The Pentagon is a very large building that houses a lot of the authorities for the U.S. Military. It's big. This photo doesn't do it justice, but they're kinda rightly concerned about people flying drones around there.

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. […]

Bot-driven cyberattacks and other fast-spreading malware have been making some pretty big waves of late. The Mirai botnet, for example, launched several record-setting Distributed Denial-of-Service–DDoS–attacks starting in September 2016. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) Empire just struck back with answers to more than 1,000 questions that vendors posed regarding the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. DoD just released its second draft request for proposal after responding to concerns of 46 vendors and two associations. […]

A new award program, that recognizes Federal agencies that turn citizens’ frowns upside down, debuts in May. The Service to the Citizens awards, founded by Martha Dorris, everybody’s favorite former govie and a lady that always makes me smile, honors Feds for service to citizens and citizen experience breakthroughs. […]

The world over, folks ask the same two questions every day–what’s for dinner, and what’s the weather forecast? In the government IT space, every day we’re all asking about the cloud forecast. A recent report from P&S Market Research provides new insights on the global government’s cloud appetites. […]

The Navy’s IT operations have a new sheriff, in the form of a chief management officer whose arrival makes the high-profile Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer a thing of the past. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD)–has recruited a new CIO–Dana Deasy. The former CIO at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Mr. Deasy is expected to report for duty in early May. […]

The Department of Defense is splitting up and reorganizing its acquisition system in an effort to keep up with the times. A changing threat landscape and a new world order in how technology is developed, and business is conducted is behind the shift, according to DOD officials. […]

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? […]

The tactics of warfare aren’t what they used to be. In addition to asymmetric battlefield tactics that differ from conventional battles, they also can include cyber, social, economic, and psychological strategies that don’t necessarily involve physical combat or destruction–or even direct human involvement–and can’t be divined by tracking troop movements or fleet deployments. As a result, the signs of impending war aren’t what they used to be either. […]

A recent study showing just how easy it is to hack into Internet of Things (IoT) devices–and to use that access to gain entrance to a larger network–focused on commercial products used in the home. However, it could serve as yet another wake-up call for the Department of Defense and other government agencies that are increasingly relying on IoT. […]

President Trump’s comment recently that it might be a “great idea” to have a “Space Force” may have seemed like an off-hand comment at the time, but it fanned the embers of what has been an ongoing and contentious debate between Congress and the Pentagon over whether a separate military force to operate in space like the Army on land, the Navy at sea, or the Air Force in the air is needed or would even be beneficial. […]

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. […]

As Department of Defense (DoD) officials testified before the Senate last week on the Pentagon’s consolidated financial audit, John Gibson, the DoD’s chief management officer, spoke on the vast potential for shared services to improve department efficiency. […]

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. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) on Wednesday sketched out plans for a swift, multibillion dollar move to a comprehensive cloud infrastructure, while leaving a lot of the details to be filled in along the way. […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has completed the transition of the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) to a virtual network, which increases its bandwidth tenfold, while supporting plans to extend SIPRNet to the very edges of the network via the commercial cloud. […]

It appears that the improved reliability and security of cloud computing is attracting more law enforcement agencies. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is the latest agency looking to migrate applications to a commercial cloud provider. […]

The accelerating cycle of technological advancements is reaching down into even small components that traditionally operated on low power and computational capacity, while performing a narrow, specific function. […]

Pentagon and allied leaders agree that future conflicts will likely take the shape of a “hyperwar” –a fast-paced clash guided via cyberspace and accelerated by artificial intelligence, but with real, even possibly nuclear, consequences. NATO’s most recent risk report, the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative, states that the next world war could come as a hyperwar, and says North Korea, China, and Russia are working on the capability. Speakers on a panel at this month’s AFCEA West 2018 conference in San Diego agreed, emphasizing that the United States needs to keep up with technological developments being adopted by other countries, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI). […]

With the passion of an evangelical, Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan preached the Defense Department’s (DoD) “uncompromising” approach to cybersecurity last month at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego. And, his sermon included spreading the responsibility for cybersecurity to industry as a condition of winning contracts. […]

About five years ago, many law enforcement officials wondered if the cloud was safe enough to hold their data. Now the FBI, the nation’s top law enforcement agency, is considering a move to a large-scale, commercial software cloud provider. […]

Reports like December’s White House IT Modernization Report sometimes seem like they impose requirements on agencies from above. Speaking at the ServiceNow Federal Forum in February, Danielle Metz, a policy advisor at DoD Office of Science and Tech Policy and contributor to the Modernization Report, gave us a look inside the kitchen to see how these reports come together. […]

Artificial intelligence has been applied to everything from cybersecurity and financial management to human resources and self-driving cars, so it seemed only a matter of time before it could take over video surveillance duties. And while AI, machine learning, and neural networks have made some promising strides in this area, it’s not quite the slam dunk that it might seem. […]

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) plan to accelerate adoption of commercial cloud computing saw an early result this month with the maximum $950 million contract worked out with REAN Cloud that lets DoD agencies buy cloud solutions and services directly from the company. The accelerated part of the equation resulted from the work of the Defense Unit Experimental (DIUx), which worked with REAN to enable prototyping and procurement of the full range of cloud requirements, contributing to the Other Transaction Authority (OTA) award. […]

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 Air Force wants to take the idea of a virtual assistant to the next level, with a system that not only draws from existing information to answer questions, but puts some additional thought into helping airmen make better decisions. This is accomplished by quizzing them about what, precisely, they plan to do. […]

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