Tactical Assault Kit to enable a seamless exchange of information at the tactical edge.

“We’ve developed a path to production where apps go from origin to security scanning to deployment into Kubernetes clusters that will run on a TSI stack here on the edge of the battlefield,” said Sgt. 1st Class Joshua Millett, a platform engineer with ASF.

Martin Christian Dudel, a civilian senior software engineer with USAREUR-AF, said the software factory transformed the application into a “container that can operate in a cloud native environment on the tactical edge bridging U.S. and NATO systems.”

ASF was launched in April 2021 at the Austin Community College in Texas to develop new applications and train soldier coders to improve operations through technology.

John Kirby, coordinator for strategic communications at the White House National Security Council, said the U.S. intelligence community was directed by President Joe Biden to conduct an assessment of China’s intelligence capabilities and found that the country has a high-altitude balloon program used for gathering intelligence and is linked to its army, DOD News reported Monday.

“We know that these [Chinese] surveillance balloons have crossed over dozens of countries on multiple continents around the world, including some of our closest allies and partners,” Kirby told the media on Monday.

He noted that Biden has directed the secretaries of the departments of Defense and State and the director of national intelligence to share information with their counterparts and gain their insights on these aerial objects.

The Department of Commerce’s bureau of industry and security added to the Entity List six organizations for backing China’s military modernization initiatives, including those related to balloons and airships the Chinese army uses to perform collection and reconnaissance missions.

Kirby’s statement came a day after North American Aerospace Defense Command detected and shot down an aerial object that had flown over Lake Huron in Michigan.