Congressional report calls for DOD tech to be built at home

A congressional task force is urging the Department of Defense to better work with its partners to bring tech supply chains back within the U.S. and its allied nations.

The report from the Defense Critical Supply Chain Task Force points to protecting DOD’s supply chains as a critical but overlooked defense objective. The task force’s leaders Reps. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., and Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., said the supply chain disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic was a motivator behind the investigation into how DOD buys its critical supplies, including tech, during war.

“Last year, we all saw how the shortages of PPE cost American lives. We struggled to get things like masks and gloves for our healthcare workers, and it was obvious that our supply chains had failed,” Slotkin said.

For tech, like the microchips that power everything from computers to weapon systems, many of the base materials come from abroad. Some, like rare earth elements, come mostly from China — a situation that could snarl supply chains for DOD if it ends up in a war with the country.

“Throughout the pandemic, U.S. adversaries like China weaponized supply chain vulnerabilities in a way that threatened Americans’ health and security,” Gallagher said. “Our Defense Critical Supply Chain faces similar weaknesses that, if exploited, would impair our ability to compete with our adversaries and respond to crises. This problem will not age well.”

One of the key recommendations for how to work with allies to reshore critical tech capability supply chains is to use the National Technology and Industrial Base (NTIB) Council and create an international council. The councils should be used as forum to coordinate industrial policy among allies, the report recommends.

“The NTIB is an underutilized forum and should be leveraged to shape policy and partnerships with allies,” the report states. “To reduce reliance on adversaries and expand partnerships, the NTIB will need to help shape global policy.”

Shield AI buys company whose AI beat a fighter pilot in a dogfight

The company that built an artificial intelligence system advanced enough to beat a fighter pilot in a simulated dogfight has been acquired by defense tech startup Shield AI.

Heron Systems is a small team of researchers based around the Beltway that develops multi-agent deep reinforcement learning AI for defense applications. Shield focuses on “AI for maneuver,” selling AI-enabled drones and robots aimed at helping to keep troops out of harm’s way.

Purchasing Heron Systems will expand Shield’s business portfolio into the cockpits of the military’s airplanes.

“Truly special AI companies are incredibly rare assets in the defense market,” Shield AI co-founder and CEO Ryan Tseng said in a statement. “Heron has developed the most advanced AI-pilot for fighter aircraft in the United States.”

Shield did not disclose how much it paid for Heron, but the company will continue to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Shield.

“Shield AI enables us the opportunity and scale to accelerate the integration of our AI-pilot on a next generation fighter and UAS,” Brett Darcey, Heron Systems general manager, said in a statement. “What stood out about Shield AI for us – is that they’re really the only ones who have an operational AI pilot that can operate on the edge without GPS or comms, and this has been proven on combat operations.”

Heron put its AI to the test in the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s  AlphaDogfight, which pitted a trained F-16 pilot against several companies’ AI systems in a simulated dogfight. The event was set up as a contest, with Heron coming out on top beating the human pilot 5-0. While some were impressed by the results, others saw the tests as “AI theater,” showing off interesting technical achievements that won’t necessarily translate to real world applications.

NIST selects 18 tech companies for zero-trust demos

The National Institute of Standards and Technology selected 18 tech companies to demonstrate zero-trust security architectures as it drafts guidance for agencies and industry.

Companies will work with NIST‘s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence to design and deploy architectures in accordance with Special Publication (SP) 800-207, as part of the Zero-Trust Architecture Project.

The project comes after the Biden administration issued a cybersecurity executive order in May requiring agencies to create plans to implement zero-trust security within 60 days.

“Implementing a zero-trust architecture has become a federal cybersecurity mandate and a business imperative,” said Natalia Martin, acting director of the NCCoE, in an announcement. “We are excited to work with industry demonstrating various approaches to implementing a zero-trust architecture using a diverse mix of vendor products and capabilities and share ‘how to’ guidance and lessons learned from the experience.”

The NCCoE plans to publish a NIST Cybersecurity Practice Guide in the SP 1800 series detailing the steps needed to implement reference designs at the end of the project.

Participating companies include: Amazon Web Services, Appgate, Cisco Systems, F5 Networks, FireEye, Forescout Technologies, IBM, McAfee, Microsoft, MobileIron, Okta, Palo Alto Networks, PC Matic, Radiant Logic, SailPoint Technologies, Symantec, Tenable, and Zscaler.

The selected vendors responded to a Federal Register notice to submit capabilities that aligned with the project’s desired solution characteristics. Each one was extended a cooperative research and development agreement, enabling them to participate in the consortium.

“We are all committed to collaborating and demonstrating different, practical approaches to implement a zero-trust architecture,” said Stephen Kovac, vice president of global government at Zscaler, in a statement. “As we know, no one solution fits every situation.”

VA won’t deploy EHR to more sites until 2022

The Department of Veterans Affairs won’t continue rolling out its new electronic health records (EHR) program to any new sites until 2022, a top VA official told Congress Wednesday.

Dr. Carolyn Clancy, deputy undersecretary for health at the VA, said a new schedule to deploy the system across the country won’t be ready until the end of the year. This comes after the VA’s recent strategic review of the program led the department to restructure the EHR’s rollout schedule to be based on which medical centers have the infrastructure ready.

The program was initially paused for the review in March, resulting in eight recommendations to improve the $16 billion, 10-year program. The cloud-based system from Cerner is designed to be interoperable with the Department of Defense’s new EHR platform and replace the legacy Veterans Health Information System Technology Architecture (VistA).

“We will not be scheduling any deployments in the next six months; the secretary is optimistic that end of this calendar year he will be able to discern a new deployment schedule,” Clancy told the House Veterans Affairs Committee.

That news was received well by some committee members who remain skeptical about the new system and want to see more proof that it can improve health outcomes.

“It would be irresponsible to deploy the Cerner system … until the bugs are worked out,” ranking member Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., said.

The VA is also re-working the cost estimates for the program after its inspector general found the initial estimates were as much as $2.6 billion short of what could be needed.

“We should have been far more transparent,” Clancy said about the initial cost estimate for the program.

Following the hearing, full committee Chair Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., and Bost announced a new bill that would require the VA report on the EHR’s costs every three months. Names the VA Electronic Health Record Transparency Act of 2021, the bill would require the reports to include all expenses in the program include infrastructure upgrade costs, which had been counted separately.

“Given this month’s Inspector General reports and what we heard at today’s hearing, it’s clear we need a full accounting of all costs associated with VA’s EHRM project,” Takano said in a statement. “I’ve heard some concerning information about the state of the EHRM project, and I’m worried that the total cost estimate was vastly underestimated by the previous administration.”

NASA won’t rush Mars mission over U.S. ‘space race’ with China

NASA won’t rush its planned mission to Mars in the late 2030s and risk human life, despite being in a “space race” with China, said Administrator Bill Nelson on Wednesday.

The agency awarded a now-contested contract to SpaceX in February to launch the initial components of the Gateway lunar outpost, where the rocket and supplies for the Mars mission will eventually be assembled.

NASA expects a decision from the Government Accountability Office in the next few weeks and to launch by the end of 2021, but China announced an ambitious plan to send astronauts to Mars by 2033 in June.

“The Chinese space program is also a military space program,” Nelson said, during a live interview with the Washington Post. “They are very aggressive and very good, and a lot of that success has come in the last few years.”

China was the second country to land a rover on Mars after the U.S. with plans to return samples from the planet to Earth “probably within the same timeframe,” Nelson said.

But the Pentagon has also reported Chinese development of anti-satellite weapons that threaten global communications and space exploration.

“The Chinese are very intolerant of any examination of their space program,” Nelson said. “They are very inflexible; they are not very transparent.”

Nelson contrasted that with Russia, which began cooperating with the U.S. on space missions during the Cold War and launched another “major component” of the International Space Station (ISS) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday.

NASA’s administrator said he’d support cooperation with China on space missions if they’d “open up,” but in the meantime, one of their satellites exploded in low-Earth orbit near the ISS and one of their rockets landed in the Indian Ocean without a controlled reentry.

“Space is the high ground and the important ground in trying to protect the interests of our country and the free world,” Nelson said.

Nelson said he also supported expanding public-private partnerships in space exploration. Commercial 3D printing of rockets will reduce the cost of space travel and make it more “accessible,” while SpaceX’s fixed-price contract to deliver cargo and crew to the ISS is enabling commercial space efforts, he said.

NASA will require that any space tourists going to the ISS endure the same training and medical and psychological training as its own astronauts so as not to interfere with their research, Nelson said.

“Yes there may be Bezos ideas of colonies out in space; yes there may be colonizing of Mars,” he said. “But we need to have the vision to get there and develop the technologies in order to sustain human life.”

NASA will “aggressively” look for evidence of life in samples returned from Mars and Venus, and a new space telescope will launch at the end of 2021 designed to look at the source of light 13.35 billion years ago, shortly after the Big Bang, in a search for other planets that might support life, Nelson said.

Closer to home NASA deployed a “phalanx” of satellites measuring climate effects, he said.

“In the next 10 years we’re going to put up five great observatories, and we’re going to look at oceans and land and ice and the atmosphere,” Nelson said. “And we’re going to compile a 3D composite of the minute changes that are occurring so that we can better project what we’ve got to do in order to save our planet by saving our climate.”

Air Force inks new ABMS concept document

The Air Force signed a new document solidifying the foundational concepts that underpin one of its highest priority technology modernization programs, the Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS).

The “JADC2 Supporting Concept” document will guide changes the Air Force will make in how it is connecting data from sensors across a battlefield through the Advanced Battle Management System.  ABMS is essentially the Air Force’s internet of things for war, made within the broader framework of Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) that aims to get the entire military to link its sensors and platforms across all domains of battle.

“[W]e just got the JADC2 Supporting Concept signed. The document guides the USAF concept-driven, threat-informed JADC2 capability development to include doctrine, training materiel and personnel,” an Air Force spokesperson told FedScoop in response to inquiries about the document.

The document was created by the cross-functional team working on ABMS led by Brig. Gen. Jeffery Valenzia. 

The ABMS family of technologies aims to improve the data linkage and overall connectivity of weapons systems and platforms the Air Force uses. Currently, the Air Force uses a construct and technology that rely on both legacy systems and processes. For example, in surveilling targets, an airman often has to watch a drone feed and manually count how many people appear on screen, instead of the drone feeding its data directly to a computer-vision algorithm and that data then sent to fighter jets with payloads, as is the intent with ABMS and JADC2.

The Supporting Concept document is more foundational work that is specific to the Air Force, though it has JADC2 in its name, the spokesperson said.

Other services have their own programs that follow the JADC2 framework recently spelled out in a new strategy document approved by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.  The Army has Project Convergence and the Navy runs Project Overmatch as their contributions to JADC2. Each of the three follows the general framework of JADC2 and works with a JADC2 cross-functional team on the Joint Staff to coordinate their efforts.

Agency reuse of FedRAMP-approved cloud products climbs with automation

Agency reuse of cloud products authorized by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) continues to increase, with the program management office (PMO) automating parts of the process in fiscal 2021.

Reuse of security authorization packages is up 85% compared to pre-pandemic levels, and agency demand for cloud products grew 60% in the first half of fiscal 2021 compared to the first half of fiscal 2020.

Increases in reuse and demand coincide with the FedRAMP PMO’s work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to standardize authorization packages and automate their review with the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL).

“NIST recently released OSCAL Version 1, which is the first major release of OSCAL and provides a stable OSCAL platform for wide-scale implementation,” said Brian Conrad, acting FedRAMP director and program manager for cybersecurity at the General Services Administration, during a Carahsoft virtual event Tuesday. “And this release also marks an important milestone for the OSCAL project and for early adopters and implementers of security automation with OSCAL.”

Machine-readable authorization packages will allow cloud service providers (CSPs) to create system security plans faster and validate much of the content before submitting it for government review. Meanwhile, agencies can expedite their reviews, and third-party assessment organizations (3PAOs) can automate planning, execution and reporting of their activities.

The FedRAMP PMO is developing conversion tools that will reduce review times further and hopefully increase OSCAL adoption.

“We’re really excited about the next step in that we’re going to pilot some of these validation tools with users,” Conrad said. “We have cloud service providers and 3PAOs and agencies, for that matter, stepping up — willing to take part in those pilot programs.”

At the same time, the FedRAMP PMO has teamed with the Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and .govCAR to score security controls based on how well they detect and respond to real-world threats. The threat-based authorization approach speeds up the process further by using fewer resources and focusing control implementations on the current threat landscape, Conrad said.

The FedRAMP PMO is currently considering new baselines using the NIST Special Publication 800-53 Rev. 5 security and privacy controls.

Another area the FedRAMP PMO wants to automate is continuous monitoring, having developed a web services application programming interface (API) specification allowing CSPs already using OSCAL to push and pull data to and from a secure repository — eliminating manual processes.

President Biden‘s cybersecurity executive order issued in May has the FedRAMP PMO reevaluating its business processes and automating routine messages to CSPs at every stage of authorization.

The office also recently released guidance on Incident Communications Procedures; Vulnerability Scanning Requirements for Containers; and updated low, moderate and high baselines for System Services & Acquisition-4 (SA-4) and Incident Response-3 (IR-3) controls.

More guidance is on the way.

“FedRAMP is releasing an Authorization Boundary Guidance for public comment in July,” Conrad said. “This one is really critical; we get a lot of questions from stakeholders on this.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., provided an update Tuesday on his FedRAMP Authorization Act, which would codify the program. Introduced for the third time in a year in January, the bill was the first to pass the House in the 117th Congress and passed unanimously.

The legislation would reduce duplication of security assessments by establishing a “presumption of adequacy” if an agency already authorized a particular cloud product, require agencies to prioritize reusing products, establish a Federal Secure Cloud Advisory Committee, and fund the program at $20 million annually.

“While this has been a long journey, I’m happy to say that, with new leadership in the Senate, we’re working in lockstep with our colleagues over there to try and finally get this bill for a markup in the Senate or attached to this year’s Defense Authorization Act,” Connolly said.

Coast Guard ‘lacks control’ over telework data, GAO finds

The U.S. Coast Guard‘s plans to continue using telework could be derailed by weak data verification of how many of its members are still working remotely, the Government Accountability Office found in a new report. 

The maritime service might not be conducting its needed weekly audits of the surveys it collects on who is teleworking, potentially clouding the picture of how many people need tech to support their connectivity outside of Coast Guard offices. Working with inaccurate data could lead to poor planning for future technical requirements and budgeting to support the Coast Guard’s IT, the report found.

“Coast Guard officials could not provide assurance or evidence that weekly audits purposefully designed to verify the accuracy and completeness of these data were being conducted,” the report states. “Without such assurance, the Coast Guard may be relying on inaccurate and incomplete information when making decisions that rely on these data, such as for assessing its operational readiness.”

The Coast Guard, a part of the Department of Homeland Security, also could not confirm how many telework agreements it had signed with employees and guardsmen, further obfuscating the telework picture. The GAO recommended the service remedy the situation by implementing plans to ensure everyone working remotely has a teleworking agreement, auditing telework survey data and put in place additional controls to ensure supervisors review telework agreements at least annually.

“GAO found that the Coast Guard lacks controls over telework documentation and its personnel data are not reliable,” the report stated.

Coast Guard officials want many employees and guardsmen to continue to telework for the foreseeable future, a prospect the GAO warns requires careful analysis of its telework data to ensure it has enough back-end tech to support.

Interviews the GAO conducted also showed that at the beginning of the pandemic, the service lacked bandwidth and laptops to support its staff working from home. Money from the CARES Act provided the Coast Guard with the needed equipment, but how it is being used and in what capacity is not apparent due to the lack of data audits on its telework surveys.

“During the pandemic, the Coast Guard has faced challenges in balancing the need to safeguard its personnel with its responsibility to continue missions and operations,” according to the report.

The Coast Guard has been on a “tech revolution” since 2020 to modernize its aging systems and migrate its tech to the cloud. Commandant Karl Schultz said the service needed to dig itself out of the ’90s to improve connectivity on both its cutters and offices ashore. During that time, the service has added Wi-Fi to some cutters and replaced outdated desktops with “two-in-one tablets.”

Under C2E, IC’s top challenge is turning cloud competitors into partners

The intelligence community has five cloud providers in place to soon deliver capabilities under its multibillion-dollar Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract. But now comes the hard part: incentivizing those companies to work together rather than compete for task orders under the larger contract.

Acting intelligence community CIO Michael Waschull pointed to this dynamic of collaborating competitors as the greatest challenge the IC faces in moving to the C2E multi-cloud contract from single-cloud predecessor, the Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) vehicle.

Last fall, the contract manager CIA awarded the cloud services portion of C2E to Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. The new multi-cloud contract will have a 15-year period of performance and be worth “tens of billions” of dollars, according to contracting documents. The contract holders will compete for task orders at various levels of classification, up to the top-secret level.

Waschull told FedScoop “the idea of five different world-class cloud providers, bringing their capabilities, their knowledge, skills, and their capacity to bear on our problems and allowing the components within the IC to pick and choose so we can tailor and devise a best-fit molecule of capabilities, that shows great promise.” However, he said, that’s “if and only if I can overcome the one big obstacle that stands in our way: How do we incentivize collaboration, cooperation, communication, and mutual support between and among what are frankly these five competitors.”

The model is ideal for the IC but runs contrary to the values of the profit-driven private sector.

“By their very nature, they are private sector mission partners, they are motivated by profit, they are motivated by competition,” Waschull said. “We’ve got to instill a core value in that we appreciate collaboration and cooperation, more than we appreciate any single technical provision or any single lowest price.”

He added: “We want best value. We want to promote integration of effort, promote each different competitor understanding not only their product lines but understanding the capabilities and limitations of their competitors’ product lines so that they can work together to come up with the best possible technical and business solution to the government’s needs.”

Waschull, who spent part of his career with the Missile Defense Agency, compares this environment to MDA’s model for the Missile Defense National Team, which brings together leaders in the aerospace sector like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon to support the agency’s Ballistic Missile Defense System.

“If we can do here, with our cloud efforts, what they have done there with their missile defense efforts and forgo competition in lieu of cooperation and collaboration, we will be in a great place,” he said.

The Department of Defense stands to learn from the IC’s venture into this multi-cloud model after it recently announced it will go down a similar path, canceling its failed single-vendor cloud acquisition, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI).

To further support such a model, the IC is also planning to bring on a systems integrator through a second, separate contract under C2E to help manage this environment — “providing knowledge, skill and ability to help the government make the best possible choices to devise that best-fit formula for cloud capacity and capability,” Waschull said.

In the past, the IC has had consultants to advise on such IT procurements. But this integrator will be a built-in partner whose “award fees are predicated upon helping us make not only the best technical decisions for the implementation of cloud capacity across our enterprise but to understand the various pricing models from each particular vendor,” Waschull said.

“Understanding volume discounts, understanding the way they compute pricing and knowing it so well that they can advise the government to say between two or three equally competitive technical approaches, from a business perspective, this is the way you want to go,” he said. “Having that kind of incentivized professional analysis to help guide the decisions we’re gonna make, I think is wicked powerful.”

The cloud services portion of the C2E contract and the five providers are working to reach initial operational capability status to begin work. Until the integrator contract is awarded, they are supported by the CIA Cloudworks Program Management Office, said Waschull, who meets with the providers individually and as a group on a monthly basis to discuss challenges, opportunities and their perspectives.

When this multi-cloud capability does come online, the “unity of effort sets the stage, sets the table to take us to the next level,” Waschull said.

“When we look at 21st-century warfighting in a peer competitor environment and the volumes of data coming down from our overhead constellations, being generated locally by artificial intelligence and machine learning applications and being exchanged to competitive advantage between and among IC components, warfighters and others — that is a huge problem set,” he said. “But these building blocks really lend themselves to be able to come up with those creative solutions that will enable us to manage the volume and velocity of the information that we’ve got to move around.”

Waschull concluded: “Having these best of breed cloud contributors in the fight with us, if we can find the magic sauce that gets them to work together, cooperatively and collaboratively, we’re going to be in a far more competitive place than our neighbors that we have to deal with in this 21st-century competition.”

OMB reaffirms commitment to hiring diverse cloud tech talent

The Office of Management and Budget has reaffirmed the Biden Administration’s commitment to hiring cloud technology experts from a more diverse talent pool.

In a statement to FedScoop, an agency official said the administration is focused on developing a new talent pipeline, including through workforce exchange programs and partnerships with educational institutions.

“The federal government recognizes the changing workforce and ever-changing technological landscape and is working to support the IT workforce through reskilling, training, career growth opportunities and worker flexibility in order to recruit and hire the best IT talent,” the official said. “The recent executive order made clear that the administration is committed to cultivating a workforce that reflects our country’s diversity – meaning cloud technology experts are being recruited from a diverse talent pool.”

The comments come after the Biden administration last month signed an executive order that mandates agencies take wide-ranging action to increase diversity equity and inclusion.

The OMB spokesperson added that IT workforce exchange programs between the private sector and federal agencies would be key in developing a new talent pipeline.

Under the recent EO, agencies are required to collect enhanced demographic data about federal employees and advance pay equity among public servants. Government departments will be required to look at new channels for staff recruitment, including through striking partnerships with universities and colleges that historically have served minority communities.

The Office of Personnel Management and OMB are overseeing the implementation of the new directive.

Technology recruitment consultants say that deep relationships with educational institutions and broadening the reach of paid internships are among the best ways for agencies both to increase the diversity of cloud talent and to foster innovation.

“This [recent EO] has to open things up, right from paid internships. Those exists – those paid internships exist with two- and four-year degrees, but the positions are not yet available once they got through that to place them in the long-term,” said Britaini Carroll, principal director of Accenture Federal Services’ Human Capital division.

Carroll added that there may also be a case for agencies in some instances to loosen educational requirements for cloud jobs that do not require the highest levels of technical expertise.