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The Army’s contract for its next-gen fighting vehicle doesn’t have any requirements

The Army is taking a new approach with its latest major tech-focused acquisition: There are no requirements, just “characteristics of needs,” one of the generals running the program said Friday.

The Army published the final request for proposals for the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV) last week in a completely unclassified manner to allow non-traditional companies and foreign firms to submit bids over the next four months for what will eventually replace the well-known Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The idea is to be as open as possible with companies, proposing no requirements to give them as much “latitude” as possible to innovate to solve the service’s problems.

It’s an approach technology acquisition reform advocates have been suggesting for years.

“We are not going to put a nail in a single requirement until we have to,” Brig. Gen. Richard Coffman, director of the Army Futures Command‘s Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team, said Friday during a virtual news conference. “That allows the industry to continue to innovate.”

The Army is looking for innovative ideas throughout the build of the next-generation vehicle — from the materials used in the vehicles to the IT driving autonomous capabilities. The contract has nine total “characteristics of needs,” and the Army will judge bidders on how well they meet them.

Despite having “no requirements,” the vehicle will need to link into the Army’s new Modular Open System Architecture (MOSA) that future combat vehicles will use for software updates.

The Army anticipates the next vehicle it eventually selects — which would likely be after prototyping in 2023 — to have a life similar to that of the Bradley, the enduring troop-carrier that the Army has been using and upgrading for decades.

“This vehicle will be in our Army for a very long time, we have to have the ability to continually upgrade,” Coffman said.

Coffman and Brig. Gen. Glenn Dean, the  program executive officer for Ground Combat Systems (PEO-GCS), repeated the analogy that the vehicle be like an iPhone with an app store that has a common software architecture that can allow for new capabilities to be designed and pushed through code instead of constantly getting a new phone.

“You are seeing that with your cell phones today … that is the speed that we need to move in the future,” Dean told reporters.

The technical needs for the new vehicle are emblematic of the largest military branch’s shift to being a technology- and data-focused force. Top generals and civilians have long said they want to bring technology modernization to every aspect of warfighting, with this latest contract being a major example of that shift.

VA expanding clinical data access to improve COVID-19, suicide prevention outcomes

Authorized users will soon be able to access COVID-19 clinical data from the Veterans Health Administration via an analytics platform.

The VHA Innovation Ecosystem has partnered with MDClone to deploy the Israeli digital health company’s platform within the Department of Veterans Affairs‘ cloud environment.

MDClone’s software tools will help VA staff identify operational efficiencies and improve patient outcomes — not only regarding the coronavirus pandemic but suicide prevention and other illnesses — for more than 9 million veterans.

“Available clinical data includes electronic health record, lab, pharmacy and telehealth data, which will be ingested into the MDClone ADAMS platform,” Josh Rubel, chief commercial officer at the company, told FedScoop. “Authorized users will have access to the data, but notably the VA can administer access, to only view or access synthetic data, to certain types of users — enabling wider access as desired by the agency.

The VHA Innovation Ecosystem wants to enable more VA clinicians and scientists to test and refine care models and initiatives. Data access, complexity and privacy regulations have made that difficult in the past.

MDClone worked with Senior Innovation Fellow Amanda Purnell, who leads care and transformational initiatives at the VHA Innovation Ecosystem, on the initiative to shorten research timelines.

“Using MDClone, VA staff can compare care models and define best practices across facilities or service lines to get a real-time view of performance,” Rubel said. “This type of analysis often takes months in today’s environment. With MDClone the analysis will take minutes.”

The initial collaboration will focus on COVID-19, suicide prevention, chronic disease management, precision medicine, and health equity. For instance, clinicians can use the ADAMS platform to look at leading indicators of suicide in order to intervene with patients most at risk.

The privacy of veteran health information will be protected using synthetic data in place of traditional de-identification methods. That data could also let VHA collaborate with other agencies, health-care providers and industry down the line.

“The MDClone ADAMS platform enables self-service data exploration and insight discovery with a novel data organization model coupled with a synthetic data engine,” Rubel said. “Using MDClone, VA staff will be able to make powerful self-service exploration available to a wider variety of users due to the synthetic data output.”

Air Force to test flying cars in early 2021

The Air Force’s “Agility Prime” program to create a market for electric flying cars will see its first major tests in early 2021, the department’s research lab announced.

The planned tests come after the program cleared several regulatory hurdles to prove “military airworthiness” for some of the first vehicles from Joby Aviation and BETA Technologies. The next phase of tests feature an “air race” where the prototypes will get more real-world testing. The goal is to field vehicles that could eventually transport troops in battle and civilians looking for a quick way to get around town.

Agility Prime follows a new model of acquisition for the Air Force, through which it partners with venture capital investors who put private money into far-reaching technology that can be tested at military facilities and one day could bear fruit in both the defense and civilian markets. The Air Force did not specify where the new round of tests will occur.

The flying cars from Joby and BETA have a few design elements in common, including multiple helicopter-style rotors, as well as battery-powered “electric vertical takeoff and landing” (eVTOL) systems. They’re also intended to be highly modular, with features that can be swapped out to fit different customers.

“You are literally seeing a new market emerge,” Will Roper, the Air Force’s assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, said. “This is exactly the type of public-private partnership innovation the Air Force and Space Force want to be a part of … to make amazing things happen not just for the military but for the world.”

The Air Force is working with Joby and BETA to get their vehicles the clearance to fly under Air Force contracts in early 2021, according to the release. A key aspect in attracting private capital, officials said, was the Air Force’s commitment to work with civilian regulators like the Federal Aviation Agency to lower barriers to advance testing on the systems.

“We at the FAA are very privileged to partner with the Air Force and AFWERX on Agility Prime,” FAA Administrator Steve Dickson said. “We see tremendous value in this program for civil aviation applications.”

The Agility Prime model is working with several other companies which have yet to reach the same advanced “air race” stage of testing.

The Air Force also announced that it will expand the Prime model of partnering with private investors and working to advance emerging technology development.

“Forging ahead we will design future Prime programs focused on space, autonomy, energy, gaming, supersonics, and microelectronics,” secretary of the Air Force, Barbara Barrett said.

Air Force flies surveillance simulation with AI copilot for the first time

An artificial intelligence system flew onboard a U.S. Air Force military aircraft as a fully fledged crew member for the first time this week, helping a human pilot fly a reconnaissance mission during a simulated missile strike.

The algorithm, known as ARTUµ, acted as a sidekick to a pilot identified as Maj. “Vudu” on a U-2 Dragon Lady aircraft from the 9th Reconnaissance Wing at Beale Air Force Base in Yuba County, California. Shortly after takeoff, ARTUµ took control of sensor employment and tactical navigation, searching for enemy launchers while the pilot scanned the skies for threatening aircraft. It’s a skill the algorithm learned after a “half-million computer simulated training iterations,” according to a statement from the service.

The flight was the culmination of the Air Force’s “three-year journey to becoming a digital force,” according to Dr. Will Roper, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics. Part of that journey has been Project Maven, the service’s at-times-controversial push to use AI technology to scan drone footage.

“Putting AI safely in command of a U.S. military system for the first time ushers in a new age of human-machine teaming and algorithmic competition,” he said. “Failing to realize AI’s full potential will mean ceding decision advantage to our adversaries.”

During the flight, ARTUµ was pitted against another dynamic computer algorithm, which predicts a scenario where adversaries employ AI technology in warfighting. The Air Force has been preparing for that development for some time, establishing an AI accelerator in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019 and expanding its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) portfolio to support futuristic warfighting efforts.

This most recent maneuver is yet another push to “accelerate change” in the field, according to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown, Jr.

“We know that in order to fight and win in a future conflict with a peer adversary, we must have a decisive digital advantage,” Brown said. “AI will play a critical role in achieving that edge, so I’m incredibly proud of what the team accomplished.”

Perspecta fails again in protest of Navy’s $7.7B NGEN-R

A federal claims court Thursday denied Perspecta‘s latest protest of the Navy’s $7.7 billion contract for the network services portion of the Next Generation Enterprise Networks Recompete (NGEN-R).

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims entered a judgment ruling in favor of the Navy’s original award of the contract to Leidos in February. The court hasn’t yet published an opinion supporting its decision.

The Government Accountability Office also denied an earlier Perspecta protest of the award. Similarly, General Dynamics IT protested the award with GAO and lost.

Under this Service Management, Integration and Transport (SMIT) $7.7 billion contract — one of two main elements of the overall NGEN-R — the Navy is acquiring “base network services … such as electronic software delivery, end user core build, endpoint detection, logistics management, network operations, security operations, service desk, transport and virtualization services.”

In its protest complaint, Perspecta argued that the Navy’s award to Leidos was “riddled with material and prejudicial errors,” including not considering conflicts of interest, improperly evaluated pricing scenarios and “engaged in inadequate and misleading discussions that it disingenuously represented were comprehensive.”

These arguments were similar to those it pushed with the GAO. The GAO, however, found that “the Navy’s evaluation was reasonable and that, to the extent that there were errors in the agency’s evaluation, those errors did not result in competitive prejudice to Perspecta because its proposal remains higher-priced and lower-rated than Leidos’s proposal.”

If Perspecta were to continue protesting the award, its next stop would be with a federal appeals court.

Leidos, on the other hand, celebrated the decision.“We’re pleased the Court of Federal Claims ruled in our favor,” said Gerry Fasano, Leidos Defense Group president. “During this partial stay, and the previous protests which were also dismissed, Leidos has not been sitting still. We are ready for immediate program execution and success.”

The other portion of the NGEN-R acquisition, for end-user hardware, was won by HPI Federal LLC — HP’s arm to sell equipment and software to the federal government — in October 2019.

CISA, DIU partner on acquiring commercial technologies

Two agencies critical to federal cybersecurity activities agreed to collaborate on the rollout of emerging commercial technologies in a memorandum of understanding announced Thursday.

The Defense Innovation Unit and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will share information, jointly develop solutions and work with the private sector across 22 areas identified in October.

DIU has traditionally served defense agencies and CISA civilian ones, so the memo represents the beginnings of a whole-of-government approach to acquisitions benefitting national security.

“Commercial technologies have grown tremendously with the need for cybersecurity, and the significant majority of investment to create these technologies is in the commercial sector,” said Jeff Kleck, cyber director at DIU, and Sabra Horne, innovation lead at CISA, in a joint response. “The nation’s ability to access commercial innovations quickly and efficiently is critical in keeping abreast of the best industry has to offer.”

The agreement took nearly three months to complete and predates the SolarWinds hack, which has CISA and the Department of Defense working more closely to mitigate damage.

Both agencies plan to share information on the innovative use of procurement methods like other transaction authority (OTA) agreements — a key element of the partnership.

The 22 areas of mutual interest are:

CISA isn’t the only agency DIU is coordinating with to scale commercial technology and streamline processes.

DIU and other tech-focused, rapid-acquisition hubs also announced they would increase their data sharing on companies that approach them to be able to transition between innovation offices. Afwerx, the Navy’s Tech Bridge and the Army’s Futures Command would be part of the partnership.

“No ideas are going to be lost on the cutting room floor,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, at the AFWERX Accelerator summit on Dec. 11.

While they often work with different types of companies and different maturity levels, DIU Director Mike Brown said on a call they were building “one DOD storefront.”

“I am particularly enthused about this aspect of our partnership,” Brown said

Jackson Barnett contributed to this report.

Breaking the cycle: Modernizing the federal payroll systems

America deserves the best possible federal workforce. Therefore, in order to recruit and retain the best employees, it is critical that we provide a consistent and secure payroll system across the federal government. Whether it is cybersecurity, supply chain risk management, or simply knowing how to draft comprehensible regulations, we want federal employees to move between agencies to further their careers and share expertise so that American taxpayers get the best results. Currently, an IT specialist who moves from a job at the Department of the Interior to a job in the same city and salary with the Department of Agriculture will change payroll providers. This simple move creates a number of behind the scenes inconsistencies that change the employee’s take-home pay. This is frustrating and costly for both the employee and the agency.

Earlier this year, GSA was designated by the White House as the Civilian HR Transaction Services Quality Service Management Office, activating the NewPay initiative. The purpose of NewPay is to create a secure, reliable, and innovative payroll platform where a federal employee’s professional experience is modern, efficient, and consistent regardless of the agency where they are employed. GSA’s NewPay program solves this problem, by implementing new, technology-based solutions for a modern federal payroll system, focused on removing inconsistencies in take-home pay between agencies.

Payroll administrators, timekeepers, and others will still each have their own distinct roles, but will no longer be the crisis managers of the federal payroll system. Instead, they will work together to ensure employees are paid consistently and accurately, even when transferring between federal agencies. Building on strong partnerships and collaboration between the federal government’s payroll SSPs has ensured that NewPay will provide a standards-based, secure commercial solution for agencies to use with ease.

Between 2003 and 2008, the federal government consolidated twenty-six payroll systems to four shared service providers (SSPs) in an effort that saved over $1 billion in cost avoidance over the next 10 years. Those SSPs currently serve the payroll and time and attendance needs of over 2.2 million civilian federal employees with their own unique, dependable payroll services.

Since that major consolidation, there has been no significant innovation in federal civilian payroll. The lag comes from having obsolete and costly IT infrastructure, creating a cumbersome, bureaucratic environment that struggles to support federal employees. Instead, both individual employees and HR payroll administrators are forced to do things manually (e.g., update timesheets and enter corrections) while managing complexities that come with antiquated data systems that are held together with baling wire and chewing gum. These systems are unable to communicate between agencies, let alone adopt common data standards. Simply put, when there are four different ways of managing core payroll and time and attendance functions, there are at least four different definitions of a day. Responding to changes in tax laws, or implementing the new maternity leave options becomes a herculean effort.

The NewPay initiative was established to make the federal government’s mission support services more efficient and effective in the short- and long-term in performance, customer experience, and operational costs. The NewPay team is ensuring that the applicable payroll laws serve as its foundation, which will ultimately shape payroll policies and lead to the development of uniform standards. For example, when Congress granted leave to employees suffering from COVID-19, each SSP had to individually spend time and money to make the changes necessary to support sick employees.

Another important change is that NewPay will move the government away from expensive, custom-built systems or systems that the original providers no longer support. Instead, NewPay takes advantage of successful commercial offerings and uses a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to manage payroll and other HR-related functions. This industry-leading best practice will ultimately reduce operating costs, mitigate the risk exposure associated with legacy technology, and standardize business processes. As a result, NewPay will improve cybersecurity by placing the responsibility for cloud-based security in the hands of commercial providers who utilize highly automated and centralized security platforms. This increasing investment on HR SaaS infrastructure will help mitigate the evolving and escalating cyber threat facing the government’s legacy IT systems. The NewPay solution meets Federal cybersecurity standards, which will ensure a reduction in time and cost to implement for customer agencies.

NewPay is breaking the cycle of using separate, stand-alone legacy payroll systems that have outgrown the federal government’s changing needs. We are also replacing antiquated and siloed approaches for handling the most important thing to a federal employee — their payroll — with a secure, cohesive, and dynamic payroll system. In doing so, we are leveraging current technology in a more innovative manner to standardize data, reduce operations and maintenance costs, modernize and automate processes, and improve overall customer satisfaction. Federal employees deserve to have a secure, modern way to receive their paychecks — NewPay delivers that solution.

Emily Murphy is the Administrator of GSA.

Senate bill would modernize government response to agency cyberattacks

A bipartisan duo of senators introduced legislation late last week to update the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) by clarifying how agencies share information about breaches in federal data systems.

Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Gary Peters, D-Mich. — who serve together on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — introduced the Federal System Incident Response Act as an effort to modernize and increase transparency in the government’s response to cyberattacks on federal agencies. The bill is especially timely after the recent SolarWinds breach that affected multiple agencies.

“As bad actors continue to exploit weaknesses in federal systems, it’s critical that the federal government is able to quickly respond to any incident and better protect the information in its care,” Portman said in a statement. “This bipartisan bill takes important steps to better coordinate our government’s response to breaches and quickly inform the American people if their information has been compromised.”

The bill would set specific requirements about alerting people if their information was accessed in a security breach by providing written notice “as expeditiously as practicable and without unreasonable delay.” To standardize that process, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director would develop a template and guidance to share that information.

It would also require agencies to share incident information with OMB and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to compare attacks across agencies. CISA would then produce an annual report of these incidents to share with federal and private-sector cybersecurity professionals so they can better understand the most common and persistent threats.

Peters and Portman have led several efforts to strengthen cybersecurity defenses, such as a bill to improve cybersecurity budgeting and another — unanimously passed by the Senate — to promote cybersecurity collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and state and local governments.

It is unlikely that this bill will pass in the final weeks of the 116th Congress, but could signal legislative priorities for the next term.

These 7 DOD contracts could be the first to get CMMC requirements

The Department of Defense announced the first contracts it plans to add new contractor and subcontractor cybersecurity requirements to.

The Pentagon aims to integrate Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) requirements to seven pilots contracts by the end of 2021. Those pilot contracts will require vendors to meet a level three certification under the new standards, similar to the current standards in place for contracts that contain controlled unclassified information.

Under CMMC, contractors will need to pay for a third-party assessment to ensure they are meeting the needed level of security in their networks. CMMC carries five levels of security, ranging from level one with light controls to level five that requires hundreds of expensive locks on networks.

The contracts that could be the first to see CMMC level three requirements are divided among two of the military services and a support agency:

CMMC became an official Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation (DFAR) earlier in December, but DOD’s Acquisition and Sustainment directorate is still reviewing comments from industry on the rule and may adjust it.

The CMMC Accreditation Body that is working to approve the assessors that will inspect contractors’ networks welcomed the news, saying it has been working closely with the DOD to get ready for the rollout.

“The AB has worked closely with the CMMC [Program Management Office] in preparing the provisional assessors to support the pilot activities kicking off next year and feel we are well prepared and partnered with the PMO to ensure success,” Wayne Boline, a CMMC AB board member and spokesperson, told FedScoop in a statement.

In DOD’s statement, it said it is “currently reviewing the following pilot nominations,” meaning that the list of contracts might not end up being the first to get requirements. Katie Arrington, chief information security officer of acquisition and sustainment and lead CMMC official, has previously said that the DOD plans to put it in around 15 contracts by the end of next year.

Services like the Army and other defense agencies are notably missing from the list. It is unclear what the delay for the Army and others signing on means for the interagency process of rolling out the program from a DOD-wide initiative to being implemented at service-level acquisition offices.

“The CISO team continues to work with the Army and other defense agencies to identify and approve additional candidate CMMC pilots, to ensure they fit within the criteria, and will provide updates in the weeks to come,” the notice said.

Experts want a Biden fellowship targeting young technologists

Technology experts want the incoming Biden administration to create a two-year fellowship letting early-career talent work at federal agencies.

The so-called Digital Corps would improve agencies’ IT service delivery, including pandemic-related services while offering fellows senior leader mentors, skills development and substantial federal loan forgiveness.

None of the government’s IT talent programs focus on young technologists, and if successful the Digital Corps will compete to recruit thousands of recent graduates annually across technical fields.

“The work of civic tech and government modernization is often described as a relay race,” said Nick Sinai, former U.S. deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration and co-author of the Day One Project proposal. “And a Digital Corps would allow a new generation of technologists to join in the effort, with many technologists likely to stay in government even after their fellowship period ends if Coding it Forward’s experience is any indication.”

The nonprofit Coding it Forward already runs the Civic Digital Fellowship, a cohort-based program for collegiate technologists that has placed more than 200 of them at 11 agencies out of upward of 3,000 applicants. Coding it Forward’s 2020 cohort saw 34% of students stay with their agencies part or full time following the fellowship.

Only about one-fifth of the federal tech workforce is younger than 40 years old. At departments like Veterans Affairs, less than 1% of its approximately 8,000 IT workers are under 30 years old and almost 17% more than 60.

Meanwhile, about 65,000 computer science and 331,000 STEM majors graduate college annually.

Fellows in the Digital Corps would rotate agencies they’re matched with at least once based on IT, cybersecurity, product management, design, program management, and acquisition needs.

Senior White House staff like the Federal CIO and U.S. CTO, U.S. Digital Service administrator, and Office of Management and Budget deputy director of management would sponsor the Digital Corps.

“The federal government needs to own the federal IT talent problem,” reads the proposal. “A federal program office, similar to [Presidential Management Fellows] or [Presidential Innovation Fellows], provides advantages of scale and permanence and signals importance to the rest of the federal civil service.”

A nonprofit could also administer the Digital Corps though.

The Biden administration would need to form a program office at the General Services Administration or Office of Personnel Management and, over the subsequent year, recruit agency partners, develop an onboarding and training program, establish “high-impact” project placements with mentors and rotations, design a selection process, and work with OPM on retainment, according to the proposal.

Ideally, the first cohort would start in fall 2021 once referral partners and marketing strategy are in place ensuring diversity and inclusion, according to the proposal.

Fellows are less expensive than retiring federal IT employees and will make the government more efficient — a return on investment.

Legislation isn’t needed to start the Digital Corps, but it would “significantly accelerate it” and be required for loan forgiveness, according to the proposal.

The program office would consist of a small team and grow to up to 10 full-time employees, placing the budget in the low, single-digit millions annually. And host agencies would be responsible for fellows’ costs to the tune of $100,000 to $150,000 per fellow.

“The Biden-Harris administration, focused on COVID, the economy, racial justice, and climate, will need Generation Z to scrub in,” said Chris Kuang, co-founder of Coding it Forward and co-author of the proposal. “I’m hopeful they will be excited about the Digital Corps idea, as a way to continue to build a federal workforce that looks like America.”