Modernization, Army, cybersecurity, technology

The U.S. Army on October 18 issued contract awards to 198 companies for its potential 10-year, $37.4 billion Responsive Strategic Sourcing for Services (RS3) contract, which covers a wide range of government programs with Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) mission requirements. […]

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army fitness apps

Greg Garcia became the Army’s new deputy CIO on Monday. Garcia replaces Gary Wang, who retired from the position in May. […]

Modernization, Army, cybersecurity, technology

The Senate Armed Services Committee’s cybersecurity and personnel subcommittees held a joint hearing today to examine the cyber operational readiness of the Department of Defense and heard from leaders of both the military and civilian side of the DoD cyber force about the mounting challenges they face. […]

Modernization, Army, cybersecurity, technology

The Army Futures Command (AFC) is ready to start working on modernizing the U.S. Army. As MeriTalk reported last month, the new AFC is headquartered in Austin. John Murray, who will lead the new command, was promoted to four-star general last Friday at a ceremony in Austin, following Senate confirmation of the promotion early last week. […]

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Brian Sadler, senior scientist for intelligent systems at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, today discussed how the expanse of artificial intelligence (AI) research activities across the Army is bringing to light even greater challenges. […]

Modernization, Army, cybersecurity, technology
Modernization, Army, cybersecurity, technology

The Army needs help from academia and the private sector to modernize its workflow, explained Maj. Gen. Garrett Yee, acting deputy CIO for the U.S. Army, during an Avaya webinar today. Yee specifically stressed an interest in industry helping to make the Army’s workflows interoperable and said that “workflows at the installation level must be scalable” to achieve true modernization. […]

Federal IT leaders discussed the ways their organizations are tackling the proliferation of more and more endpoints on Federal networks at MeriTalk’s Cyber Security Brainstorm Thursday. In particular, ever-increasing mobile connectivity is creating the potential for further headaches, but the officials advised that next-gen technologies and proper network and data governance provide avenues to expand the ways employees work without compromising security at the network edge. […]

As it looks to get new technologies developed and into the field as quickly as possible, the Department of Defense has been making greater use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA), a quick-strike contracting mechanism that has gone in and out of fashion since the 1950s, but is now seeing a resurgence. […]

Alexander Kott, chief scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, said Wednesday at the Defense Systems Summit that creating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions for complex battlefield environments requires different prioritization than commercial solutions, and offered four tips for defense organizations looking to implement. […]

The latest edition of the Army’s annual Cyber X-Games exercise is designed to let Reserve and other cyber warriors team up to train in dealing with real-world situations. It is focused on protecting U.S. infrastructure, an area somewhat outside the norm for the exercises, but one that reflects an emerging potential battleground on the cyber landscape. […]

The possibilities of quantum computing have been floating on the horizon for a while now, at least since renowned physicist Richard Feynman dreamed up the idea in 1982. But like the horizon itself (at least in a world that isn’t flat), it always seems to recede despite all efforts to close in on it. Until now. […]

Army Lieutenant General Paul Nakasone is taking over this afternoon as chief of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency.  At the same time, U.S. Cyber Command is being elevated to the level of a full unified military command, the Defense Department said today. […]

The Pentagon’s vision of future warfare involves teams of small autonomous and semi-autonomous unmanned vehicles–in the air, on the ground, and in the water–operating in coordinated swarms to support troops on the battlefield. […]

In another example of how far the cyber domain is pervading every aspect of warfare, military units are beginning to add cyber protection testing to vehicles before they hit the road. […]

The Army recently added 18 more vendors to its $250 million Army Cloud Computing Enterprise Transformation (ACCENT) contract, which kicked off last year with 50 vendors certified as meeting the Army’s requirements for cloud services. […]

The U.S. military has long laid claim to having the best-equipped, best-trained fighting force in the world, and to spending more on defense than the next eight top-spending nations combined. But when the battleground is cyberspace, does that claim hold up? […]

Health

The Department of Defense (DoD) and contractor Cerner are coming off an eight week break in the initial deployment of what’s planned to be a worldwide health care records system. The team stopped work to address glitches in system performance and contend with negative user feedback. But officials in charge of the deployment of the MHS Genesis system said the pause was planned as part of the rollout, initial complaints were expected, and DoD still expects to complete the $4.3 billion system by 2022. […]

Like King Louie in the Jungle Book–Artificial Intelligence has to learn like people. Machine learning’s surely a brilliant student, but it’s still a slow learner. Once trained to recognize patterns, analyze huge amount of data, or interpret speech, they can do the job at lightning speed, often better than humans can. But the training part of that equation can be a labor and programming-intensive task, because machines still learn like machines–one thing at a time, often only after repeated instruction. […]

Pentagon leaders say they’re serious about getting ahead in the artificial intelligence (AI) game, which increasingly could include the “games” involved in the modeling and simulation programs used for training. […]

The idea of a scorecard seems like a quaint notion, conjuring black and white photos of somebody’s grandad in a fedora, licking the pencil tip before recording the latest play at the old ballgame in his program. […]

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