How one corps is trying to modernize the Army

Last summer, the Army’s highest-ranking general had a meeting with the three-star commander in charge of some of the service’s most elite forces. The purpose of this encounter was not a briefing on readiness or a new war game, but a chance for Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville to deliver a challenge to his subordinate at the 18th Airborne Corps: Build the corps of the future.

McConville’s meeting with Commander Lt. Gen. Erik Kurilla sparked the creation of a new program at the corps’ home in Fort Bragg, N.C., dubbed Project Ridgway after Gen. Matthew Ridgway, the corps’ first commander. Unlike the Army’s plethora of existing programs dedicated to developing new technologies, Project Ridgway is an experiment to not only field those new technologies but also develop cultures that support them, senior project leaders say.

“We have to create a culture in the corps where soldiers know they have the ability to see a problem…and actually be a part of a solution,” Col. Jeff Worthington, deputy director and senior technical adviser to Project Ridgway, told FedScoop in an exclusive interview.

Policy leaders have for many years advocated for faster technological development to ensure the U.S. military is equipped to face future threats. That military-wide transformation can’t happen without its largest component, the Army, changing — nor can the Army change without its corps changing, and so down the list of units that leaders say need to be reformed.

“We cannot be an Industrial Age army in the Information Age,” Gen. McConville wrote in 2019 in his initial message to the Army when he took over as top officer. “We must transform all linear industrial age processes to be more effective, protect our resources, and make better decisions. We must be the Army of tomorrow, today.”

The 18th Airborne Corps — often called the nation’s “contingency force,” as it must be ready to fight anywhere in the world with “18 hours’ notice” — saw itself as a ripe candidate to lead that change from a unit level.

Small steps

Project Ridgway is built around four lines of effort: culture change, upskilling data and tech literacy, using data as an asset, and building an artificial intelligence-enabled infrastructure.

“[We] needed to make the first AI-ready corps; we could never be AI-ready if we were not data ready first,” Worthington said.

Ridgway shares a similar mission with many other bodies in the Army, like Army Futures Command, cross-functional teams and task forces focused on modernization. But what’s unique, its leaders say, is its drive to operationalize at the lowest level possible the use of the tech, not just its development.

Despite big ambitions, so far the corps has taken small steps, posting an open job position for a chief data officer and holding several rounds of its “Shark Tank”-style pitch event called the “Dragon’s Lair.” A dozen or so soldiers from the corps in February participating in data boot camps, with more expected to take internships at U.S. Special Operations Command — the unified combatant command that has taken the lead on many of the military’s data and AI-initiatives.

Additionally, the team is the first to develop an application entirely in the cARMY cloud environment and has adopted parts of the Department of Defense Joint AI Center’s “data fabric,” its cleaned-up data architecture available for use.

“We are moving out and I think we are breaking down some of the bureaucracy,” said Col. Dan Kearney, the project’s director.

A soldier-developed app for range finding

To showcase the type of work Project Ridgway hopes to foster, its leaders walked FedScoop through a project meant to be like an Airbnb for shooting ranges — small in scope, but representative of the type of culture the team wants to create.

Maj. Evan Adams, an operations planner in the 101st Airborne Division within the corps, came up with the idea to replace the current process, more akin to signing into a motel on carbon copy papers, with a smartphone app — an idea that he pitched to leadership and earned him resources to continue it development.

“It is an enduring issue in the military…we are pretty much stuck to our desks doing admin work,” Adams said. “We can do this stuff on our phone.”

The application itself will allow soldiers to schedule a spot at a range for shooting practice. It’s a mundane problem unique to soldiers who need to keep their shooting skills sharp and range managers who are burdened by paperwork and maintenance requirements.

That mismatch of time, effort and means to schedule time on the range is one part of what the “Range Finder” app is targeting. But it’s also a small use case for a larger ambition. Adams said the app will also collect data on range usage, feed predictive maintenance efforts and provide a starting example for what soldiers can accomplish when supported to provide their own solutions to challenges.

Ridgway leaders point to the Range Finder app as the first of many soldier-led tools they want to implement.

“Bottom line, we typically have to carry a bunch of books…It is 2021 — the book should fit in our pocket,” Adams said.

Formalizing innovation

The cadre of innovators across the Army remains an informal one, strung together in a shadow network of LinkedIn and Microsoft Teams connections. Adams said formalizing that network and putting time and resources behind soldiers’ ideas is what is needed to advance from one-off apps to the type of technology ecosystem the Army wants.

“We like to stay in the shadows,” Adams said. “We don’t know what we are doing; we just figure it out as we go.”

Other lines of effort in the project, like the data and tech upskilling, are more institutionalized means of attaining the goals of modernization. The internship and data boot camps are supported by Galvanize, a data and tech boot camp company. But it remains a small effort with only a handful of soldiers sent through the program on temporary assignments out of the tens of thousands in the corps.

The challenge on both ends becomes formalizing change without that processes overshadowing its initial goals. In Adams’ mind, that means burning everything the Army does down to the ground.

“If we want to apply this model and this thinking and saying this is a success, we are going to essentially have to burn what we thought was the right way of doing things and build anew,” he said.

Ultimately, Kearney, Adams and others take a long view of the approach they have started. The colonel said his unit of time is set to years, not months or weeks, to measure change. Adams too acknowledged that his app for finding ranges was a small start to a big problem.

“I don’t think these are short-term wins,” Kearney said.

Air Force to issue $750M IT contract for drone squadron operation center

The Air Force is preparing to issue an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for IT and technology services for an operations center dedicated to flying a squadron of drones.

The contract has a $750 million ceiling and would be to service network and data curation for the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Squadron Operation Center Enterprise at Joint Base Langley-Eustis.

The center plans and operates drone missions around the world, which are an increasingly important part of the military’s strategy to use integrated technology systems to guide military operations in war zones.

“The requirement is to Install, configure, operate, maintain, manage, and troubleshoot equipment and networks to support long-haul communications (both satellite and terrestrial), and provide help desk function,” the request states.

The Air Force plans to issue an eight-year contract with requirements for small businesses to be included in work delivered under the contract. The contractor will also need to keep IT systems up to date in the center with tech-refreshes over the period of the contract.

The Air Force expects to release the RFP by early August, it said.

Leidos wins $999M contract to support reserves’ health IT infrastructure

Leidos has won a contract to provide commercial health services to U.S. military reserve forces, which includes medical and IT infrastructure work.

The contract, known as the Reserve Health Readiness Program III, has a total estimated value of about $999 million if all options are exercised. The work will be carried out by Ledios’ subsidiary company, QTC Medical Services. The award is a firm-fixed-price, cost-no-fee contract, and could extend for up to five years.

Leidos will work with the Defense Health Agency to carry out the contract and will provide services to the reserve arms of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Commenting on the contract win, Leidos Health Group President Liz Porter said: “We are excited to begin this contract and expand our health care offerings for all U.S. military reservists.”

“This work builds on our robust health delivery solutions, which are leading the industry in innovative care for active duty, reserve and veteran service members,” she added.

Ex-NASA scientist imprisoned for ‘long-running deception’ working in China

U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel sentenced a former NASA nanotechnologist, suspected of giving Chinese nationals access to its facilities, to 30 days in prison Wednesday for lying to federal agents about working at a Chinese research university.

Meyya Meyyappan, 66, served as chief scientist for exploration technology at the Center for Nanotechnology at NASA‘s Ames Research Center, until he was caught lying to the FBI and NASA Office of Inspector General about being a visiting professor at Soochow University for an estimated $1.4 million over five years.

The case raises questions about NASA’s insider threat protections given Meyyappan’s “long-running deception,” in which he applied in 2016 to China‘s Thousand Talents Program — known for incentivizing foreign researchers to transfer technology and intellectual property licitly or illicitly, according to court documents.

“The privilege of access to cutting-edge U.S. technologies and intellectual property comes with the critical responsibility of protecting their secrecy,” said Audrey Strauss, U.S. attorney, in a statement on the ruling. “Meyyappan betrayed that trust by failing to disclose his foreign activities and then compounding his mistakes by lying to the FBI and NASA.”

Prosecutors said the government’s investigation found Meyyappan had provided Chinese researchers with data, documents and guidance on biosensors; assisted them with nanodevice fabrication; helped a Chinese company manufacture a smartphone sensor NASA is also working on; and given Chinese nationals access to NASA facilities.

“NASA is committed to conducting its work and fulfilling its missions securely and in full compliance with all applicable laws and regulations,” a NASA spokesperson told FedScoop, when asked if the agency will make any changes concerning insider threats based on the case.

Meyyappan was only charged with making a false statement to a federal agent, to which he pled guilty on January 13. The judge also ordered him to pay a $100,000 fine.

Chinese universities, including Soochow University, are considered to be incorporated under the laws of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As such, laws that prevent high-ranking U.S. federal employees from working for Chinese companies, can also prevent them from working at Chinese universities.

According to court documents, for about eight years Meyyappan lied on U.S. Office of Government Ethics public financial disclosure reports, as well as his tax returns, about working there and universities in South Korea and Japan, according to court documents.

China’s Thousand Talents Program afforded Meyyappan an office and apartment, and he recommended other researchers for consideration. However, when interviewed by the FBI and NASA OIG on Oct. 27, 2020, he denied his ties.

“The PRC was not paying the defendant simply to publish papers on unsensitive matters, as he suggests in his brief. Meyyappan was being paid to pass sensitive and confidential NASA research to China, a foreign adversary,” wrote the prosecution ahead of sentencing. “That was why he concealed these associations for years and, when confronted about it during his proffer session, he lied.”

Meanwhile the defense said all of Meyyappan’s work abroad was published and not tied to sensitive or classified operations.

The defense said he was a hard-working immigrant from India, who’d created the NASA Ames Center for Nanotechnology from nothing and worked 25 years at the agency.

During that time Meyyappan’s 27 patents earned him a spot in the NASA Inventor Hall of Fame. His inventions include a gas sensor used to monitor crew cabin air quality on the International Space Station — the first nanotechnology in space — as well as biosensors for early heart disease detection and treating Parkinson’s disease.

The defense said NASA forcing Meyyappan to resign was punishment enough.

“The job he loved, the profession he was dedicated to, and the reputation for innovation and excellence that he built all cease to exist,” read their memo to the judge ahead of sentencing. “This, more than anything, is a much more severe sentence than any period of incarceration.”

For that reason Meyyappan should receive time served or one year of probation maximum, the defense added. Meyyappan’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

While the prosecution agreed Meyyappan was not likely to reoffend, they sought up to six months imprisonment to deter other U.S. researchers from doing the same thing.

“[A] term of imprisonment is appropriate for reasons of general deterrence,” read their letter to the judge. “When a high-level U.S. government employee breaches the duties that he owes to his country by passing sensitive and confidential scientific research to the Chinese, and then lies about it, a message must be sent that this serious conduct that will be punished.”

GSA makes 426 awards on $50B STARS III contract with more to come

The General Services Administration made awards to 426 small businesses in an effort to provide agencies with more emerging technology options, completing the first phase of its $50 billion 8(a) STARS III contract Thursday.

No task orders can be made until GSA issues the notice to proceed, expected in July, when agencies can begin taking advantage of the fourth-generation governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC).

GWACs are best-in-class, easy-to-use contracts that allow agencies to procure IT from prime contractors. The 8(a) STARS III contract is expected to focus on emerging technologies and technologies outside of the continental United States.

“GSA is rolling out this new contract vehicle in cohorts, balancing the need to provide innovative products and services that agencies require quickly with the intent to onboard the broadest number of small businesses over time,” said Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service within GSA. “Through this strategy GSA can start to create an immediate positive impact to our partner agencies’ missions, while increasing opportunities for our small business partners.”

Phase 1 awards come almost a year after GSA issued its request for proposals, and the agency will hold discussions with the remaining offerers later this summer before making a second phase of awards.

The Small Business Administration partnered with GSA to support the small, disadvantaged businesses that received awards in keeping with President Biden’s January executive order to improve racial equity.

“The 8(a) STARS GWAC program represents an inclusive opportunity for small, disadvantaged firms to compete within the federal marketplace and gain valuable experience in navigating agency requirements,” said Exodie C. Roe III, associate administrator of the Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization within GSA. “More than $18 billion have been awarded through GSA’s 8(a) GWACs, and many successful firms have graduated from the SBA’s 8(a) Program to compete on a larger scale.”

VA will use $670M from transformational fund to supplement 2022 IT budget request 

The Department of Veterans Affairs will supplement its $4.8 billion request for the Office of Information Technology’s fiscal 2022 budgett with $670 million from expired funds already appropriated by Congress.

The additional funds, called the VA’s Transformational Fund (TF), boosts the $269.9 billion all-in base funding request for the fiscal 2022 with a total of $820 million. The other $150 million from the transformational fund account will go to physical infrastructure upgrades.

The TF was created by legislation passed in 2016, and allows the VA to transfer unobligated balances of expiring discretionary funds to be used for facilities infrastructure improvements at existing VHA hospitals and clinics and IT improvements.

At a hearing on Wednesday, VA Chief Financial Officer Jon Rychalski told the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs outlined the extra funds, which will take total funding for the agency’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) to $5.5 billion, up from $4.9 billion in 2021.

“We also have access to the transformational funds starting in [fiscal 2022], which is access to our expiring appropriations that we can use for two purposes, one is for IT and one is for physical infrastructure,” said Rychalski.

From the transferred funds $477.5 million is being request to for the IT infrastructure, $122.9 million for enhancement of the financial management systems and $69.6 million for modernization and sustainment of human resources IT systems, according to budget documents.

The OIT budget is separate from the the VA’s electronic health records modernization program, a  $16 billion, 10 year drive to migrate medical records to a Cerner cloud system and modernize the entire IT system medical staff use when working with patients. The program has hit several road blocks, including a pause in roll out while VA Secretary Denis McDonough completes a strategic review of the program. The VA asked for $2.7 billion for the EHR program in fiscal 2022.

“I’ll be in a position before the end of this month to submit a series of reports” on the EHR program, McDonough told senators.

Senate legislation proposed to create tax credit for US semiconductor manufacturing

Senate lawmakers have introduced bipartisan legislation that would establish an investment tax credit for domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

The bill was introduced Thursday by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and follows the passing vote earlier this month by Senate lawmakers to pass the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which includes $52 billion in funding provision for semiconductor manufacturing, design and research.

Called the Facilitating American-Built Semiconductors (FABS) Act, the legislation is the latest measure proposed in response to rising concerns about the technological dominance of China and supply chain weakness.

In January, Congress enacted the CHIPS for America Act as part of the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which authorizes incentives for domestic semiconductor manufacturing and investments in chip research. Since then, industry groups, including the Semiconductor Industry Association, have called on leaders in Congress to enact an investment tax credit, such as the measures included in the legislation introduced on Thursday.

According to research by the SIA and Boston Consulting Group, the share of global semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. decreased from 39% in 1990 to 12% today. Among factors cited as driving the decline in market share are tax incentives issued by governments of other countries.

Commenting on the move, SIA president and CEO John Neuffer said: “Boosting domestic chip manufacturing and research will keep America on top in semiconductors, which underpin the game-changing technologies of today and tomorrow.”

Neuffer called chip production and research “critical to U.S. job creation, national defense, infrastructure, and semiconductor supply chains.”

Verizon gets $495M to build network for DOD’s supercomputers

The Department of Defense has selected Verizon to create a network for its high-performance computing centers and other research and engineering labs.

The $495 million contract will be for a full range of network tech and services, aiming to boost the connectivity between 200 of DOD’s research, developing and testing labs. In a press release, Verizon described the network, known as the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN), as a “high-bandwidth, low-latency, Layer 2 wide area network.” It will also provide services to a separate initiative called the High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), which is DOD’s main program to test supercomputers.

The contract comes as DOD is trying to boost its research and development funding to record highs, especially in areas of emerging technology like artificial intelligence. AI is powered by the type of high-performance computing resources this contract will create a network for.

“Investments across Verizon’s enterprise business enable the kind of tailored solutions our team will deliver to the U.S. Department of Defense and the Defense Research and Engineering Network,” Jennifer Chronis, senior vice president for public sector at Verizon, said in a statement.

The work will include providing everything from switches, routers, firewall protection and edge compute capabilities, according to Verizon.

Air Force, Navy developing agreement to share coding platforms

The Air Force and Navy are working on an agreement that will allow each of their software factories to share more code and products.

The agreement is close to being finalized Navy CTO Jane Rathbun said Tuesday. There are still technical “nuances” being worked out between the departments on how best to create a collaborative environment between the Air Force’s Platform One and the Navy’s Black Pearl, each service’s DevSecOps software development platforms, but the gist of the agreement will allow each to work off the other’s platforms and code more easily, Rathbun added.

Air Force Chief Software Officer Nicolas Chaillan confirmed this in a statement to FedScoop, saying: “The Department of the Air Force [is] working with the Navy leadership to define what a collaborative environment between Black Pearl and Platform One looks like.”

Platform One has a continuous authority to operate (c-ATO), meaning that its coding environment and processes have been certified to be so secure that the products it makes and any updates to the platform do not need additional approvals before going live. That cuts down the time it takes to start using the software, as the typical ATO process can take weeks or months.

While the two services already share some products, like the code repository Iron Bank, they want to deepen what each can do with each other. The Navy’s Black Pearl platform is newer than Platform One, and the service hopes to build off the Air Force’s work to give sailors and Marines an established DevSecOps environment to code in. Black Pearl had a soft launch in September with an initial cohort of users gaining access to the coding environment.

“We are leveraging as much of what the Air Force has done that we can,” Rathbun said.

Platform One is also trying to share its work by transitioning some of its products to the private sector through a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). The agreement between the government and non-government entities allows for the private sector to commercialize government-created technology, in this case, the Air Force’s coding environment.

One detail being worked out between the Navy and Air Force is how each service will develop on top of shared source code.

“[I]t is critical that we ensure there is no forking of code or any drift between implementations,” Chaillan said, referring to the practice of developing new applications and pieces of software on top of the same source code.

The idea is to be as interoperable as possible, Rathbun said. The agreement would commit more resources to how the two work together, evolving their relationship to include more recognition and the ability to share products.

“What we have discovered in our partnership is there is some nuance in how the Navy needs to deploy” software, she said.

Officials urge agencies to coordinate their IPv6 and zero-trust plans

Agencies should develop their IPv6 and zero-trust architecture implementation plans simultaneously because the two work in tandem to improve network cybersecurity, say federal officials.

IPv6‘s 340 undecillion Internet Protocol addresses not only solve the scalability issue of IPv4, which ran out of readily available addresses in 2015, but they support end-to-end visibility and microsegmentation required for zero-trust security.

Agencies’ IPv6 implementation plans, due before the end of fiscal 2021, align with the cybersecurity executive order President Biden issued in May requiring agencies to develop zero-trust architecture implementation plans.

“By providing end-to-end network paths and better support of microsegmentation, the transition to IPv6-only is going to be a key component of zero-trust architecture — which is one of the key pillars of the executive order,” said Maria Roat, deputy federal chief information officer, during the IPv6 Summit hosted by the General Services Administration on Wednesday.

GSA officials at the event would not immediately comment on whether all agencies had met the Office of Management and Budget‘s 180-day deadline to publicize their IPv6 policies, set in a November memo, or if they’re on pace to complete one IPv6-only system pilot before the end of fiscal 2021.

Agencies have opened a “great dialogue” around IPv6 in recent recent months, with the Cloud and Infrastructure Community of Practice hosting meetings in January and May attended by hundreds of federal employees, said Tom Santucci, director of governmentwide policy for the Data Center Optimization Initiative and CloudSmart at GSA.

OMB’s memo further requires 80% of all IP-enabled assets on federal networks to operate in IPv6-only environments by fiscal 2025.

“Support from agency leadership and our industry partners is essential to meet this goal,” Roat said. “And when I say agency leadership, this is not just the CIOs; this is the [chief financial officers], this is the mission owners and everyone that has a stake in the modernization across the board.”

While IPv6 promotes zero-trust security, it also paves the way for 30 billion network devices to connect to the internet by 2023 — expanding the cyber threat landscape even as it improves 5G connectivity. That has agencies like the National Institute of Standards and Technology updating security guidance and developing related testbeds and practice guides.

NIST’s Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6 haven’t been updated since they were published in 2009.

“A lot has changed about the IPv6 technical landscape, how people handle transition mechanisms to bridge legacy systems, mp6 systems,” said Doug Montgomery, manager of internet and scalable systems research at NIST. “That security guidance needs updates.”

The goal is to turn the guidance into an IPv6 deployment scenario playbook for agencies’ decision makers, Montgomery added.

Meanwhile the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence within NIST is launching a public-private partnership to demonstrate IPv6-only deployments with plans to produce a practice guide full of use cases.

NIST is also working to ensure IPv6 transitions are included in risk assessments under its Risk Management Framework.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is addressing the expanded cyber threat landscape IPv6 presents by issuing guidance for agencies and industry, starting with its Trusted Internet Connections 3.0 program. CISA also wants to ensure its tools can measure IPv6 implementation.

“We are making sure that all programs and services that CISA provides to federal agencies and other state, local, tribal and territorial governments also support IPv6,” said Branko Bokan, cybersecurity specialist at CISA.

While OMB has pushed a transition to IPv6 since 2005, for the first time every common operating system and platform on the market has a mature IPv6 implementation, and much more is known about how to transition away from IPv4, Montgomery said.

Now the majority of traffic to agencies’ public-facing services is IPv6 because industry surpassed the government in IPv6 adoption.

“Amazon Web Services supports the U.S. federal government’s move to IPv6,” wrote Dominic Delmolino, vice president of worldwide public sector technology and innovation at AWS, in a blog Tuesday. “Transitioning to IPv6 will make sure that growing government networks and Internet of Things devices benefit from the increased scale of IPv6.”