The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) helped Stanford University establish an academic center to educate and train the next generation of innovators to support the U.S. government’s national security objectives.

ONR said Friday the Gordon Knot Center for National Security Innovation seeks to connect defense, commercial and academic organizations by inspiring the future workforce and promoting technology areas of interest to the office.

“A Gordian Knot is a metaphor for an intractable problem,” said Rear Adm. Lorin Shelby, chief of naval research.

The center’s three lines of effort are national security innovation education, training for innovators and insight, integration and policy outreach. ONR started its partnership with Stanford when the service awarded grants in 1946 to Fred Terman, the late dean of the university’s engineering school who put the funds into Stanford Electronics Research Lab.

“Today, our nation faces many intractable problems, from great power competition to non-state actor threats, as we reimagine what naval power looks like in the 21st century. We’re seeking new disruptive technologies, new operational concepts, and new types of program management and mindsets,” Shelby added.

Gen. David Berger, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, said the service branch needs industry’s help to develop simulators and other training systems that replicate the behavior of adversaries, Defense News reported Tuesday.

“We need help in creating the software, the simulation, that doesn’t replicate us, it replicates the adversary, whether it’s Russia or Iran or the [People’s Republic of China], [People’s Liberation Army],” Berger said at a conference Tuesday.

“They’re all going to operate differently, so we need the fidelity there to allow us, our practitioners, to see they’re not thinking like we are,” he added.

Berger said the services also need training platforms that can combine with systems from other service branches and foreign militaries.

“We assumed that we’re going to need an asymmetric approach. In other words, we’re not going to out-muscle, out-size this pacing threat; you have to have an asymmetric advantage. And the asymmetric advantage that we have is our ability to operate as a team,” he noted.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced that its program designed to produce strategic materials and chemicals from feedstock is entering its second phase to further test novel approaches to waste conversion. 

DARPA said Monday that the ReSource program is aimed at producing systems that convert mixed waste, such as common plastics, into potable water, food, chemical lubricants and other products that can be used during times of shortages.

During the first phase, teams from Battelle, Iowa State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michigan Technological University demonstrated their processes of breaking down waste materials, reassembling organic molecules into chemicals and retrieving purified products.

DARPA said the second phase of the program will focus on engineering versatile systems capable of processing larger number of products with lower energy input. 

Blake Bextine, ReSource program manager at DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said the initiative is intended to reduce the U.S. military’s use of plastics while supporting humanitarian relief efforts in resource-limited environments.

The Department of Commerce (DOC) is seeking public comments on a proposed amendment to the list of criteria for determining whether transactions involving information and communications technology and services present risks to national security.

The department proposed adding a lack of reliable third-party for evaluating the security of connected software applications as a potential indicator of risk when determining whether to approve the acquisition, importation and transfer of foreign information and communications products and services, according to a notice published in the Federal Register Friday.  

The proposed amendment is in response to an executive order President Biden issued in June ordering the federal government to review the security of connected software applications developed, manufactured and supplied by persons supported by a foreign adversary.

The department is seeking feedback from the industry on whether the additional criteria should be applied to all ICTS transaction reviews or just those that involve connected software applications.

Commerce also wants to determine whether to revise the definition of connected software applications to include other means of transmission and communication devices.

Comments to the proposed rule are welcomed until Dec. 27th.