Department of Energy expands CyberForce program

The Department of Energy is expanding its CyberForce program by offering year-round competitions, webinars and career resources designed to prepare collegiate students to fill workforce gaps — especially around industrial control systems (ICS) and operational technology (OT).

Argonne National Laboratory leads the program and added two virtual, solo competitions, comprising a Conquer the Hill series, that allows students to hone cyber skills mapped to the National Institute of Standards and Technology‘s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Workforce Framework.

Argonne launched a Cyber Defense Competition in 2016 to help address the national cyber talent shortage, predicted to reach 1.8 million workers by 2022, which has evolved into a program benefitting not only companies but government as well.

“The National Labs, Department of Energy and all the other federal agencies are obviously equally looking for talent that is interested,” Amanda Joyce, CyberForce program director, told FedScoop. “Bringing students on-site, or even bringing them in virtually, brings awareness to the national lab system.”

Tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google attract the top cyber talent, but students forget DOE keeps the lights on for those companies — literally — and can give them the hands-on  training in real-world scenarios involving ICS and OT they lack, Joyce said.

Argonne won’t hold the next in-person, team CyberForce Competition until 2022 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is why it started the Conquer the Hill series.

The Reign Edition set for September will be a timed, capture-the-flag event with non-traditional  escape room elements that force competitors to think logically.

While the Adventurer Edition, which ran from July 16-18, gave participants 48 hours to complete 160-plus cyber tasks of varying difficulties in a question-and-answer format. University of Central Florida student Cameron Whitehead won.

While Conquer the Hill events try to admit all who register, the CyberForce Competition only allows one team per university to enter. The red-blue, attack-defend competition requires teams to perform daily tasks like examining log files while keeping everything from email to ICS operational, in what is a multi-lab event.

This year the CyberForce program also added a once-a-month webinar series highlighting key cyber topics; a virtual career fair for more than 1,000 students to meet with cyber companies; and is creating a workforce development portal that will report on students’ progress and let them engage with each other and government and industry experts year-round.

The need to have students fill cyber roles defending ICS and OT became more critical after a hacker breached a Florida water treatment plant in February and a ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in May, which led the company to shut the pipeline down temporarily and saw people panic-buying gas into scarcity across the Southeast.

“Why we push operational technologies so much is because the technology we’re using is very old,” Joyce said. “”The problem is none of these systems were ever really meant to be on the internet.”

The CyberForce program encourages students to think through the added cyber risks ICS and OT present and consider what constitutes the proper amount of security, how the networks communicate internally and with other networks, and how a hacker might turn them off.

Security isn’t just updates, patches and firewalls when it comes to such systems, Joyce added.

“The problem is that doesn’t work for everything and specifically for our operational technology networks,” she said. “And it takes a unique skillset to really understand that and to figure out that these systems are very sensitive in nature.”

GSA makes awards under ASTRO IDIQ contract

The General Services Administration has awarded over 300 spots to federal contractors across its ASTRO indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity vehicle for robotics and unmanned systems.

Awardees include contracting giants Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton and Leidos, in addition to smaller, veteran-run entities and many others.

ASTRO is a large U.S. government contract vehicle, geared towards the needs of the Department of Defense and the U.S. military. It is understood to have a budget of tens of billions of dollars and no defined ceiling.

Its scope is focused on the operation and maintenance of robotics and unmanned systems, as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

ASTRO is broken out into myriad separate domains, which encompass the majority of the armed services’ technical requirements. ASTRO has 10 pools, or scope areas, for a maximum of 450 contracts.

Contracts issued through the vehicle are intended to support a 10-year ordering period.

Air Force testing microwave weapons to stop drones

The Air Force Research Lab wants to find new ways to stop potential drone attacks. Now it’s turning to microwaves as one possible solution.

The lab wants to create a high-power microwave weapon system that could halt an incoming unmanned aircraft or swarm of small drones. To bring this idea to life, the lab is seeking commercial partners to further prototype tech the lab has already developed. Stopping enemy drone attacks is a problem the military has been eager to solve as commercial unmanned aerial systems (UAS) proliferate on and off the battlefield.

The new program is part of AFRL’s Tactical High-Power Operational Responder (THOR) program that has been testing and developing directed energy for the past two years. Now, the new program dubbed “Mjolnir,” after the hammer Norse god Thor uses, aims to operationalize and advance more capabilities in using directed energy in weapon systems.

“After a successful two-year testing campaign, the AFRL team has learned a lot about the benefits of the technology and how it can be improved,” Amber Anderson, THOR program manager, said in a release.

Directed energy is a new category of tech that uses highly focused energy, often electromagnetic spectrum waves or laser beams, to disable or cause harm to adversaries. They can be used to fool incoming guided missiles or even attack humans by simulated burning sensations. When faced with drones, the weapons could disable a swarm of them without firing a physical bullet or launching a rocket, giving the operators greater stealth.

The tech remains nascent and has yet to be scaled, a problem the Mjolnir team want to solve.

“AFRL’s goal is to create a blueprint for our partners so these systems can be economically produced in large quantities, and to grow a fledgling industry that will become critically important as the U.S. strives to maintain our electromagnetic spectrum superiority,” Adrian Lucero, THOR’s deputy program manager, said.

The DOD recently signed a contract with Anduril Industries for an other type of counter-UAS tech. Their tools use an artificial intelligence-enabled sensing system to detect incoming small aircraft that could pose a risk to a base or other military options. Other options the DOD has looked at include drones that carry large nets to intercept incoming drones.

Treasury CIO Eric Olson to depart

Eric Olson will be leaving his role as CIO of the Treasury Department at the end of July, FedScoop has learned.

It is understood that Olson’s last day with Treasury will be July 31.

Olson officially took over as CIO of Treasury in November 2017. As deputy CIO since 2015, he assumed the role in an acting capacity that July when then-CIO Sonny Bhagowalia took on a detail with the Bureau of Fiscal Services.

He has also served as the department’s CISO, according to the Treasury website.

Before joining Treasury, Olson was at the Department of Justice for 12 years where he held several technology leadership positions, such as the director of service engineering. Earlier in his career, he also spent time in the private sector with Accenture, Verizon and Sprint.

As CIO of Treasury, Olson led and oversaw the department’s $4 billion portfolio of IT systems and services. Recently during his tenure, the department has made a shift in its approach for cloud computing with the TCloud acquisition, which aims to centralize and broker cloud services across the department under a multi-cloud, blanket purchase acquisition with a $1 billion ceiling. A draft solicitation for the procurement went out earlier this month.

Olson was a winner of a FedScoop 50 award in 2020.

Treasury officials did not comment on Olson’s departure.

Internships are ‘primary mechanism’ to expand federal cyber workforce, says Partnership for Public Service CEO

The CEO of the Partnership for Public Service has called for an expansion of cybersecurity internship programs, describing them as the “primary mechanism” for getting new talent into entry-level jobs at federal agencies.

“Our federal government needs to approach talent management as the best private sector organizations do,” said Max Stier, speaking at a congressional hearing on Thursday. “We think our student internship program is our primary mechanism for identifying talent for entry-level [cybersecurity] jobs.”

Thursday’s hearing was hosted as lawmakers debate the most effective way to foster a new generation of cybersecurity experts in government in response to the rise in cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. It follows also a memorandum from the Biden administration yesterday that will create new performance goals for federal agencies.

Converting internships into full-time, fully paid government positions is currently a laborious process and can leave candidates waiting for up to 100 days before receiving a job offer. Roles requiring security clearance often result in a longer delay for potential employees.

Stier said also that more granular metrics should be used to judge the success of departments in recruiting and retaining a broad range of candidates.

“The most senior leadership in government need to hold their teams accountable to make sure these numbers are good,” he said. “If they prioritize it themselves, you will see change.”

Among key challenges for federal agency cyber recruitment is the age of the workforce, which has fewer than 6% of staff under the age of 30.

In a conversation with FedScoop earlier this month, cloud technology experts identified the expansion of internships and partnerships with colleges and other institutions as key ways of tackling a lack of cloud talent.

The Partnership for Public Service is a D.C.-based nonprofit that is focused on improving how government agencies function.

Aging infrastructure the ‘single, greatest threat’ to NASA missions and technology

NASA infrastructure should be part of the wider effort to fund federal research and development infrastructure, said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, during a House Science Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics hearing Thursday.

The chair of the full committee said NASA‘s infrastructure needs include one of the nation’s most powerful supercomputers, utility and access systems across nine centers and other research and test facilities, wind tunnels for developing subsonic and hypersonic aircraft, and clean rooms and vacuum chambers for building sensitive interplanetary spacecraft.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has previously said the agency’s full list of infrastructure needs is more than $5.4 billion, which includes $2.6 billion in deferred maintenance — roughly 7% of its $39 billion asset value.

“NASA’s infrastructure represents the single, greatest threat to mission success,” said Robert Gibbs, associate administrator for NASA’s Mission Support Directorate. “Practically 82% of our facilities are beyond their designed life.”

Annual maintenance requirements increase every year and exceed NASA’s resources, which will begin jeopardizing efforts to return to the moon, establish a permanent lunar base and reach Mars, understand the impacts of climate change, and make engineering breakthroughs in the “near future,” Gibbs added.

Many of NASA’s buildings and laboratories date back to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, and Artemis Program investments are needed to maintain technical capabilities.

In addition to the hypersonic tunnel at Langley Research Center with high-speed air travel implications, NASA wants increased funding for its new robotics lab within the Jet Propulsion Laboratory benefitting Mars exploration and its recently opened Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Johnson Space Center studying the impacts of space travel.

JSC also runs NASA’s space sample return program, which hasn’t yet sited a new facility for processing samples returned from Mars. Missions like that are consistently prioritized over NASA’s deferred maintenance backlog across 5,000-plus buildings and structures.

“The reality is I’ve had to delay, defer, descope 47 [construction] projects over the last two budget cycles because I just didn’t have the resources,” Gibbs said.

The House Science Committee hadn’t examined NASA’s infrastructure since 2013, when the deferred maintenance backlog was $2.1 billion, and the agency received less funding than it’s requested 10 out of the last 12 budget cycles.

Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, said NASA’s infrastructure funding request needs to be formalized, rather than remaining an “off-budget wishlist.”

NASA’s fiscal 2022 request represents a $6.3% increase on last year with an additional $3 billion for safety, security and mission services that include maintenance and operations. But the agency’s request for construction, environmental compliance and remediation represents a 9% reduction.

“If NASA’s facilities and infrastructure are in need, they should be appropriately prioritized in the agency’s budget request,” Babin said.

Riggs said mission, safety and health remained higher priorities in the budgeting process, but there’s an opportunity to invest in state-of-the-art facilities and demolition of outdated ones to shrink NASA’s footprint.

Exactly how lawmakers plan to approach the problem remains up in the air.

“While the path forward in Congress might not yet be totally clear, my commitment to addressing our R&D infrastructure needs is steadfast,” Johnson said. “Science, research and innovation are our future.”

ABMS test events focus on applying tech to enterprise IT

As the Air Force continues testing artificial intelligence programs for the future of connected warfare, it is also assessing how some of that tech can support the service’s broader enterprise IT modernization goals.

The Air Force recently wrapped up its fifth Architecture Demonstration and Evaluation (ADE) event, which brought together 11 combatant commands, 46 commercial companies and a host of tech-focused offices throughout the Department of Defense to test emerging tech in the battlefield.

The ADE events were created to test the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) and other programs. ABMS is designed to link more data from battle together and use artificial intelligence to help analyze it. Demonstrations for the events went from July 8-28, according to a release.

The latest experiment tested new “packages” of communications technologies that could improve both the reliability and security of data flowing across the globe, Preston Dunlap, the Air Force’s chief architect, said during a press conference Thursday.

Those new technologies could also be used to improve enterprise IT, he added.

“We have always been doing that; however, in the first year we had been laser-focused on [the Advanced Battle Management System],” Dunlap said of the event’s focus on IT, not just ABMS.

ABMS is the Air force’s contribution to Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) — a framework the military hopes the services will implement where all data and communications are linked from air, land, sea, space and cyberspace operations. AI will be central to this new way of waging war to sift through all that newly linked data and generate options for commanders.

During this fifth version of the demonstration, the team was looking to make successful tech “ubiquitous” for the Air Force enterprise, Dunlap said. That means new ways of transmitting data or securing endpoints for ABMS could become standard practice in enterprise IT.

Dunlap added that not only are specific pieces of tech being tested, but the entire underlying architecture of how tech is put together is also being tested. The open-architecture approach ABMS has could also be a template for enterprise IT solutions, Dunlap said.

“ADEs are interned to be able to funnel together departmentwide space and air capabilities,” he said. 

One program that showed success was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) called System-of-systems Technology Integration Tool Chain for Heterogeneous Electronic Systems (STITCHES). The software is essentially an automated translation service for data. When a weapon system or platform spits out numbers in a format unreadable to another machine, STITCHES can be one of the tools to help translate it to readable format.

The program was at risk of falling through the cracks of the DOD’s financial system, due to budgeting issues. Dunlap said the Air Force will be picking up the tab on the software, saying it could be a viable tool for future use. But it’s unclear how it would work on an enterprise level.

Tech was not the only thing experimented with — the operational construct of how tech gets used in battle was another focus. Much of that came down to arranging the right personnel, Dunlap said.

The event consisted of a broad collection of sub-events that included Northern Command’s Global Information Dominance Experiment 3 (GIDE 3) and IndoPacific Command’s Pacific Iron 2021 Agile Combat Employment. Dunlap described the model as a Venn diagram, where each event had large overlaps in technology used and personnel, but they also hosted their own, unique tests.

“We are drawing a common thread through it all,” Dunlap said.

Contributing to data and AI

One of the personnel moves the Air and Space Forces are making is contributing to a new initiative to send technical experts into the field. The AI and Data Accelerator Initiative (AIDA) sends small teams of data and AI experts out to combatant commands to build new tools to fit their specific problem sets. The idea came from the National Security Commission on AI and was implemented by the Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks.

Dunlap said the Air Force is already sending people to build tech that will help combatant commands in the field use their data better.

“We are pushing that hard and we already started building a minimum viable product,” he said.

The initiative is designed to be department-wide and eventually will include all services. Dunlap said the Air Force is leaning especially hard into it, praising the initiative as a way to put technical talent where it’s needed.

GAO survey of federal managers suggests progress needed on evidence-based policymaking

Only about 45%-47% of federal managers believe that staff within their agencies have the skills needed to collect, analyze and use different types of evidence, according to a survey by the Government Accountability Office.

The study, which was carried out by the oversight body between July and December last year, identified further concerns about the availability of tools and personnel needed to enact policies based on the foundation of clear evidence and analysis.

“These results suggest the finding from the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking’s report—that capacity to support evidence-building functions is uneven across agencies—persists,” said GAO.

The survey was carried out as part of GAO’s work to review the implementation of the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, a responsibility that is encoded within the legislation itself.

Of respondents to the survey, between 50% and 60% said that within their specific programs, staff had the skills needed to collect, analyze and use different types of evidence. About half of federal managers reported that aspects of evidence building capacity existed to a “great” or “very great” extent across different types of evidence.

Despite the finding, nearly all federal managers – an estimated 95% of respondents – reported having at least one type of evidence for their programs. When evidence was available, about half to two-thirds reported using it in different decision-making activities, including in the allocation of resources.

Additionally, the survey found that only about one-third of managers surveyed said they used evidence to inform the public about a program’s performance.

In 2016, Congress passed and President Trump signed into law the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission Act of 2016, which established a commission to examine the comprehensive data infrastructure associated with federal policymaking.

When it reported in September 2017, the commission found that agencies’ capacities to generate a range of evidence were uneven and that where it existed, it was often poorly coordinated.

The Evidence Act, which was subsequently passed in 2019, represents a continuation of laws and executive actions to establish officer positions to improve federal government management, which began with the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.

In its report, GAO concluded that the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management should use its findings to improve implementation of the act, but did not offer further recommendations.

CACI gets $496M Air Force contract for automated system testing

The Air Force Sustainment Center issued a $496 million indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract to CACI to do automated testing and modernization on a range of legacy system.

The contract, called the Air Force Automated Test System Sustainment Initiative II (ATSSI II), has a nine-year work period and extends previous testing work to new weapons and sub-systems.

“We are proud to bring our highly-skilled workforce and mission technology to expand our partnership with the U.S. Air Force to ensure their critical systems are resilient and ready for the connected battlespace of today and tomorrow,” CACI’s CEO John Mengucci said in a statement.

Under the contract, CACI program engineers and software developers will aim to ensure operational safety, suitability and effectiveness of multiple Air Force weapon systems and sub-systems through automated testing. The Air Force selected CACI for its “software methodologies” and “robust industrial process controls and quality systems.”

CACI was one of 144 vendors selected by the Defense Intelligence Agency in March to participate in its $12.6 billion Solutions for Information Technology Enterprise III contract. In 2019 the company was also awarded an $880 million task order by the Army for personnel and force management.

Army awards $2.4B National Cyber Range contract

The Army has awarded a potential $2.4 billion contract to 14 companies to provide IT services to its National Cyber Range Complex.

According to the Department of Defense, companies that have won spots on the potential 10-year contract will compete for individual orders. They will provide event planning and execution, site security, information technology management and range modernization and operations support for the military’s cyber mission force teams.

The National Cyber Range is an Army program focused on improving battlefield resilience by creating operationally representative cyberspace environments for testing, training and mission rehearsal. Since 2014, it’s been solely supported by Lockheed Martin.

Now, the 14 companies on the contract, which include Lockheed, Boeing, Command Post Technologies and Axiologic Solutions, will compete for task orders.

Army Contracting Command received 29 bids for the cost-plus-fixed-fee and order-dependent contract and expects work to conclude by July 26, 2031.