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General News/Government Technology/News
U.S. to Provide Ukraine With Advanced Rockets, Ammunition
by Jane Edwards
Published on June 1, 2022
U.S. to Provide Ukraine With Advanced Rockets, Ammunition

President Biden said his administration will provide Ukraine with “more advanced rocket systems and munitions” to help its people counter Russia’s invading forces and continue working with allies and partners on Russian sanctions.

Some of the weapon systems that the U.S. will continue providing Ukraine are Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, radars, Javelin anti-tank missiles, artillery and precision rocket platforms, Mi-17 helicopters, ammunition and unmanned aerial vehicles.

Biden wrote in a guest essay published Tuesday in The New York Times that the U.S. is not seeking a war between NATO and Russia and will not attempt to bring about the ouster of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.

“So long as the United States or our allies are not attacked, we will not be directly engaged in this conflict, either by sending American troops to fight in Ukraine or by attacking Russian forces,” the president wrote.

“We are not encouraging or enabling Ukraine to strike beyond its borders. We do not want to prolong the war just to inflict pain on Russia,” he added.

Biden said the U.S. will continue to provide Ukraine congressionally authorized-financial assistance, address the global food crisis, help European allies reduce their reliance on Russia’s fossil fuels and reinforce NATO’s eastern flank.

He also explained the move of the U.S. to stand by Ukraine and shared his thoughts on the use of nuclear weapons.

Government Technology/News
Navy Tests Mission Computer Replacement for T-45 Trainer Aircraft
by Mary-Louise Hoffman
Published on June 1, 2022
Navy Tests Mission Computer Replacement for T-45 Trainer Aircraft

The U.S. Navy has tested a new avionics computer technology that will replace the mission display processor of the branch’s T-45 jet trainer platform.

Naval Air Systems Command said Tuesday that two program offices put the Mission Computer Alternative through a flight test Monday at Patuxent River, Maryland.

The service’s PMA-209 air combat electronics program office developed the MCA system using the Hardware Open Systems Technologies framework as part of obsolescence management planning efforts.

HOST seeks to minimize the need for regular updates to mission computing hardware and software, according to NAVAIR. PMA-209 and the Naval Undergraduate Flight Training Systems program office collaborated to carry out the test.

The Navy is looking to apply the T-45 aircraft’s next mission computer for navigation performance and area navigation use.

Contract Awards/News
Pentagon Releases Guidance on Inflation, Economic Price Adjustment in Defense Contracts
by Jane Edwards
Published on June 1, 2022
Pentagon Releases Guidance on Inflation, Economic Price Adjustment in Defense Contracts

The Department of Defense has issued a memorandum meant to guide companies and contracting officers on how to manage cost increases due to inflation under existing contracts and provide considerations with regard to the use of economic price adjustments when entering into new contracts.

The memo states that the treatment of cost differences depends on contract type and that vendors should inform DOD that the costs incurred are closing in on the limits specified in the contract.

Upon notification, the department may raise contract funding and the company is not obligated to continue contract performance beyond what can be carried out within the contract’s funded amount.

For fixed-price incentive contracts, the government may adjust the target profit in the event that the vendor’s actual cost differs from the target costs.

The memo signed by John Tenaglia, principal director of defense pricing and contracting at DOD, states that under fixed-price contracts with EPA, the government will shoulder the cost risk up to the limit specified in the clause.

For firm-fixed-price contracts, contractors should bear the risk of cost increases and those associated with inflation. The department said it is addressing queries about the possibility of user requests for equitable adjustment to address inflation under FFP contracts.

“For contracts being developed or negotiated during this period of unusually high inflation, an EPA clause may be an appropriate tool to equitably balance the risk of inflation between the Government and contractor,” the document reads.

Cybersecurity/News
Space Execs Get Temporary Clearances for IC’s Classified Cyber Briefing; Kevin Coggins Quoted
by Jane Edwards
Published on June 1, 2022
Space Execs Get Temporary Clearances for IC’s Classified Cyber Briefing; Kevin Coggins Quoted

U.S. intelligence officials organized a classified briefing on hacking threats facing satellite networks amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and issued temporary security clearances to executives of satellite operators for them to attend the event, Via Satellite reported Tuesday.

“It was a milestone moment,” Erin Miller, executive director of the Space Information Sharing and Analysis Center, said of the clearances, also called “one-time read-on.”

“We had people who were not cleared who were invited to the discussion, people who would normally never have had access to that [classified] information,” Miller said during a May 13 panel discussion at a conference.

Space ISAC facilitated the briefing, which was organized under the leadership of Stacey Dixon, principal deputy director of national intelligence and a 2022 Wash100 Award winner.

Kevin Coggins, vice president for positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) at Booz Allen Hamilton, said the briefing included the FBI and the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. He also described the issuance of provisional clearances as “unprecedented.”

“The intelligence community said, ‘You have a need to know because you operate in the space domain. You might not have government contracts, but you’re part of Space ISAC and the space community, and we need you to know these classified threats and behaviors we’re seeing because we want you to be able to defend against them,'” said Coggins, who is also a Space ISAC board member.

Miller also discussed Space ISAC’s information-sharing efforts using the Traffic Light Protocol and how the center produced and transmitted machine-readable alerts to its members using Structured Threat Information eXpression and Trusted Automated eXchange of Intelligence Information as information sharing standards.

Government Technology/News
ASRC Federal Recognized as AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner; CTO Eric Velte Quoted
by Charles Lyons-Burt
Published on May 31, 2022
ASRC Federal Recognized as AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner; CTO Eric Velte Quoted

Amazon Web Services has honored defense contracting company ASRC Federal with its advanced tier services partner distinction.

Awarded to organizations within the AWS partner network, this selective recognition is given to businesses that demonstrate exemplary technical skill sets and customer experience offerings, the Beltsville, Maryland-headquartered company said Tuesday.

Eric Velte, chief technology officer at ASRC Federal, noted that the company’s AWS credentials come from serving clients with the platform “through our centers of excellence and integrat[ing] these resources into our technology product offerings.”

ASRC Federal and AWS collaboratively offer comprehensive cloud-based strategies and a set of cloud management applications that aim to provide speedy and malleable interface and storage for users.

AWS advanced tier services partners are trained and knowledgeable about AWS processes and are seen as something of an ambassador for the AWS brand. In exchange, the network of companies can acquire resources through the AWS marketing development funds program. The latter program sponsors prototypes and the launch of embryonic research endeavors.

ASRC’s AWS notice follows the company’s Data Network Technologies business unit’s contract award from the Transportation Security Administration in April. Under the Dynamic Integrated Secure Connectivity for Operational Value and End Point Resiliency contract, ASRC DNT will modernize the TSA’s Security Technology Integrated Program.

In January, ASRC Federal Space and Defense landed prime positions on six pools of the General Services Administration’s ASTRO contract vehicle for manned, unmanned and optionally manned robotics work.

Government Technology/News
Red Hat Brings Cloud Environment Qualifications to HPC Research with DOE Labs; CTO Chris Wright Quoted
by Charles Lyons-Burt
Published on May 31, 2022
Red Hat Brings Cloud Environment Qualifications to HPC Research with DOE Labs; CTO Chris Wright Quoted

Red Hat has partnered with several U.S. Department of Energy laboratories, targeting their efforts to progress cloud-native standards and practices in high-performance computing environments.

The Raleigh, North Carolina-based open source software company said Tuesday it will work with the research teams at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, among others, to expand the possibilities of harnessing standardized container platforms to connect HPC and cloud computing impacts.

Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president of Red Hat, outlined the prominence of HPC technology in demonstrating computer-intensive applications’ strengths in scientific experimentation via containers. Wright says this caused an imbalance of standards throughout HPC sites and a resultant difficulty in constructing and implementing new programs that can be used in HPC, commercial and cloud settings.

“Through our collaboration with leading laboratories, we are working to remove these barriers, opening the door to liberating next-generation HPC workloads,” Wright stated.

A widespread, growing desire to operate containerized syllabi on traditional HPC architectures is attributable mainly to new discoveries in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning, in addition to compute and data-driven analytics.

In their joint ventures with the DOE, Red Hat looks to combine their expertise in cloud-native and multi-cloud infrastructure with the laboratories’ innate facility with large-scale HPC execution. The collaboration will center on four focus areas aimed at gaining new understanding in exascale computing, touching on standardization, scale, cloud-native application development and container storage.

The work will find Red Hat’s team utilizing some of the most intricate and robust supercomputers in the world. Their partnership with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Berkeley Lab will see the two organizations refine Podman, a daemonless container engine designed to develop, manage and run container images on a Linux system.

In addition, alongside the research staff at longtime partner Sandia National Laboratories, Red Hat will concentrate on deploying a Kubernetes-derived infrastructure at enlarged scale in order to test a simplified route for mechanism delivery of containerized workloads.

Red Hat’s new DOE announcement follows the company’s March deal to offer data integration services for a network of hospital research centers in Canada. Using Red Hat Integration, Toronto-based University Health Network consolidated 170 systems into one platform.

GovCon Expert/Industry News
GovCon Expert William Boykin: Federal Thrift Savings Plan’s New Investment Window
by William McCormick
Published on May 31, 2022
GovCon Expert William Boykin: Federal Thrift Savings Plan’s New Investment Window

(The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Executive Mosaic, its newsroom, or any of its affiliates)

NO T.S.P. FOR THE C.C.P.

By Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin, (U.S. Army, Ret.)

As things stand now, the people who manage our federal retirement funds will mark Memorial Day with an egregious act of betrayal of our men and women in uniform, past and present, and their civilian colleagues. Based on my own experience serving our country, I think what they are doing by surreptitiously arranging for participants in the Thrift Savings Plan unwittingly to invest in companies owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is tantamount to treacherous sedition.

On May 24th, I joined five prominent retired military leaders in warning the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB) that, in “our professional judgment…mutual funds with such companies in the portfolio must be excluded from the Mutual Fund Window that the Thrift Savings Plan expects to open to
federal retirees [on June 1st].

We observed that: 

Under Chinese law, all PRC companies are obliged to assist the Party and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) whenever asked to do so. Worse yet, some of those Chinese corporations listed or traded in our capital markets actually work directly for the PLA. It is completely unacceptable that our servicemen and women, past and present – or, for that matter their civilian counterparts among the federal workforce – might be put in a position where their investments may help acquire weapons intended to kill them.

We called on the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board (FRTIB) “to refrain from opening mutual funds to TSP participants’ investments unless and until you have ensured than none of such investments will help enrich, enable or empower the Chinese Communist Party.”

Our bottom line is one that I am convinced the vast majority of Thrift Savings Plan participants – if not, as I would hope, every one of them – would strongly endorse: “The government of the United States should be precluding any underwriting of the CCP’s ominous military build-up and human rights abuses, not legitimating and facilitating them.”

This is not the first time the FRTIB and its lead fund-manager, Larry Fink’s BlackRock, have tried to help the Chinese Communists to gain access to our federal employees’ retirement savings. They attempted in 2020 a relatively above-board effort to the same end by switching the only option for international TSP investing to an index fund whose portfolio was substantially made up of CCP corporations. To his credit, President Trump personally intervened to block that gambit.

So, now the TSP fund managers have stealthily conjured up a far less transparent scheme, whereby participants are invited to put up to 25% of their retirement investments in one or more of perhaps as many as 5,000 mutual funds. While the FRTIB will not reveal which of such mutual funds it is offering – and, thereby, at least implicitly legitimizing and endorsing as prudent investments, it is widely expected that many will have problematic Chinese companies in portfolios. Yet, the TSP managers have said that they will not be making transparent the funds that include such companies and which ones.

Apart from the fiduciary irresponsibility of such an arrangement, there’s another factor that should concern every TSP participant still working in a sensitive position with or for the federal government: Professional harm could be done to government employees with security clearances if they wind up having what would rightly be deemed to be, at a minimum, a conflict of interest by dint of their investments in what has emerged as our greatest enemy of all time.

For these reasons, I urge Thrift Savings participants and other patriotic Americans to take a stand at once and express righteous indignation about the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board’s insidious, and potentially dangerous, help to the Chinese Communist Party. You can do so quickly and easily with your own elected representatives and with the FRTIB Board at www.NoTSPforCCP.org.

Please, do it today.

Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin capped a highly decorated 36-year career in the U.S. Army, including service as the commander of its elite Delta Force special operations unit and as the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Government Technology/News
Federal Reserve Board’s Lael Brainard Testifies on Emergent Digital Financial System
by Mary-Louise Hoffman
Published on May 31, 2022
Federal Reserve Board’s Lael Brainard Testifies on Emergent Digital Financial System

Lael Brainard, vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, told the House Financial Services Committee that she believes a central bank digital currency, stablecoins and commercial bank money could exist together in the future financial system.

Brainard said in her written testimony published Thursday that establishing a CBDC to complement cryptocurrencies would offer “a safe central bank liability in the digital financial ecosystem, much like cash currently coexists with commercial bank money.”

Conservative investors may find a CBDC attractive in stressful times and the potential wide availability of a digital banknote can possibly lower aggregate banking deposits, the Fed official added.

She proposed offering zero interest-bearing accounts or imposing consumer limitations if the Fed decides to move forward with CBDC development as part of risk mitigation measures.

News
Navy Commissions Fast-Attack Submarine USS Oregon
by Christine Thropp
Published on May 31, 2022
Navy Commissions Fast-Attack Submarine USS Oregon

The U.S. Navy has commissioned USS Oregon (SSN 793), a Block IV Virginia-class fast-attack submarine, during a ceremony at Naval Submarine Base New London, marking the first time the service branch held an in-person submarine commissioning event since 2019.

The fast-attack submarines like USS Oregon are developed to meet the Navy requirements for sea control, power projection, forward presence, maritime security and deterrence as part of its maritime strategy, the service branch said.

In addition, Block IV Virginia-class subs undergo smaller-scale design changes for increased component-level lifecycle, enabling the Navy to expand the periodicity between depot maintenance availabilities while boosting deployment numbers.

The traditional ceremony held Saturday was attended by Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon; Tommy Ross, performing the duties of assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition; Adm. Frank Caldwell, director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program; Cmdr. Lacy Lodmell, commanding officer of USS Oregon; and other officials and personnel, according to the service branch.

“Oregon and the other Virginia-class submarines will not only sustain, but exploit our edge in undersea warfare,” remarked Caldwell during the commissioning ceremony.

Executive Moves/News
Senate Confirms Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh as Cybercom Deputy Commander
by Mary-Louise Hoffman
Published on May 31, 2022
Senate Confirms Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh as Cybercom Deputy Commander

Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh, commander of the 16th Air Force, was confirmed by a voice vote in the Senate Thursday to become the next deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command, C4ISRNET reported Friday.

He was nominated by President Biden to the No. 2 post at Cybercom one month ago and will succeed Lt. Gen. Charles Moore, who has held the role since September of last year.

Haugh has led the information warfare-focused numbered AF since October 2019. In his current capacity, he oversees more than 44,000 personnel who support the delivery of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance data to the military service and the operations of the branch’s portion of the global Department of Defense network.

His previous assignments include leadership of the 25th Air Force, the Cyber National Mission Force and the 480th ISR Wing.

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