Pentagon publishes zero-trust cyber strategy, eyes 2027 implementation

On the same subject

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  July 3, 2018 | International, C4ISR

  Does DoD know how to supply intel for cyber ops?

  By: Mark Pomerleau Cyber has been an official domain of warfare for nearly a decade, yet the Department of Defense is still learning how to integrate it with operations. And some members of Congress are concerned the traditional military intelligence organs to this day don't understand intel support to cyber ops. The House Armed Services Committee is directing that a briefing on the subject must take place by December 1, 2018. The briefing — delivered by the under secretary of defense for intelligence, in coordination with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the military services — is expected, according to a provision in the committee's annual defense policy bill, to address multiple issues, including: Efforts to standardize a common military doctrine for intelligence preparation of the battlefield for cyber operations; Efforts to develop all-source intelligence analysts with the capability to support cyber operations; and Efforts to resource intelligence analysis support elements at U.S. Cyber Command and the service cyber components. “The committee is concerned about the Defense Intelligence Enterprise's ability to provide the cyber community with all-source intelligence support, consistent with the support provided to operations in other domains,” the provision, called an “item of special interest,” says. In some cases, other intelligence disciplines, such as human intelligence or signals intelligence, might be needed to help enable a cyber operation. A committee aide noted that the goal is to get DoD to think about cyber operations just as operations in any domain and build the infrastructure to support that. According to Gus Hunt, Accenture Federal Services cyber strategy lead, cyber as a domain is really no different than the others from an intelligence support perspective. The objective of intelligence, he told Fifth Domain in a recent interview, is to ensure it provides timely information about the adversary, who they are, the status of their capabilities and any information about the threats that are there. “I think what you're seeing ... is that people are asking the question are we appropriately structured or resourced and focused to be as effective as we possibly can in this new realm of cyber and cyber operations,” Hunt, who previously served as the chief technology officer at the CIA, said. “Because they're asking the question, I think the obvious answer is ... we're not structured as effectively as we possibly can be ... [but] it's really good that people are sitting there asking.” The Army is experiencing similar problems, especially when it comes to experimenting with force structure changes and bringing cyber effects to the tactical edge, which currently don't exist. “We're not seeing a corresponding growth in the intel organizational structure with the cyber and” electronic warfare, Lt. Col. Chris Walls, deputy division chief for strategy and policy in the cyber directorate of the Department of the Army G-3/5/7, said at the C4ISRNET conference in May. “The existing intel force structure is really going to be stressed when we put this EW and cyber capability into the field unless they have a corresponding growth and capability as well,” Walls said of tactical cyber effects and teams. https://www.fifthdomain.com/congress/2018/07/02/does-dod-know-how-to-supply-intel-for-cyber-ops/

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  April 16, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  Economics Of Rocket Reuse Still Up In The Air

  Irene Klotz The first Falcon 9 rocket to land successfully after dispatching a payload into orbit stands on permanent display outside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, a testament to the perseverance of founder, CEO and chief engineer Elon Musk, who wants a fleet of fully reusable spaceships to reduce the cost of colonizing Mars. The vision is shared by fellow tech entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, whose Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin space company is developing a series of reusable vehicles, beginning with the New Shepard suborbital passenger transport system. The New Shepard made 12 uncrewed flight tests over the last five years, with more to come before commercial flights begin. Bezos also has pumped $2.5 billion into developing the New Glenn, a reusable system powered by seven BE-4 methane-fueled engines designed to carry nearly 50 tons to low Earth orbit. “That is the smallest orbital vehicle we are planning to build and launch,” says Clay Mowry, Blue Origin vice president of sales, marketing and customer experience. But the first BE-4s to power a rocket to orbit may not be aboard the New Glenn. United Launch Alliance (ULA) is buying the engines to power the first stage of its Vulcan rocket, an expendable booster—at least for now—which, like the New Glenn, is slated to debut next year. At some point, ULA may decide to recover and reuse just the BE-4 engines, a pair of which will fly on each Vulcan. The idea is for the engine compartment to disengage after launch and fall back through the atmosphere protected by an inflatable hypersonic shield. A helicopter would be positioned to snag the engine section midair as it makes a parachute descent. ULA calls the approach its Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology, or SMART. “It does not impact, in any significant way, the overall performance of the launch vehicle because you don't have to save fuel to fly home with,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno tells Aviation Week. “You still get to burn up all your fuel, separate your engine, which is the most expensive piece, and recover it.” “We have not really changed our assessment over the last couple of years because we have yet to see the other forms of reusability—flyback or propulsive return to Earth—demonstrate economic sustainability on a recurring basis,” Bruno says. “It's pretty darn hard to make that actually save money. . . . We've seen nothing yet that changes our analysis on that.” SpaceX currently is the only launch company reflying orbital rockets. SpaceX launched its final version of the workhorse Falcon 9 booster, called the Block 5, in May 2018. Within two months, the company was flying Block 5s exclusively. The upgrade includes higher-thrust Merlin engines, stronger landing legs and dozens of upgrades to streamline recovery and reuse. Block 5s were designed to fly 10 times with minimal maintenance between flights, and up to 100 times with refurbishment. SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell says the company no longer expects to need to fly a Falcon 9 more than 10 times. “We don't have to ramp up our production, at least for boost phases, like we thought we were going to,” Shotwell said on March 10 at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington. “From a reliability perspective, we want to know the limits of Falcon 9, so we'll push them, but . . . some government customers want new vehicles—I think over time, they will come to flight-proven vehicles as well,” she added. “But if I have to build a couple of new ones every year, or 10 new ones a year, that adds to the fleet, and I don't know that I'll have to push a rocket more than 10 [flights.]” With regard to how much the company has been able to cut costs by reflying rockets, Shotwell would only say, “We save a lot of money.” As a privately held company, those operating expenses are not publicly available, but the Block 5 flight record is. So far, SpaceX has flown 14 Block 5 core boosters over 31 missions, including two Falcon Heavy flights, which use three cores apiece. Of those 14 boosters with flight history, five remain part of the operational fleet. The rest were expended—several after multiple missions—due to payload performance requirements or unsuccessful landings. One booster was intentionally destroyed as part of a Crew Dragon capsule launch abort flight test. SpaceX's fleet leader flew five times before failing to land on a drone ship stationed off the Florida coast on March 18. SpaceX has not said if the botched landing was related to a premature engine shutdown during the final phases of ascent. The rocket's remaining eight Merlin engines compensated for the shutdown, and the payload—a batch of 60 SpaceX Starlink broadband satellites—reached its intended orbit. While it continues to fly the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy for NASA, national security and commercial missions, SpaceX is developing a fully reusable, human-class deep-space transportation system called Starship at its own expense. Another company testing the waters of reusability is Rocket Lab, which builds and flies the Electron small-satellite launcher. “For a long time, I said we weren't going to do reusability,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in August 2019, when he announced the new initiative. “This is one of those occasions where I have to eat my hat.” Electrons do not have the performance for a propulsive return like SpaceX's Falcons do, so Rocket Lab is pursuing a midair, helicopter recovery system to snare the booster's first stage. The intent is not to reduce costs per se but to increase flight rates without having to boost production. The company currently is producing one Electron rocket about every 30 days. “We need to get that down to one a week,” Beck says. “We view [rocket reuse] as sort of a journey,” ULA's Bruno adds. “We're going to start with the engines because we're pretty sure we can save money with that and pass those savings on right away. As we learn more by doing, we'll continue to assess other valuable parts of the rocket, and we may discover that we can do that there as well.” “There is one funny thing about reusability,” he adds. “As you make your rocket less expensive, and you make parts of your rocket less expensive, it's harder to close a business case on reuse because the thing you're recovering isn't as valuable. There's a balance there.” https://aviationweek.com/shows-events/space-symposium/economics-rocket-reuse-still-air

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  May 11, 2020 | International, C4ISR

  Amazon challenges the Pentagon’s revised JEDI solicitation directly to the department

  Andrew Eversden Amazon Web Services filed a bid protest directly to the Department of Defense challenging “ambiguous aspects” of the Pentagon's revised solicitation for its embattled enterprise cloud contract. AWS' challenge is in response to a revised solicitation from DoD regarding a specific technical requirement of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract that AWS had challenged. Back in mid-April, a Court of Federal Claims judge granted the department's motion allowing DoD to “reconsider certain aspects” of the JEDI award. “AWS is committed to ensuring it receives a fair and objective review on an award decision that the court found to be flawed," an AWS spokesperson said. "AWS repeatedly sought clarity from the DoD around ambiguous aspects of the amended solicitation and the DoD refused to answer our questions. We simply want to ensure a common understanding of the DoD's requirements and eliminate ambiguity that could impact a fair evaluation.” The JEDI cloud, potentially worth $10 billion over 10 years, was awarded to Microsoft in October last year. Amazon protested the award in the Court of Federal Claims in December and won a temporary restraining order in March preventing the DoD and Microsoft from building out the cloud infrastructure after the court decided that AWS was likely to show that DoD erred in its technical evaluation. AWS also opposed the DoD's motion to reconsider specific aspects of the JEDI award because the DoD's request didn't account for all six technical errors Amazon alleged were made during the contract's evaluation process. "Even if taken at face value, DoD's proposed corrective action fails to address in any meaningful way how it would resolve the technical issues AWS has raised, or which specific technical challenges it intends to address,” Amazon lawyers wrote in a March 24 court filing. In response to Amazon's protest, the content of which is not publicly available, Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw wrote in a blog post that the filing by AWS was “disappointing but not surprising.” “The only thing that's certain about Amazon's new complaint is that it will force American war fighters to wait even longer for the 21st-century technology they need – perpetuating Amazon's record of putting its own interests ahead of theirs,” Shaw wrote May 7. A spokesperson for AWS called Shaw's post “not surprising," and touted AWS' cloud computing capabilities. “We're eager to see the full array of mistakes considered and assessed,” the spokesperson said. Lt. Col. Robert Carver, Department of Defense spokesman, said in a statement that the department is trying to get the JEDI capability to war fighters quickly. “DoD continues to execute the procedures outlined in the Motion for Voluntary Remand granted last month with the intent of delivering this critically-needed capability to our warfighters as quickly as possible,” Carver said. This story has been updated with a comment from the Department of Defense. https://www.federaltimes.com/it-networks/cloud/2020/05/07/amazon-challenges-the-pentagons-revised-jedi-solicitation-directly-to-the-department/