The Non-classified Internet Protocol Generative Pre-training Transformer, or NIPRGPT, is part of the Dark Saber software platform, an ecosystem where airmen experiment, develop and deploy their own applications and capabilities.

The platform is not the end tool or the final solution, said Air Force officials, but rather a testing ground that will allow the service to better understand practical applications of generative AI, run experiments, take note of problems and gather feedback.

The Air Force Research Laboratory, which developed the tool, used publicly available AI models, so the service has yet to commit to a particular vendor. But as commercial AI tools become available, the platform will help the service to better gauge the best approach to buying those tools.

“We’re not committing to any single model or tech vendor — it is too early in the process for that. However, we are leveraging this effort to inform future policy, acquisition and investment decisions,” Chandra Donelson, the Air Force’s acting chief data and artificial intelligence officer, told reporters on Monday.

“We aim to partner with the best models from government, industry and academia to identify which models perform better on our specific tasks, domains, as well as use cases to meet the needs of tomorrow’s warfighter.”

While NIPRGPT is only available on unclassified networks, the service is considering expanding it to higher classification levels depending on demand and interest from airmen and guardians.

“The research will absolutely follow demand. We have already had people signal that there’s interest there working with different and appropriate groups. I think that’s why starting intentionally and clearly so we can learn any of those guardrails but, as you can imagine, people want relationships with knowledge at all levels. And so that has absolutely been considered,” said Air Force Research Lab Chief Information Officer Alexis Bonnel.

As uses of generative AI have exploded in the commercial sector, the Defense Department has been carefully exploring how it can leverage the technology to improve intelligence, operational planning, administrative, business processes and tactical operations. The Pentagon’s Task Force Lima, for example, is evaluating a wide range of use cases and working to synchronize and employ generative AI capabilities across the military services.

In the interim, the Air Force’s office of the chief information officer along with the chief data and artificial intelligence office recently wrapped up a series of roundtables with industry and academia where they explored the potential applications and best practices for adopting GenAI across the service. Air Force CIO Venice Goodwine said the roundtables showed how fast the field of generative AI is growing.

“Now is the time to give our airmen and Guardians the flexibility to develop the necessary skills in parallel. There are multiple modernization efforts going on right now across the federal government and within the DAF to get tools in the hands of the workforce. This tool is another one of those efforts,” said Goodwine.

The post Air Force unveils new generative AI platform first appeared on Federal News Network.

• The Defense Innovation Unit and the Army are joining forces to ramp up the service’s nuclear power capabilities. The Army is looking to develop and test a prototype of a nuclear reactor as part of the service’s push to bring nuclear energy to its installations. The service is heavily dependent on off-site electricity providers to obtain energy and conduct its missions. If successful, these micro-reactor power plants could be operational by 2030. The Army’s effort along with the Air Force’s microreactor pilot are paving the way for deployments of nuclear power technology across military installations.
  (Army seeking to develop nuclear reactor prototype - Defense Innovation Unit)
• Former senior government officials are joining the growing calls against Schedule F. The former officials from the Bush administration said civil service reform is necessary, as is holding federal employees accountable. But they said Schedule F is not the answer. The now-revoked policy from the Trump administration aimed to reclassify feds to make them easier to fire. In a letter to House and Senate leadership this week, the former officials are calling on Congress to pass more protections for government workers in national security and law enforcement. The letter to lawmakers comes in light of former President Trump’s plans to revive a policy akin to Schedule F if he’s reelected.
  (Ensuring the accountability of the federal civil service: An urgent call to action - Former Bush administration officials)
• Nurses at the Department of Veterans Affairs are pointing to staffing shortages that are making it harder to treat veterans. The VA employs 122,000 nurses, which is the largest nursing workforce in the U.S. That is also a record high for the department. But the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) and National Nurses United (NNU) said the VA is leaving thousands of positions unfilled and spreading nurses thin. Irma Westmoreland is NNU’s vice president and a registered nurse who works at the VA medical center in Augusta, Georgia. She said VA nurses are being assigned more patients, which is contributing to burnout. “We feel that we are chronically understaffed in nursing, and that is erodes the patient care that we’re able to provide for our veterans," Westmoreland said.
  (VA touts its largest nursing workforce, but union says they're 'chronically understaffed' - Federal News Network)
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development has put the help wanted sign out for a new chief information officer. Beth Niblock, who has been CIO since July 2021, transitioned to a new role in May, the senior adviser for disaster management. One reason for the move is Niblock was a political appointee and HUD is moving the CIO's position back to a career job. The CIO job announcement closes June 13. Sairah Ijaz, who has been deputy CIO since March 2023, is the acting CIO until HUD hires a permanent career technology leader.
  (HUD searching for new CIO - USAjobs.gov)
• DoD's chief information officer is stepping down. John Sherman is moving on to a new role at Texas A&M University, where he will serve as dean of the Bush School of Government. Sherman has led the CIO's office since December 2021. Before that, he was the intelligence community's CIO. Defense officials said they still have not decided who will fill the DoD CIO role when Sherman departs at the end of this month.
  (DoD CIO John Sherman to step down at end of June - Federal News Network)
• Starting in August, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses will no longer be able to self-certify status for set-aside or sole source prime or subcontracts. The Small Business Administration's final rule issued yesterday requires companies to obtain approval through the SBA's Veteran Small Business Certification Program (VetCert). Without this certification, agencies and prime vendors will not receive socio-economic credit for contracting with these firms. Previously, SDVOSBs could self-certify they met the criteria, but Congress changed the requirements in the 2024 Defense authorization bill. The rule becomes effective August 5, but SBA is accepting comments through July 8 and reserves the right to withdraw the rule if it receives enough significant adverse concerns.
  (SBA takes self-certification for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses mostly off the table - Federal Register)
• Senate Democrats are heightening their push to create better access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments and medications. New legislation that the lawmakers introduced this week rolls together several previous bills aiming to expand the fertility treatments. Under the bill, there would be increased access to IVF coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, as well as coverage for veterans. The new bill comes in light of a growing push from federal employees to offer more fertility-related health benefits. The Senate is slated to vote on the Right to IVF Act next week.
  (Right to IVF Act - Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.))
• The Defense Department is continuing its push to consolidate its purchasing for wireless services. A new memo from the DoD CIO told all DoD components that they will need to use the Navy’s new “Spiral 4” wireless contract vehicle to buy their mobile services for employees in the continental U.S. The Navy awarded seven separate indefinite, delivery indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts last month, including to the big three wireless providers. All together, those IDIQs are worth up to $2.7 billion over the next decade.
  (Memorandum for the Senior Pentagon Leadership - DoD)
• The Postal Service is putting the first of its custom-built, next-generation delivery vehicles to work. USPS received its first Next-Generation Delivery Vehicles from the manufacturer Oshkosh Defense. They are the first of about 60,000 custom vehicles USPS will buy over the coming years. Electric vehicles will make up at least 75% of the next-generation fleet. USPS is sending its first round of vehicles to a large facility in Athens, Georgia.
  (First NGDVs delivered to the Postal Service - National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association )
• The Marine Corps has opened a new center to focus on the future of war. The General Robert B. Neller Center for Wargaming and Analysis, named after the 37th Commandant of the Marine Corps, will help the service develop capabilities through experimentation, doctrine and policy review, and science and technology examination. The center will be maintained by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and will feature next-generation technology, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. The center is located on the Marine Corps University campus near Washington, D.C.
  (Marine Corps opens up advanced wargaming center - DVIDS)

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A new policy allows service members to collect extra pay based on their Basic Allowance for Housing at the without-dependent rate to cover housing expenses at their second location.

Troops are eligible for this daily stipend if they are stationed at their training location for under a year and return to their primary duty station, where they must maintain their primary residence. Service members are not eligible for the stipend if they live in no-cost government housing.

Service members will still receive their Basic Allowance for Housing stipend at the with-dependent rate for their primary residence where their family resides. If they happen to lose their BAH stipend for their primary residency, they must immediately contact their servicing finance office to correct the error and restart their payments.

“We understand that these short moves, while necessary, can be disruptive to the lives and finances of Airmen and Guardians with families — particularly in situations where they are slated to return to their original duty station,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Alex Wagner said in a statement.

“This new allowance gives our service members and their families additional resources to weather these times away without the added stress of financial uncertainties.”

Lawmakers directed the Defense Department to implement the policy as part of the defense policy bill for fiscal 2023.

The Navy and Marine Corps announced the policy in March, and the Air Force and Space Force introduced the changes earlier this month. The Army has yet to update its policy.

The policy changes were incorporated into the Joint Travel Regulation, which establishes travel and transportation allowances for service members. Those changes took effect on Nov. 1, 2023.

Service members who attended training on or after Dec. 23, 2022, and meet the eligibility criteria for the stipend under the new policy will receive payments retroactively.

The new policy is part of a slew of changes the Defense Department has recently introduced to improve quality of life of service members and their families.

A provision in the House Armed Services Committee’s draft defense policy bill for fiscal 2025 directs the Defense Department to increase housing allowance. Since 2016, the department has covered 95% of the housing costs. If passed, the defense bill would require the DoD to reverse the 5% reduction in Basic Allowance for Housing and make sure it covers 100% of the calculated rate for the military housing area.

The provision was adopted last week, but it will have to be voted on by the rest of the House and Senate before making it into the final version of the bill. The House Armed Services Committee’s lawmakers on the quality of life panel recommended increasing BAH in their final quality of life report.

“What we’ve seen over the past few years is that military families are spending more and more out of pocket to obtain safe housing in in the duty station that they’ve been assigned to. Because of skyrocketing housing costs, we know that housing costs have have just shot up all over the country but the stipends haven’t always kept up in the past year,” Jessica Strong, the senior director of applied research at Blue Star Families, told Federal News Network.

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The Air Force’s Platform One program has a well established role in bringing “DevSecOps” software development to the Defense Department.

Now the program is focusing on enhancing its existing services, while expanding its secure software development work into more sensitive data environments.

Platform One’s core offerings include “Iron Bank,” a secure repository of hardened container images. Maj. Matthew Jordan, chief of product for Platform One, describes Iron Bank as the “Lego bricks” needed to build modern software. That includes hardened applications, continuous monitoring, vulnerability scanning and regular updates.

“We ensure that we’re patched within our repository, and all of our downstream consumers are able to easily receive the cybersecurity benefits,” Jordan said on Federal News Network. “You’re getting a lot of economies of scale there.”

Iron Bank is primarily accredited for less sensitive unclassified information. But Jordan said Platform One is working to get Iron Bank accredited for controlled unclassified information (CUI) as well as for classified information.

That work is detailed in Platform One’s new product roadmap, which lays out the program’s plans for various offerings and services, including “Big Bang,” its continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD) platform, and the “Party Bus” platform-as-a-service.

Platform One’s zero trust approach

Platform One also provides a “cloud native access point (CNAP),”  for accessing the software factory’s various services in a secure manner. Jordan said CNAP was “borne out of necessity” in the early days of Platform One, as it sought to work with software vendors, including nontraditional defense vendors, to establish its agile software development platform.

“How do you ensure that you’re still being secure and accessing things that may be coming from the Internet, or via contractor’s workplace or from their home as opposed to in a secure facility on a base?” Jordan explained. “So CNAP allows you to do the device compliance checks, so that you get a lot of attributes about the device itself, as well as understand who the user is, and get a lot of attributes on that user, and then make risk decisions as to ‘Okay, based on what we’re seeing today, you only get access to a certain subset of resources.’”

The capability allows each application owner behind the access point to “set their policies dynamically and make informed risk decisions, or accept the risk if they’re willing to, or mitigate the risk that they want to,” Jordan added.

CNAP is a key piece of Platform One’s zero trust security architecture, which also includes macro segmentation using a software-defined perimeter, Jordan said. Internally, Platform One also uses service meshes to ensure segmentation between individual applications, as well as continuous logging and monitoring.

“And that runtime security so that you can understand when something is going wrong or something’s attempting to do something that it shouldn’t, and then dive deeper for that root cause analysis,” Jordan said.

Platform One is also collaborating with other Air Force organizations on an application programming interface (API) reference architecture document. Jordan said that document is currently in draft.

“Data is king, and it’s crucial that we don’t allow data to just be put into a silo,” he said. “We need to be able to share that data. And API is definitely one way to enable that data flow. So we need to focus on providing those standards for application programming interfaces, software, development kits, data fabrics, all that kind of stuff to the developers. So they can quickly focus on developing features for their applications, as opposed to focusing on interfaces.”

The post Platform One looks to enhance, build on software factory services first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of the Air Force’s chief information officer’s strategy to increase the capabilities of its airmen and women and guardians is centered on increasing the use of cloud services.

Venice Goodwine, the Air Force’s CIO, said the cloud cannot be thought of as just for business applications. The lines between the back office and the tactical edge have blurred, she said.

“I’m expanding the cloud from NIPERNet [unclassified network] to SIPRNet [classified network] and also having all those capabilities as well in that cloud on both sides. As we think about the different classifications, how do we get there with those same human-to-human capabilities are important?” said Goodwine said at the recent AFCEA NOVA Air Force IT Day, an excerpt of which was played on Ask the CIO. “The other thing when I’m thinking of the cloud, it’s an investment. But I’m also going to create the transparency that we haven’t seen before in the cloud. Now when I think financial operations in the cloud, I now can talk to my system owners about their investment in the cloud, tell them when to pay for reserve instances. I could talk to them about how can they make adjustments in their investment based on the usage or their computing and storage? I didn’t have that visibility before.”

The Air Force is planning to have a single tenet for Office 365 on the secret side, which is different than what the service did with its unclassified version, which had multiple tenets

Several other military services and agencies also have rolled out O365 on the secret side recently.

“What’s important for my cloud strategy is making sure that I have cloud at the tactical edge. That’s my reliance on commercial cloud services at the edge because if I’m going to have decision advantage, I have to make sure that the data is available. The data needs to be where the warfighter is and the data needs to be in the cloud,” Goodwine said. “I don’t intend to put the data in the continental United States (CONUS) when I’m fighting in INDOPACOM. I need the data there. But then I also need the cloud at the edge. I need the data at the edge. I need artificial intelligence to make sense of the data. And it needs to be trusted. So all the attributes, you talk about data, I need all of that there. So it’s not just enterprise IT. It is it for the warfighter. That’s my mantra and you’ll hear me say that all the time and my team speak that same language.”

Air Force expanding virtual environment

The Air Force continues to mature its approach to buying cloud services. Goodwine, who became the CIO in August, said the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) remains the first option of where to buy cloud services, especially for new workloads. But, she said, those workloads and applications will remain in the CloudOne platform.

The Air Force is working on a new solicitation for CloudOne, called CloudOne Next.

The Air Force released its request for information for CloudOne Next in September and just in March, it offered more details on its acquisition strategy.

The Air Force expects to release three solicitations for CloudOne Next in the third quarter of 2024 and make the award in the fourth quarter of this year. It will be three single-award blanket purchase agreements on top of the schedules program run by the General Services Administration.

As part of this cloud expansion, Goodwine said the Air Force is developing a virtual environment to make it easier to access applications in a secure way.

“If you’re on your home computer, you have a Mac, you can go to portal.apps.mil and you can access your O365.You can be as productive as you need to be. There is no need for you to VPN in and you can use your home network,” she said. “You want to be able to access your OneDrive, all your apps and email, you can do that today. You only VPN in because you’re trying to get to some shared drives that we’re going to shut down eventually anyway. So really, those are the things that we already have in play that we should take advantage of, especially now that we’re in a hybrid environment. As we move forward, yes, understanding the work that’s done, the hours required to do that work so that we can make better investment decisions about the technology that we want to use, so I do think there’s a connection between technology and people hours.”

Additionally, Goodwine said the Air Force will expand its “Desktop Anywhere” initiative beyond just the Air Force Reserve Command.

“It now has an Impact Level 5 authority to operate, and we’re going to move it [off-premise] so we’re expanding that. We’ll have the ability to do more of these virtualized environments,” she said. “From a cybersecurity perspective, it’s a great idea because I just reduced my attack surface and from a productivity perspective, it’s absolutely faster, better, cheaper, and it now really allows you to be mobile, which is what I want my workforce to be the airmen and guardians.”

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New military aircraft designs don’t necessarily require super jet engines or hundreds of billions in development costs. A case in point: The Navy’s bid for a light plane that can take off and land in less than a football field. The Naval Air Systems Command recently hired a company called Electra to study the development of such an electrically-powered plane. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with the founder and CEO of Electra.aero, John Langford.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And just a brief technological description of what your company does. It’s more than just planes that can land in a short space, but it’s the propulsion that’s radically different.

John Langford Exactly. Electra.aero is a US company started about four years ago, whose focus is sustainable aviation. We believe that the whole next generation of aviation, at least commercial aviation, is really all about decarbonization. And we’re working in a part of the market that we think is relatively unaddressed within, but with enormous market potential, which is sort of the short haul and regional air mobility market. What Electra is doing is developing a hybrid electric, extreme short takeoff and landing airplane. Think of something with the operational flexibility of a helicopter, but with the cost structure at or below existing fixed wing airplanes. Electra uses a technique called blown lift, which is an idea that has been around for many years, was pioneered by NASA back in the 60s and demonstrated by NASA and the Air Force in the 70s, but which has never yet reached commercial utilization, primarily because the engines that existed at the time were not well suited economically to this idea of blown lift. But electric propulsion, distributed electric propulsion is really the breakthrough, which, combined with the idea of blown lift, makes this new category of airplanes possible. That’s what Electra it’s all about.

Tom Temin Blown lift then makes the wing feel like it’s going faster than it actually is. So the plane goes up even though it’s not going forward as fast as usual, rotation speed.

John Langford Exactly. The idea of blown lift is you bathe the wing in accelerated flow from many different propellers on there, and it accelerates the flow over the wing and it effectively makes the wing look bigger than it physically is, which is how we get the eventually the high lift coefficients. Then the slow flight speeds and the slow speeds are what allow you to do the really short takeoff and landings.

Tom Temin And have you tested it with a barn door yet?

John Langford We’ve tested it with a whole range of things, from pencil and pen calculations to computer fluid dynamics to subscale models. And now today, we have a full scale manned demonstrator flying right out at Manassas Regional Airport. And it’s really neat to see how all of the theory actually translates into practice very well.

Tom Temin And what has the Navy asked you to do to prototype a plane for its use, or to study the concept? What is the actual contract deliverable here?

John Langford So Electra’s primary focus is a commercial product aimed at, commercial operators. But at the same time, there’s a lot of government uses for an airplane that can take off and land very quietly in very small spaces. Our biggest financial backer to date from the government has been the Air Force through their Agility Prime program, which is helping sponsor the development, not only of the test program that we’re flying today, but also of a prototype airplane of the nine seed airplane product. As they’ve seen, the Air Force interests, both the Army and the Navy, have now become interested in how this technology might actually benefit them. And the Navy contract that we announced last week is really the first study of how that might be applied in the marine environment.

Tom Temin So they need not just the technology, but it sounds like they’re looking for a use case for this type of craft.

John Langford Absolutely. An airplane that can operate in sort of helicopter like spaces, but at the very low cost, comparatively, of a fixed wing airplane has a lot of potential uses. And commercially, what we’re trying to do is get in and out of the Wall Street Heliport, which would allow fixed wing airplanes to fly right into Manhattan, which is a little bit of a mind boggling idea when you think about it. That would enable direct air service from Manhattan to Washington, DC, right on a on a fixed wing airplane, not on a helicopter. And if you can land on that, if you’re familiar with what that heliport looks like. Barge in the East River. And that’s where the space of 300ft by 100ft, our operating requirement  comes from there. Once you can operate in a space that size, there’s all kinds of other places you can go the top of parking garages, literally any soccer field. And as you start to look at the marine environment, you start to go, wow, when you have a little wind over the deck, now you’re talking about distances that are even shorter than the 300 foot or the 150 foot ground rule that we’re talking about. These  airplanes take off and land between 25 and 30 knots, which is down in the range of ships can achieve that. And if there’s wind over the deck, either generated by ship motion or by by the wind itself, you can get into situations where these airplanes literally can almost take off vertically. There are historical examples of previous Stol airplanes, not blown lift airplanes, but previous Stol airplanes that can do essentially a vertical takeoff in the right wind conditions. And that’s really the heart of the study we’re going to be doing for the Navy is, well, what does this really mean? Some of the ideas we’re thinking about is this allows you to take container ships. And use a container ship to add aircraft, fixed wing aircraft operations off a container ship, off an oil tanker, off anything with a space of 50 to 100ft. That’s part of the study. How you treat some of these, the idea that now you have a reliable wind over the deck condition. What does that really mean for the operations of an airplane like this, which only needs 150ft ground roll to begin with? How does that really work in practice in the marine environment? That’s the focus of this initial study.

Tom Temin We’re Speaking with John Langford, he’s the founder and CEO of Electra.aero. And what is the status of this propulsion technology? Because pure electric planes have been flown, but they’re kind of like electric motorcycles. Lots of fun if you don’t want to go anywhere.

John Langford Exactly. When you look at conventional jet fuel, and you look at the very best batteries, there’s still a factor of between 50 and 100 in the amount of energy you can contain for a given amount of weight. And in cars, if your car weighs twice, your battery car weighs twice what your, gas car weighs, nobody really notices. The people who have to maintain the roads or the people who sell you the tires, they notice. But the average consumer doesn’t really realize how much heavier their electric cars are. Aviation weight is everything. Absolutely, the name of the game is how you get this high performance at low weight. And so batteries are not really well suited to aviation today. They may well be as the battery technology progresses over the next, 10, 25, 50, 100 years. But today it’s only in very limited cases that batteries buy their way on to an airplane. So what we are focused on is a hybrid solution. Think very much like, a Prius where there is both batteries and there is, in our case, a small gas turbine engine. Think of it like an auxiliary propulsion unit or something like that. They will work together in normal operations for takeoff and landing. Either one can power the airplane in an emergency. So one of the cool things the hybrid does is it gives you lots of redundancies that you don’t have on an airplane normally in this weight category. And then they allow lots of really neat advantages. Essentially what we do is we operate the gas turbine at a single fixed operating point, and we run it that way for a really long time.

John Langford So the two big drivers of maintenance cost on jet engines are how many throttle cycles you do, and how many times you turn it off and on. So both of those are dramatically reduced in the hybrid thing. And all of the throttle excursions are taken up by the batteries, which are actually pretty good at changing their loads very quickly. So we think it’s really a nice combination that is going to work well, and not just in our nine seat airplane. We actually think this technology is very scalable. We’re already talking with NASA about ideas about how this might scale up into airplanes as large as several hundred seats in a passenger. I think the whole idea of hybrid electric airplanes is actually something we’re going to hear a lot about over the next couple of decades. And we think Electra is really just a pioneer in that in the technology and in the market space.

Tom Temin But just to be clear, you do have craft built and flying around with this technology.

John Langford Absolutely right. We started out companies four years old. We spent the first two years developing and proving the hybrid electric system before we even built any kind of airplane. We spent the first two years developing and testing the hybrid electric propulsion system, and then we built an airplane. We wrapped the airplane around it. And that airplane, is called the, the EL2, goldfinch. And it’s flying today out in Manassas. It’s a two place airplane about the size of a Cessna 172. And it’s being used to validate all of the systems before we build the actual product, which is a nine passenger version.

Tom Temin It strikes me you could have the future locomotive at your fingertips also.

John Langford The electrification of things is going to be a big part of the next industrial revolution. And over the last 20 years, it’s all been how do you put everything on the internet. The next 25 years is going to be how you make everything, some version of electric. Whether it’s pure battery, whether it’s hybrid. I’m a big believer of hybrid. These are steps towards a future that may be hydrogen based or something like that, but there are steps that can be taken today with the existing technology, and they don’t require a rework of the entire distribution system. And so they’re very practical even if they’re only interim steps. And by interim, I mean this makes several generations 25 to 50 years, which is still a pretty good product lifecycle.

The post Navy hired this company to develop a new type of aircraft first appeared on Federal News Network.

The F-16 Kendall was in was up against a pilot with up to 3,000 hours of experience. 

The fight, Kendall said, was “roughly even.”

“I guess the less experienced pilot — the AI, the automation would have performed better. That’s where we’re going,” Kendall said during the Ash Carter Exchange on Wednesday. 

These experiments were being conducted within visual range engagements — where two aircrafts are just a couple of miles apart and pilots can see each other. “It’s shorter range, more maneuver dominated,” said Kendall.

The crew tested out various versions of what’s called “agents” — they can take control of the aircraft, conduct maneuvering and automate engagements. The plan was to go through about a dozen different scenarios. 

“I was in the front seat and I had a button on my stick where basically I would initiate the automation. Once we were set up at the right visual cues or where the threat was — either in front of us, behind us or in a meeting engagement — I would hit the stick and we would start to maneuver to a position of advantage and put ourselves in a position to either get away from the other adversary or be able to open fire and engage in,” said Kendall.

The technology is not there yet, he said, but it is making significant progress.

“We got to see three different versions of it. They all performed, I think, in a way, which suggests to me personally very strongly, that we’re on the right path, and we’re gonna get to where we’re headed for,” Kendall said.

“And there are a couple of factors about the computers and how they work. They don’t get tired, they don’t get scared, they’re relentless, it’s easy to see is a situation where they’re going to be able to do this job, generally speaking better than humans can do it. They also can handle large amounts of data,” he added.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been testing artificial intelligence algorithms using the X-62A VISTA (Variable In-flight Simulator Test Aircraft) as part of its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program.

While VISTA performed experiments within visual range, the Air Force is pursuing the collaborative combat aircraft (CCA) program, or next-generation drones enabled by AI. These aircrafts will be able to perform close visual-range engagements, but they are intended to be longer-range. 

The service has selected Anduril and General Atomics to develop designs, produce and conduct flight tests for the program.

“Initially, they were more oriented towards beyond visual range engagements, where a variety of centers, either organic centers or on the fighter that’s controlling the CCAs or from a non-local source could be providing target traction information to support engagements. Now this is the path to the future,” said Kendall.

While there is a lot of concern around the idea of AI acting without approval from a human, Kendall said there are ways to embrace automation while addressing ethical concerns.

“There’s a lot of discussion in the community about the need to regulate AI, if you will, to regulate particularly lethal autonomy. We already have rules that govern how people apply violence and warfare are called the laws of armed conflict. But what I think we need to do is figure out how to apply them to these types of machines,” said Kendall.

The post AI and human pilots were ‘roughly even’ during latest tests first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Defense Department, once again, dominated the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition. Service members from the Army and Marines Corps and a team of DoD experts won the individual and team competitions at this 5th annual event run by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

But civilian agencies are starting to close the gap.

Michael Harpin, the competitions section chief for the President’s Cup Competition at CISA, said once again the competition let federal workers demonstrate their cyber skillsets and gain some recognition for their talents.

CISA completed the finals of the 5^th annual competition on April 26 and the Office of the National Cyber Director will honor the winners at an award ceremony at the White House on May 20.

The results of Track A for defensive operations:

1. Army Maj. Nolan Miles,
2. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Michael Torres
3. Air Force 1st Lt. Sears Schulz

“We primarily focused on cyber defense incident responder and the cyber defense forensic analyst positions,” Harpin said. “In that competition, we had some challenges, like recovering from a ransomware attack. You also had to explore some network traffic to find an eight digit code for flood gates in a dam system. So we wanted to try and create some of these real-world type situations within our competition.”

The results of Track B for offensive operations:

1. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Michael Torres
2. Army Capt Brian Welch
3. Jakob Kreuze of the Air Force

“Some of the challenges they had to go through for this year’s competition included one was exploiting SCADA systems on a spaceship. In that, our challenge server would constantly check the environment that you’re in and provide you a flag if you properly overheated the reactors of the spaceship,” he said. “That was actually one of my personal favorite challenges this year. In another one, the individuals had to analyze a public GitLab site, so they could compromise a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.”

The results of the Team competition:

1. Artificially Intelligent — whose team included members of the Army and the Air Force. Four of the members were also on the winning team in 2022.
2. Touch grass.txt — whose team included members of the Department of Defense
3. Cyber Warfare Extremists — whose team included members of the Navy

Harpin said the team competition was one of the closest ever with Artificially Intelligent winning by just 60 points over Touch grass.txt out of a total of more than 30,000 points.

“Our team’s competition is broken up over two days in the finals. The first day we incorporated an industrial control system escape room developed by the Idaho National Lab. That was something new that we incorporated this year to give them a different experience,” he said. “In the ICS escape room, they were actually hands on some hardware. It was a fictional story of insider threat of a chemical company being acquired by a new company. So these people weren’t very happy. They raised pandemonium, which was the name of our of the escape room, with within the company. The goal was to restore the systems and then validate that you can complete an automated batch and they had to find some programmable logic controllers. They had to restore some human machine interface displays and even some virtual reality goggles as well within the escape room, so that that was a good new experience.”

Harpin said this is one area where a civilian agency team stood out. He said the team called the “Justice League” from the FBI was the only team that managed to escape during the competition.

Harpin said CISA already is planning President’s Cup 6 for next year. He said there are three things that the planning committee will take from this year’s competition.

“One is in continuing to incorporate new environments like the industrial control system (ICS) escape room. How can we give the finalists a new experience that can contest maybe even some soft skills like communication that’s why I wanted to shout out the team from the FBI that during that escape room. You had to constantly communicate a puzzle you solved or a password you found, and they are the ones who are out there, putting it on a whiteboard more than the other teams,” he said. “We want to find some hardware challenges as well that give them some new experiences. Another is continuously taking feedback from our participants. Getting back to our finals in person has been really valuable for us that we can have these open conversations with the finalists afterwards. And that’s been great. That’s how we grow the competition every year.”

Another possible change for future competitions is how to recognize individual or team efforts outside of the winner’s circle, such as fastest time to solve a challenge or top performing “rookie” competitors.

Harpin said next year’s competition is scheduled to start in January and go through April.

In the meantime, he said CISA is putting this year’s puzzles and challenges on the President’s Cup website for everyone to try and gauge their skillsets.

“We’ll have, at this point, over 200 challenges and within the coming weeks, we’ll make sure all of the challenges we used in Presidents Cup 5 finals are available. We post all the solution guides for those challenges on CISA’s, GitHub repository for individuals that get stuck. I can all admit that’s me a lot of times when I’m playing through the challenges, and it’s a great learning tool,” Harpin said. “If you have that step-by-step guide, it’s still a learning process to understand how to how to do a lot of these tasks. Since we stood up that President’s Cup practice area in September of 2023, we’ve had over 8,000 attempts so far. We’re excited to see that grow and continue to get used, all of that material can be found through CISA’s website.”

Harpin said the practice area is open to federal employees, and the GitHub repository is open to the public.

“We’re getting out to do more workshops using our President’s Cup material will be at the NICCE conference in Dallas, Texas in June where we are hosting a workshop called using games to motivate train and retain a cybersecurity workforce that will give people an opportunity to play through a handful of challenges, and how we build them on some open source applications,” he said. “We want to be able to scale that out how can we how can we do that more for the public and more for state and local governments. We’re exploring different ways that we can use that do that with the content we build within the President’s Cup competition.”

The post DoD continues domination of President’s Cup competition first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Air Force’s in-depth report to Congress says moving all National Guard space units to the Space Force is the best path forward. But the Air National Guard, governors in all 55 states and territories and a bipartisan group of 85 lawmakers are pushing back against the Pentagon’s plan.

The study that’s been in the works for quite some time examines three possible courses of actions. It lays out the feasibility and advisability of giving the Space Force its own Guard component, leaving things as they currently are and moving Guard space functions and personnel to the Space Force. The study looks into risks, costs and benefits of each course of action.

The overall costs for all options are roughly the same, the study concludes, and the Air Force can execute any course of action if required. The study’s recommendation — transferring all space functions from the Guard into the Space Force.

“Given its small size and lean philosophy the Space has taken in its organizational approach, the burden of a separate Reserve and Guard component — in any form — would detract from the ability of the Space Force to execute its critical mission,” the report, first obtained by Inside Defense, reads.

“The National Guard Bureau is capable of continuing missions with minimal disruptions regardless of the course of action selected. However, they have consistently stated and remain of the opinion that the transfer of covered space functions from the Air National Guard into a new Space National Guard component provides the best option for Airmen performing space missions in the Air National Guard today. The Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the Administration disagree with this position.”

There are no costs or risks associated with leaving things as they are, the report concludes. But Guardsmen would essentially be disconnected from the culture and training the Space Force provides. 

“They’re effectively orphaned. When you have things like schools that they have to go to — it makes life a lot harder because these folks are in the Air National Guard, but the Space Force is where they’re working,” Russ Read, the National Guard Association of the United States’ legislative affairs manager, told Federal News Network.

If the Defense Department decides to move all space functions out of the Guard and into the Space Force, it risks losing Guardsmen who don’t want to transfer to an active component. But the Space Force can manage these transition risks, the study concludes. 

“In the past two years, the Space Force received the Army and Navy military satellite communication missions, as well as the Army’s missile warning mission, without assurances that trained manpower would transfer with the units. In each case, despite not getting all the associated personnel, the Space Force successfully managed the transition without any loss to the operational mission,” the study states. 

Giving the Space Force its Guard component would limit training and promotion options for Guardsmen if the Guard space units remain the same size. If personnel grows, however, there would be more options available to Guardsmen, according to the study.

In his letter to Sen. Roger Wicker (R- Miss.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,  Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel Ashish Vazirani said consolidation of space functions would be the best solution.

“This will allow the department to fully leverage this groundbreaking approach to managing a total force,” said Vazirani.

But all state governors, lawmakers, Air National Guard leaders, Guardsmen and advocate groups have strongly come out against the Pentagon’s plan to collapse all space missions into one component as it continues to pursue a legislative proposal to bypass governors’ control over their National Guard units and move all Guard space missions into the Space Force.

In a letter sent on Monday, a bipartisan group of 85 lawmakers argued the legislative proposal is “deeply flawed.”

“To be clear: when individuals sign up for the National Guard, they are serving their country and their community. Congress shouldn’t abandon this model,” the lawmakers wrote. 

Last week, all state governors expressed opposition to the plan. Governors from 48 states and five territories sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calling for the immediate discontinuation of the proposed legislation.

Republicans Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas didn’t sign onto the letter but have since sent separate letters expressing opposition to the plan.

The post Air Force study recommends moving Guard units to Space Force as opposition mounts first appeared on Federal News Network.

Most National Guard professionals performing space missions would retrain or retire rather than join the Space Force, the Air National Guard internal survey shows.

As the Air Force senior leaders continue to defend a legislative proposal to move all space units within the National Guard to the Space Force, up to 86% of all Guard space personnel say they will stay in the National Guard and retrain instead of switching over to an active service branch. 

“We will begin to see the loss of experienced space operators long before the Space Force will ever be able to make up for the loss of that experience and proficiency. We will see a significant hit to national security because people will act in their own interest and retrain or retire rather than join the Space Force. And the Space Force does not have the capacity to make up for that loss,” Col. Michael Griesbaum, the commander of the Alaska Air National Guard’s 168th Wing, told reporters during a media roundtable Friday. 

The Hawaii Air National Guard, for example, has two electromagnetic warfare squadrons on Oahu and Kauai. About 91 Airmen are assigned to those units and the Guard plans to bring in more professionals to support the mission.

Col. Daniel Wrazien, the staff director for the Hawaii Air National Guard, said most citizen Airmen would most likely remain in the Hawaii National Guard and retrain into other missions.

“The majority of the 91 Airmen in these units do not want to transfer from the Air National Guard to the United States Space Force. This, in turn, would create new personnel training and facilities costs for both the Air National Guard and the Space Force,” said Wrazien. 

In March, Air Force officials sent a legislative proposal to Congress seeking to bypass existing law that requires the federal government to obtain governors’ consent prior to making any changes to National Guard units and to transfer 14 units with space missions within the Air National Guard into the Space Force.

The Air Force senior officials have since defended the proposal, saying that removing the requirement to obtain a governor’s consent prior to making changes to National Guard units will not set a blueprint for the active components to pull resources from the National Guard in the future.

“It’s a unique situation. There is absolutely no intention to make any other changes, moving things out of the Guard,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall Kendall told lawmakers last month. 

But Air National Guard leaders said overriding existing law to allow Air National Guard units be pulled from their states without governors’ consent  would set a dangerous precedent for separating other missions from the National Guard.

“Nothing legislatively ever happens once. If [legislative proposal 480] is successful, it will open the door to a wholesale harvesting of National Guard resources, both from the Air National Guard and the Army National Guard to the regular components. It is a solution looking for a problem,” Griesbaum said.

At the same time, the governors of 48 states and five territories sent a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin calling for the immediate discontinuation of the legislative proposal.

“Legislation that sidesteps, eliminates or otherwise reduces governors’ authority within their states and territories undermines longstanding partnerships, precedence, military readiness and operational efficacy,” the letter reads.

As of now, the Space Force doesn’t have a model for part-time participation in the service. Air Force officials want to bring citizen Airmen into the Space Force under the Space Force Personnel Management Act. The Act gives more flexibility to Guardians and Air Force reservists and allows them to serve part- or full-time, but it doesn’t cover Guardsmen.

During a budget hearing last month, Secretary Kendall said this potential transfer will not have a significant impact on Air Guardsmen in charge of space missions. 

“There’s no intention to move anyone. There are some concerns out there that I think are overblown. People will basically have stability if they transition,” said Kendall.

Air National Guard leaders said there are too many unknowns about what the transfer of the missions and personnel would look like, but the legislative proposal would give the Air Force the authority to move National Guard personnel to other states.

“The current Secretary the Air Force has said he is not planning on moving them, but the way the [legislative proposal] is written — the future Secretary to the Air Force absolutely can go in there, provide 120 days notification and then move those units out of the state,” Brig. Gen. Michael Bruno, director of joint staff for the Colorado National Guard, said. 

The post Most Guardsmen will retrain or retire rather than join Space Force first appeared on Federal News Network.

Directed energy weapons, like hypersonics, always seem to be just around the corner. Now a unit of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has finished building what it calls diagnostic system to evaluate the performance of high energy lasers developed by industry. The project is called GRAILE-II, or Government Radiometrically Accurate Instrument for Laser Evaluation Version Two. For more, the Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with Joe Cox of AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And just give us a little context here. Directed energy is something we know different military branches have been pursuing. What is the status of it now? Is there something you can put on a plane and aim it at someone and shoot it down yet.

Joe Cox Not yet. Directed energy is kind of a very high technology area in the sense that, you know, it takes a lot of resources and time to develop and solve all the different projects involved. Right now, kind of our current status is we’re building prototype systems, deploying them in the field, and seeing how warfighters and soldiers, airmen and sailors use these weapons, how effective they are in the enemy, so that we can bring that information back, get the feedback to us as scientists in the lab to continue to develop the technology.

Tom Temin And what are some of the technological challenges? Because lasers themselves are nothing new. But is it the power? Is it the weight, or what are some of the problems yet to be overcome?

Joe Cox So kind of the direction energy technology overall has been continually developing over the past 50 years. And one of the big things driving this technology is the specific weight of these weapons. By that I mean we want to deliver a large amount of power to our target, but we need to generate that power and deliver it effectively. And that takes a lot of size, weight, and power. And so, this specific weight metric basically says how much can we deliver per unit weight. So, if we have a bigger system in terms of power, can we reduce this weight so that it can fit onto an aircraft. And so, in the past we’ve been sort of working on reducing this. So, for example in the past we’ve used our chemical lasers such as our chemical oxygen iodine lasers. And those were about ten times heavier in terms of specific weight versus our more recent state of the art systems such as our shield system. So, by reducing this weight, we can fit more power into a smaller platform and sort of bring this technology closer to being integrated into an aircraft.

Tom Temin All right. Makes sense. And tell us about the GRAILE-II system that you have built, which is more of an evaluation and assurance type of operation. What have you actually got here?

Joe Cox So the GRAILE-II system is a laser diagnostic. And by that I mean it’s a system which is designed to make authoritative measurements of a directed energy system in terms of its power. So, by this I mean we can have some high energy laser system and it provides input into our GRAILE-II system. So based on this input, the GRAILE-II system can decide the quality of this laser. As in does this laser produce a high-quality beam, doesn’t produce a lot of power, and do so in an authoritative way.

Tom Temin That means then, that you could tell whether it could have, say, a lot of power, but if it’s unfocused, it probably won’t do very much good. And if it’s really super focused in and very high-quality beam, but it doesn’t have enough power to penetrate a gas tank of an enemy aircraft, it’s probably no good either. Is that the kind of questions you can answer?

Joe Cox Yeah, that’s kind of exactly kind of what we look for. And if we define these good laser sources, I call it good. But what I mean by that is something that could be effective in a directed energy application, as a system that has kind of two traits, the ability to generate a lot of light so that I can deliver a lot of energy on target. That’s kind of the energy part of directed energy, as well as the ability to project this light, you know, over several miles, several kilometers over long ranges and focus it onto a small target. And that’s kind of the directed part of the director energy. So, when we have these two together, we can build a system of what we need for our directed energy application.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Doctor Joe Cox, technical lead at the Directed Energy Directorate, which is part of the Air Force Research Laboratory. And how does it work? I mean, these are being developed by industrial partners of the Air Force, and so do they ship prototypes to the lab. And then you verify what they say about it, because they must have the same measurement ability, the companies as the lab does.

Joe Cox So in the past vendors have kind of provided their own diagnostics. They build up some sort of measurement and conduct this measurement on their laser and then report what they find to the Air Force, you know, to the government. This had limitations in the sense that it led to the question, you know, could we trust that the vendors are always providing the most authoritative, the most realistic, the most representative metrics of their system to us? And kind of answering these questions lead us to the development of the GRAILE-II system, because we want to be able to as the customer, you know, we use taxpayer dollars to purchase these lasers, and we need to make sure that they work every year to do so with these laser diagnostics, we can take our system to the vendor, test with our metrics, and come up with an authoritative value that we can compare to other vendors systems. And this allows us to make a more objective decision on, you know, how good their laser is, the quality of it, and whether their system meets our needs.

Tom Temin Sure. So, it’s almost like independent verification and validation.

Joe Cox Exactly. That’s kind of an important thing as we’re building more and more of these systems, you know, we’re having more and more vendors compete, you know, work these contracts. But in the past it might have been fine to use the vendor supplied metric for, you know, a one-off system. But, you know, now we want to do these comparisons and say, okay, who do we want to work with moving forward for our larger lasers for, you know, mass production and having these authoritative metrics allows us to do that.

Tom Temin Right? So, in other words, you want to have much more assurance that this thing will do as promised before you go to the production level of contracting, say.

Joe Cox Exactly. And that’s kind of an important piece. I mean, yeah, we trust the vendors to an extent, but, you know, trust but verify. Sure. If you know, if the vendors know, yeah, we’re going to be testing with our diagnostics, then they’re more likely to build a system which meets all of the requirements, you know, not just the ones that are picked for this specific test. And kind of doing this can help us achieve a more robust, system delivered from the vendor than otherwise.

Tom Temin And do Air Force’s particular requirements come into the equation? For example, if you are, say, a Navy laser, you might be further away aiming at a much bigger target that’s moving much slower and has much thicker skin, say, than if you’re the Air Force aiming at something on the ground or another aircraft where it’s moving faster, it’s thinner, you know, it’s thin aluminum instead of thick steel, and the distances might be different, etc., etc. and that must figure into what it is you’re testing also.

Joe Cox Yeah, that’s definitely true. So, for example, like putting a laser on an aircraft or in the air, and the air is a lot thinner up there. And so, there’s less atmospheric effects such as turbulence, which can disrupt our laser and can, you know, have different effects when we deliver the laser to the target. In other applications, such as in a sea-based application, you know, there’s salt spray and more humidity in the air, and those can affect the performance of the laser.

Tom Temin And I imagine the power available, besides the weight and the energy figures into this, because on a ship you can have an even. They have power limitations, but probably not the same power limitations that might be on an aircraft.

Joe Cox Yeah, that’s definitely true. And that’s kind of one of the big drivers of our push for a specific way that the Air Force Research Laboratory, you know, we want to be able to get more power into less weight so we can fit our laser onto the aircraft. Other services don’t have that problem to the same extent as the Air Force. And so, there’s more focus on other aspects of the laser versus a specific way.

Tom Temin And this is really an inside the weeds question. But is there any thought that the APU on an aircraft could be continuing to run after it takes off? And that’s the source of power for the laser?

Joe Cox So using the APU for running the laser, I mean, that sounds like an interesting concept. The big limitation is we’re talking about lasers normally on the order of ten plus kilowatts, you know, 30kW, 50kW larger is what we’re interested in. And perhaps if we have some sort of battery system, we can charge it with the APU. But in general, I always view those as lower power systems. And so, it would take a while to build up the energy needed to run the laser. And so that could be a possibility, you know, in terms of integrating into it and then charging with the battery, but, you know, running it constantly, we quickly run out of energy.

Tom Temin All right. Good. Well, no charge for the suggestion. And so basically then you have a very complicated multi factor equation power weight energy output range focus to balance before something can be deployed on mass by the Air Force.

Joe Cox Yeah that’s correct. And all of these different factors you know there’s a tradeoff. If you make one better, then you’re going to trade off on the other and make his performance worse. And so, you kind of have to not only balance this, but you have to build new technology which can expand this trade space so that you can do more of these things at the same time.

The post New way emerges to test, validate military grade lasers first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Air Force is requesting $140 million for privatized family housing projects at two bases in 2025. Lawmakers, however, are expressing concerns about funding additional privatization efforts.

“We do not own the units. These are units that the private companies assumed responsibility for years ago.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said during the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

“I’m going to continue to ask why it should be the government’s and not the private companies’ responsibility to cover these additional costs for sustainment and reinvestment. And importantly, how will this funding help service members and their families and not just help bailing out the private companies?”

Privatized military housing, which is managed by private companies under a contract with the base, has been a point of contention for some time now. Substandard living conditions, including mold, pest infestations, lead paint, and water leaks, have plagued privatized housing and companies responsible for managing housing have been criticized for failing to address maintenance issues promptly. But given financial constraints, there has been growing support for privatized housing efforts.

“We go from 2019 when the privatized housing providers are the worst thing in the world to now, which is, ‘We should privatize the barracks. It’s a great idea, let’s go do this.’ Because we know we don’t have that cash. And even if we did have that cash, you would be pushing out these major modernization programs,” Matt Borron, the Association of Defense Communities executive director, said during the Defense Communities National Summit on April 9.

Air Force installations boss Ravi Chaudhary said the service’s oversight program to monitor private companies has yielded positive results. 

This year, the service held a project owner at one of the Air Force installations accountable for roughly $58 million to address mold issues in over 1000 units.

In 2023, the service held another project owner accountable for about $32 million, and then another $33 million in 2024, to address safety issues.

“Our oversight program is yielding gains on us and that’s going to bring our number of restructures down,” said Chaudhary.

Additionally, the service added 218 resident advisors to help service members resolve any housing issues along with their chain of command.

Still, the Air Force’s privatized housing funding request is “significantly” higher than what the other services requested for 2025.

“I get that you have lease constraints. And there are a number of factors outside of the company’s control, like the [Basic Allowance for Housing], and you have occupancy rates that affect it. What steps are you taking to ensure that if a restructure of a project is necessary, the new agreement better ensures that privatized housing providers, not the Air Force, are responsible for operating and maintaining the units?” said Schultz.

Chaudhary said that rather than providing a lump sum of money without any oversight, the service would actively monitor how the funds are being used. 

“We’re going to make sure that any improvements we make have a direct impact on the military members and the challenges that we’re facing. We do that face-to-face with the installation command. And the members that are giving us direct feedback and resident advocates who we can directly talk to on what our individual homeowners are experiencing,” said Chaudhary. 

If contractors are not consistent with performance standards, the service puts them on a watch list. Those contractors get a notice from the headquarters about the areas they need to improve upon. 

One of the main indicators of how contractors are performing is residents’ feedback. If they are not performing well, they go on that watch list. 

“Watch list is pretty impactful because it really puts the focus of the installation and headquarters on that particular project owner,” said Chaudhary. 

“Ultimately, if they fail in all three levels, will go back and go to a default situation. That progressive approach, we believe, has been yielding some good results, especially with our newer project owners.”

The service is also considering privatized housing for unaccompanied airmen at isolated bases.

This year, the service is planning to invest about $1.1 billion in its dormitories. It’s the largest investment the service has made in modernizing its facilities in over a decade. The first privatization project for unaccompanied housing will be at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The post Air Force investing in privatized housing, lawmakers are not sold on the idea first appeared on Federal News Network.

For nearly a decade, the Army has not been able to hit its recruitment targets. 2024, however, could mark a turning point in the service’s recruitment efforts. 

The Air Force missed its recruiting goals for the first time since 1999 last year. But Air Force officials are “cautiously optimistic” that the service is on track to hit its active duty and reserve recruitment targets.

The Navy, however, is projected to miss its goals by 6,700 recruits in 2024—marking the second year in a row the service will not be able to attract enough sailors.

And while 2024 is shaping up to be a better year for the services, this mixed recruitment picture highlights the complex and multifaceted challenges the military continues to face. A strong labor market, general lack of awareness about military service, restricted access to schools in the post-pandemic world and growing distrust in public institutions have “turned into a perfect storm,” Alex Wagner, Air Force personnel boss, said in December. 

The Army wants to bring in 55,000 new recruits by the end of 2024. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she is “feeling a lot better” about recruiting this year.

“I don’t want to be overconfident but I think we feel that we have a good shot at making that goal this year,” Wormuth told lawmakers during a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

Wormuth said the service is doing better this year partly due to the success of its future soldier prep course, a program that helps new recruits meet military standards and go into basic training. Since 2022, the program has graduated about 18,000 soldiers with a 95% success rate.

“There’s an academic track for young people who haven’t quite scored high enough on the test that we use. And then there’s a physical track if you’re not quite within the body fat standards – young people can take one or the other. We now have expanded it and they can take them in parallel. They often are going into basic training and taking on leadership roles in basic training. So it’s been very successful so far,” Wormuth told lawmakers during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.

The service is now conducting a study that tracks future soldier prep course graduates as they transition to their first duty station and receive their first assignments to see how they perform. 

The Army is also transforming the way it runs its recruitment offices. The service is in the middle of standing up an innovation directorate that will be part of the Army Recruiting Command.

The new unit will help develop a pipeline of specialized recruiters and integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into recruitment. 

“They’re helping us look at what we would call the recruiting station of the future. We really think we need to fundamentally relook everything from the storefronts to how our recruiting stations operate,” said Wormuth.

Still, the Army set a lower goal for itself this year. In 2023, the goal was to bring in 65,000 new soldiers. Earlier this year, the service decided to bring down its authorized troop levels to 470,000 soldiers by 2029 from 494,000 soldiers due to its transition from counterinsurgency missions to large-scale combat operations.

The Air Force is also projected to meet its recruiting goals this year. The service wants to bring in 26,000 active duty airmen this year. In response to a decline in retention rates this year, the service recently increased its recruiting goal by 1,200.

“We’re actually doing very well this year. The Air Force is on track at this point to essentially meet its goals. In fact, we’re looking at revising the goals up slightly. The Reserves are doing well. Also, the Guard has improved their performance over last year, but it’s not quite meeting their targets,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told lawmakers last week.

Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, Air Force deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services, told lawmakers they are “cautiously optimistic we will meet fiscal 2024 recruiting goals due to modification of our policies.” The service adjusted its internal requirements, including its tattoo policies, body composition and drug testing requirements. Additionally, to expand its recruitment pool, the service now allows legal permanent residents to enlist.

At the same time, the Navy is “aggressively pursuing” 40,600 new recruits this year but will most likely miss the goal.

“We continue to face challenges in the current and forecasted economic environment and tough labor market, resulting in projected recruiting shortfalls in the coming years,” Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, the chief of naval personnel, told lawmakers in a statement. 

The Navy has also introduced a series of reforms to attract new sailors. Earlier this year, the service made a decision to allow recruits without a high school diploma or a General Educational Development to enlist. New recruits can now join as long as they score over 50 on the qualification test.

At the same time, the Marine Corps met its recruitment goals last year and is on track to hit its targets in 2024. But top officials are concerned as the service’s “start pool” of recruits fell well below its usual 50% level.

“This requires Marine recruiters to focus on finding individuals to ship in the near term, impacting their time to physically and mentally prepare for the rigors of the transformation process to Marine. We are working to grow the start pool, but it is a slow and deliberate process,” Lt. Gen. James Glynn, Marine Corps deputy commandant for manpower, told lawmakers. 

The post Army, Air Force ‘optimistic’ about recruitment, Navy falls behind first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Children at a New Mexico Air Force base appear to have a higher rate of a rare brain cancer. A new Air Force study found that there is no significant increase in overall brain cancer among children at Cannon Air Force base, but children living at the base are diagnosed with a rare form of brain cancer more often when compared to children living at other bases and in the general civilian population. Cannon Air Force base leadership raised concerns in 2022 about the occurrences of a rare type of pediatric brain cancer among children living at the base, resulting in researchers spending two years conducting the study.
  (Air Force finds higher rate of rare cancer among children at Cannon AFB - Cannon Air Force Base)
• Could AI make airport security screening more efficient? The Transportation Security Administration is developing an AI tool for detecting guns and other prohibited items hidden inside luggage. TSA Administrator David Pekoske said it could help take some of the burden off security screening staff. “We're going to see some days this summer that might have 3.1 million passengers, and you figure 3.1 million means well over six million images that officers are reviewing on a given day,” Pekoske said Tuesday before the House Appropriations Committee’s Homeland Security Subcommittee. “That's a lot. What we find in our testing is that the constant review of images can be very fatiguing.” The AI screening tool is not deployed yet. Pekoske told the House Appropriations Committee that TSA is working with the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate to advance the technology.
  (TSA sees potential for AI to reduce burdens on security screeners - Federal News Network)
• The Office of Management and Budget has produced a progress report on governmentwide digital transformation efforts. In the six months since OMB issued the digital experience memo, agencies have inventoried 10,000 federal websites, named a digital experience delivery lead and taken more advantage of tools and training to change how they deliver services. OMB said in a progress report on this 10-year roadmap that agencies will now identify opportunities to improve content for the most common questions asked and deliver digital self-service options in new ways. Additionally, the new Digital Experience Council will convene experts from across the government to bring a more coordinated approach to digital experience delivery.
  (OMB's six-month update on agency digital service progress - White House)
• The Office of Personnel Management is setting stricter validation requirements for enrollees in the Federal Employees Health Benefits program. Starting in this fall's Open Season, agencies will be required to validate a sample of at least 10% of their FEHB enrollments. The requirements apply to both Self-Plus-One and Self-and-Family plans. The changes from OPM come after the Government Accountability Office found that ineligible FEHB enrollees may be costing up $1 billion annually. Beginning next year, feds will also have to provide documentation for any family members they want to add to their plans during Open Season.
  (Stricter FEHB requirements from OPM aim to root out ineligible members - Federal News Network)
• More and more federal workers are getting representation from the American Federation of Government Employees. The federal union grew by 5.5% last year, which it said made 2023 by far its best year for organizing in decades. It also makes AFGE the fastest growing major union in the country. AFGE credits the rapid growth to a change in its organizing model. And for 2024, the union said it has already surpassed 300,000 members.
  (AFGE ranks first as fastest growing large union in U.S. - American Federation of Government Employees)
• The federal government is stepping up efforts to be a more attractive employer for spouses of military service members overseas. The departments of Defense and State are looking to streamline the process for federal employees to continue their careers when their active-duty military spouses deploy abroad. They are looking to shorten the process of becoming a Domestic Employee Teleworking Overseas. That includes simplifying work between the two departments to sign off on overseas housing and residential security requirements. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said these efforts will allow military spouses living abroad to continue their federal careers with as little disruption as possible. “With having to move from post to post every couple of years, maintaining meaningful employment can be difficult for military spouses — even more challenging when you are assigned overseas,” Hicks said.
  (DoD, State Dept streamline process for federal employees to telework overseas - Federal News Network)
• The IRS said it has answered more phone calls from taxpayers in need of help, as the agency handled a million more calls this filing season and three million more calls than in 2022. The IRS exceeded its customer service goals for the second year in a row and more than 85% of calls were answered. That’s compared to only 15% of callers getting through to the agency in 2022. In terms of workload, the IRS received more than 100 million individual tax returns this year and issued more than $200 billion in refunds.
  (The president’s fiscal year 2025 IRS budget and the IRS 2024 filing season - Senate Finance Committee )
• Agencies may face a new category on the annual small business report card. Under a new bill that the House Small Business Committee passed yesterday, the Small Business Administration would factor in the number of small firms winning a contract for the first time when determining annual grades. The committee also passed two other small business contracting bills. One of them would require agencies to offer more specific reasons when they cancel a small business contract and help the small business identify similar opportunities. The bills now head to the full House for a vote.
  (House committee approves bill to expand small business report card - House Small Business Committee)
• The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency is getting a new director. Richard Muller is taking the reins at IARPA. He previously led the Department of Energy’s Quantum Systems Accelerator and managed the Advanced Microsystems Group at Sandia National Laboratories. Muller replaces Catherine Marsh, who is retiring after more than 20 years in the intelligence community. During her tenure, IARPA launched 27 new research programs.
  (Haines welcomes Richard Muller as IARPA director - ODNI)
• The Navy is projected to miss its recruitment goal again this year. The service will most likely miss that goal by about 6,700 sailors. In 2023, the service missed its recruiting goal by about 7,500 new sailors. The other services, however, are projected to meet their recruitment targets this year. The Navy has introduced a series of reforms to attract new sailors, including allowing potential recruits to enlist without a high school diploma or GED.
  (Navy on track to miss its recruiting goal again - House Armed Services Committee)

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A potential transfer of all space units in the Air National Guard to the Space Force will have minimal impact on the 1,000 guardsmen performing space missions in seven states, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said today.

“There’s no intention to move anyone. There’s some concerns out there that I think are overblown. People will basically have stability if they transition,” Kendall told senators on Tuesday at a hearing on the service’s posture.

Last month, Air Force officials sent a legislative proposal to Congress to bypass existing law that requires them to obtain governors’ consent prior to making any changes to National Guard units and to transfer 14 units with space missions within the Air National Guard into the Space Force.

Since the inception of the Space Force in 2019, much debate has centered on what to do with the 1,000 Air National Guard professionals performing space missions.

The 2024 defense policy bill requires the Air Force to assess the feasibility of creating a separate National Guard component for the Space Force, moving National Guard space units with space missions to the Space Force or leaving things as they currently are.

While the study, which was due on March 1st, is still in its final draft, Air Force officials are already pursuing a provision in the 2025 defense policy bill to move all Guard space units to the Space Force.

“The missions that are currently being performed in the National Guard are critical to our success and I’ve been very clear about that in the past. The easiest way for me to manage it, though, is for those missions to be performed in a single component. There’s an added level of complexity if the Space Force is required to manage a second component, like a Space National Guard. And I’m trying to do my best to keep the administrative bureaucracy, the staffing levels of the Space Force as small as possible,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman told lawmakers during the Senate Appropriations Committee’s hearing on April 9.

Kendall said they have already looked at the functions of those space units to determine whether they better fit into the Air Force or Space Force architecture.

“Most of them do fit within the Space Force. There are a couple that I think may be more appropriate in the Air Force, but they’re all valued and they’re all important. We want to have them continue to serve. We are looking at how to best make that happen,” said Kendall.

Air Force officials want to bring Air Force Guardsmen into the Space Force under the Space Force Personnel Management Act, which allows Guardians and Air Force reservists to serve part- or full-time.

The service is already working to bring about 1,000 Air Force reservists performing space missions into the Space Force under the new legislation.

“We are looking at how to best make that happen. [Gen. Chance Saltzman] and I are both very strongly of the opinion that the right way to do that, from the point of view of national capability and for the ability to manage the Space Force, is to bring those units into the Space Force ultimately under the Space Force Personnel Management Act,” said Kendall.

“We’re doing this now with some of the reserves that are going to be moving under the Space Force Personnel Management Act. We’re going to handle the Space Guard people the same way. So they would have stability and they will be able to continue to serve in the way that they currently would serve. There should not be a lot of concern about dramatic changes as far as any of them are concerned.”

The proposed legislation to transfer Air National Guardsmen has received pushback from state governors and advocate groups.

Last week, the National Governors Association called for immediate withdrawal of the proposed legislation.

“Governors on both sides of the aisle call for the immediate discontinuation of legislative proposals that endanger or deny the full and legitimate authority of governors to act in the capacity of commander-in-chief to their respective National Guard across states and territories,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a National Governors Association press release.

Kendall, however, said removing the requirement to obtain a governor’s consent prior to making changes to a National Guard unit will not set a blueprint for moving other missions out of the National Guard.

“This [issue] is an artifact of the creation of the Space Force. It’s sort of cleaning up the battlefield of the creation of the Space Force. It’s a unique situation. There is absolutely no intention to make any other changes, moving things out of the Guard,” said Kendal.

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