Mutual Telecom Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tyto Athene, received a potential five-year, $43.5 million Department of Energy (DOE) contract to support the Oak Ridge Federal-Integrated Communications Network (ORF-ICN), the company announced on Tuesday.

“Tyto is honored to have been selected to continue its partnership with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge community in providing integrated network maintenance services to the DOE Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the nation’s largest multi-program science and technology lab,” said Jason Alexander, vice president of Operations at Tyto Athene.

The ORF-ICN provides comprehensive telecommunications networking services to the DOE and other Government agencies located throughout Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This marks the first time that a company has successfully won back-to-back contracts in support of the ORF-ICN.

Tyto will apply Mission-Focused Digital Transformation, our proven service improvement framework, to deliver innovative and emerging technologies which increase the resiliency of DOE’s IT infrastructure and meet the evolving needs of Oak Ridge’s missions.

“We look forward to continuing to deliver the highest level of service in support of this mission-critical program for the Department of Energy and our nation,” Alexander added.

Gen. John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a two-time Wash100 Award winner, said the Department of Defense (DOD) has developed a concept called “expanded maneuver” to deter Russia and China from future aggression, DOD News reported Monday.

He said expanded maneuver highlights the need for DOD to understand how adversaries operate across all domains and how to deter them while safeguarding Pentagon and coalition forces.

Hyten said there are four functional combat areas within expanded maneuver and those are contested logistics, joint fires, joint all-domain command and control and information advantage. With JADC2, he said there should be a flow of data everywhere.

“The goal is to be fully connected to a combat cloud that has all information that you can access at any time, any place … to be able to act quickly on that,” Gen. Hyten said during his remarks at the launch of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies Institute.

Under the joint fires concept, he said services should be able to fire from all domains while making it impossible for adversaries to defend themselves against those fires.

“That’s a purely aspirational requirement, but I hope everybody can see that if you could do that you would change the equation on any future battlefield,” Hyten added.

The Potomac Officers Club will host a virtual event on JADC2 on Aug. 31. Register here to join POC’s Building the Future Battle: The Keys to JADC2 event and learn more about the fundamental principles and systems needed to advance JADC2 implementation.

The Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory has signed a five-year partnership agreement with two universities to conduct research into new materials and manufacturing processes.

DEVCOM ARL, University of Kentucky and University of Tennessee at Knoxville will collaborate on a project aimed at advancing systems for producing advanced materials that could support military equipment modernization priorities, the service said Monday.

Bryan Cheeseman, leader of ARL's rapid technology transition team, said forming a group that includes university professionals who are knowledgeable about fundamental materials science, industry partners that develop high-strength products and defense equipment manufacturers, is key to drive innovation for warfighters.

I.S. Jawahir, director of the University of Kentucky Institute for Sustainable Manufacturing, will serve as the project's principal investigator.

The school's researchers will work with the Army to develop nanostructured metal alloys and composite materials through hybrid manufacturing methods.

Jawahir noted that the partnership intends to establish an additive manufacturing laboratory in the University of Kentucky College of Engineering.

NASA has completed the high-voltage testing of its all-electric X-57 Maxwell aircraft at the agency's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.

The test plugged an auxiliary power to the Emipircal Systems Aerospace-developed aircraft to ensure that all integrated systems could function as designed at full power, NASA said Friday.

The milestone saw the first time the X-57's propellers spun under electric power since Empirical Systems delivered the aircraft to NASA in October 2019.

With the high-voltage procedure now completed, the space agency will put the experimental aircraft through verification and validation testing next.

The X-57 project is aimed at helping regulators and the aviation industry in developing certification standards for urban air mobility vehicles and other electric aircraft.

The U.S. Army's Integrated Fires Mission Command program intercepted a cruise missile in a highly contested, electronic attack environment during a demonstration at White Sands Missile Range.

Soldiers participating in the program launched a Patriot Advanced Capability – 3 interceptor to block a missile that was targeting assets, while another missile was electronically attacking radars, the Army said Friday.

The 3-6 Air and Missile Defense Test Detachment deployed the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System to track and identify the cruise missile targets before launching the PAC-3 interceptor.

IBCS integrates a wide range of fire control sensors, including Army Sentinel radars, an AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar from the U.S. Marine Corps and F-35 jets from the U.S. Air Force.

"The ability to integrate joint weapons and sensors with Army platforms on a single fire control network is a game-changing capability that is one step closer to being delivered to our warfighters,” said Col. Philip Rottenborn, program manager for IFMC.