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  October 14, 2020 | International, Land, C4ISR

  US Army pegs 2023 as tipping point for ending old weapons

  Jen Judson WASHINGTON — The Army will see a significant shift in funding from its current fleet to new and modern capability designed to fight in multidomain operations in fiscal 2023, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy told Defense News in an Oct. 8 interview. The service has conducted several rounds of “night court” reviews already, a deep dive across the Army's portfolios to determine whether money is in the right place to ensure modernization priorities are getting what they need to progress. In FY18 and FY19, the Army focused on the science and technology portfolio, but in FY20 ramped up the process finding north of $25 billion to apply to modernization priorities across the next five years. The FY21 and FY22 process was similar and still resulted in a substantial amount of funding that was redirected, according to McCarthy. “We're basically lining ourselves up for the '23 program where you will see a much more aggressive effort like you saw in FY20,” McCarthy said. “The choices are going to get bigger and tougher, but that's necessary” as modernized programs begin to be fielded, he said. “That will force us to make harder calls with legacy systems that will have to be forced to end their service life.” The FY22 night court review has wrapped up, and the number of canceled, reduced or delayed programs is less than in previous years. The Army still had to make some hard decisions, Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the Army G-8, told Defense News in a separate Oct. 8 interview, but there were fewer. “It did still result in dozens of reductions and eliminations, but smaller, much smaller than in the past.” In FY20, for example, the Army canceled, delayed or reduced 186 programs. In FY21 that number was roughly 80. “I feel better now than I did on the front end of this thing a year ago,” Pasquarette said, “and how we were going to make ends meet.” Pasquarette, who manages the night court process, said a year ago that after two deep dives he was concerned there wouldn't be enough low-hanging fruit to move over to fund modernization at the levels needed in the coming years. But since the Army has already found $37 billion total from the previous night courts and no major changes have been made to the strategy or what is being prioritized, less needs to move around because everything is in the right place, according to Pasquarette. Yet in FY23 some big programs will begin to go out to units such as the Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense System (M-SHORAD), next-generation squad weapons, enhanced night-vision goggles, the Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) systems, the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) and ground-launched hypersonic weapons. “So in our fires community, massive changeover,” McCarthy said, “so units will be taking on new weapon systems, changing their task organizations, so you have to start divesting legacy weapon systems at a much greater rate of speed. ... Then as you get towards the back end of the [five-year defense plan] FYDP, in '25 and '26, here come the helicopters.” In FY23, McCarthy said, the Army will also make trades in order to invest in logistics to accommodate new weapons. Questions center on determining whether there are appropriate hangars, maintenance facilities and ranges that accommodate greater lethality and range for things like the Long-Range Precision Fires capabilities. More difficult decisions could be around the corner should the defense budget face cuts in the future. Some are projecting numbers as high as a 20 percent cut in military spending if there is a change in the administration. “If we see a reduced top line, I do wonder what would be the impact to some of the things that we put in place,” Lt. Gen. Thomas Horlander, the Army's comptroller, told Defense News earlier this month. “How will things like our modernization plan become pressurized? And so definitely a reduced top line will pressurize some of the programs and we'll be making some tough decisions.” Should the Army face cuts, McCarthy said, “we'll have a hard look at our readiness portfolio.” The Army has “been very blessed” to have 27 or 28 brigades at the highest levels of readiness, he added. “So you look at your readiness portfolio and are there ways to do it more efficiently? Do you need that many ready at any given point in time? Can you make an adjustment to that large bucket of funding in the readiness portfolio?” McCarthy asked. On the modernization side, the Army will have to continue to divest legacy platforms, according to McCarthy. “But you also need to take a very hard look” at priority programs to ensure they are correctly lined up, he said. As for quality of life, the Army “will not take much risk there,” McCarthy said. “We're very concerned that we spent over a decade at deficit spending on that side and we've made some pretty substantial moves. We're going to make some more here in the next week or two that you'll hear about ways that we're working to improve upon that.” The Army will do what it can to manage the balance sheet “as efficiently as possible,” McCarthy said. “If the cuts come, they will come. You have to face that down. The fiscal posture of the country has been challenged with the COVID-19 pandemic and we're going to do the best we can with the budgets we are granted.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2020/10/13/us-army-pegs-fy23-as-tipping-point-for-ending-old-weapons/

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  July 5, 2018 | International, C4ISR

  THE DOD’S APP STORE DOES THIS ONE CRUCIAL THING TO STAY SECURE

  Lily Hay Newman EVERY DAY, COMPANIES like Google and Apple wage a constant battle to keep malicious apps out of their marketplaces and off people's phones. And while they do catch a lot of malware before it does any damage, there are always a few nasty infiltrators that manage to sneak by and end up getting downloaded by thousands of consumers. No one wants these mistakes to happen, but when you're a crucial app store for the Department of Defense, these mistakes can't happen. That was the problem facing the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as it set about creating a flexible yet ultrasecure app store in 2012. NGA is a combat support organization that primarily assesses and distributes geospatial intelligence. The agency wanted to provide sensitive and mission-critical apps to groups across the DOD through a platform that had the security and resilience of a government defense product, while also offering a streamlined, up-to-date user experience similar to ubiquitous commercial app stores. "We recognized that we did not know everything when it came to apps, and we wanted to be using the innovation that was happening in the commercial sector," says Joedy Saffel, division chief and source director of NGA who has worked on the GEOINT App Store from the beginning. "But how do we do that in a safe, secure manner? How do we do that from a contractual perspective? And how do we do that in a way that nontraditional vendors will trust doing business with the government? It was a great challenge." The key, Saffel says, is getting developers to agree to hand over the source code of their apps for in-depth analysis and review. Whether an app is a simple time/speed/distance calculator for a pilot or a hyper-specialized classified tool, sharing source code is a big risk for developers, because it means trusting third parties with the core intellectual property they have built their businesses on. But NGA soon realized that full access was the only way its project could work. So NGA's GEOINT App Store runs its security protections and screening processes in a way a commercial platform never could. Need To Know You can browse through the GEOINT App Store yourself today and see many of the mapping, aeronautical, weather-forecasting, location-sharing, and travel-alert services that it hosts for Android, iOS, desktop, and web. But that's just the public unclassified section—one crucial aspect of designing the platform was building segmentation controls so DOD employees with different levels of clearance, or simply different needs, could have gated access to different apps. "We built the App Store to be a completely unclassified environment that's open to the public," says Ben Foster, a technical director at NGA who is the product manager for the app store. "But it also has identity management that uses a federated approach to authentication. It's even flexible enough to integrate with other identity-management platforms across DOD. If a user is a helicopter pilot, they might see and get different apps then someone who is a tactical operator in the Army." This system also works with the platform's pricing variations: Some apps are free to everyone, some downloads come with a fee that needs to be taken out of a particular department's budget, and some apps are licensed by NGA or another agency. The most radical part of the GEOINT App Store from a government perspective is the speed with which NGA can process apps and get them live in the store. In general, government acquisition processes take many months or years, a clear problem when it comes to constantly evolving software. So NGA worked with its chief information officer, IT Directorate, legal team, international affairs division, and contracting office to establish a streamlined app-vetting process that would be acceptable under federal acquisition regulations. The agency also contracted with a private firm called Engility to directly manage the outreach, acquisition, and development environment for customizing prospective apps to NGA's requirements. The process, known as the Innovative GEOINT Application Provider Program, or IGAPP, minimizes bureaucratic hurdles and guides developers who want to submit an app through a pipeline that vets, modifies, and generally grooms apps for NGA's store. "What we focused on early on was providing tools so developers can bring their app and do a lot of the pre-testing and development with Engility," NGA's Saffel says. "We're able to be flexible with that because it's being done outside of the government footprint in a brokered environment. And then NGA has a governance board that meets every week, and the whole process has matured enough that by the time an app comes to NGA, we can review it and get that application into the app store and exposed within two weeks' time." Though the process might be even faster if NGA only did the minimum vetting required, Saffel says that the GEOINT team worked to find a balance where the apps go live quickly, but there's still time for the automated code analyses and human audits that commercial app stores can't do. Check It Out After a developer submits their app, Engility does extensive source code analysis and vulnerability scanning and produces an initial findings report. John Holcomb, the IGAPP program manager from Engility, notes that an initial vulnerability report can have as many as 1,000 items on it that a developer needs to address. "It's a little intimidating at first," Holcomb says. "But we walk them through it, and they go back and modify their code—it's their code, we don't modify it for them. We might go through four runs of that on a brand-new app, but by the time we're done, they will have remediated their code down to the level that the government needs. There are still going to be bureaucratic hurdles, but it's our job to break through those." In addition to digging deep into source code, IGAPP also tests how apps function in practice, to make sure that there aren't benign-looking aspects of the code that actually underlie a shady function. "We take the compiled application and we watch what it does," Holcomb says. "Who does it phone home to? Is it sending private information unencrypted?" After an app gets approved for inclusion in the GEOINT App Store, developers continue to work with IGAPP on developing and vetting software updates so that patches and improvements can be pushed out quickly. The brokered vetting process means that the government never holds developers' source code directly. The inspection is always mediated by Engility, which signs nondisclosure agreements with developers and isn't a software maker itself. Holcomb says that the company carefully guards app data while storing it, and once a project is done, Engility doesn't just do a soft data deletion; it hard-purges the information from its cloud servers within 30 days. NGA's Saffel and Holcomb both note that developers were apprehensive about the unusual workflow at first, but over the years the app store has gained credibility. Developers say they benefit from the IGAPP process both by securing lucrative government contracts and by integrating the improvements from the IGAPP development into their commercial products. The code audits and security vetting IGAPP offers are expensive, so developers generally don't do such extensive assessment on their own. "Everyone's dream is to sell to the government, but it normally takes years of effort to get to a position where you can. In our case, I was able to sell to the government in less than a month," says Bill DeWeese, CEO of the firm Aviation Mobile Apps, which has had six apps accepted into the GEOINT App Store. "You do feel a little anxiety about sharing source code, you worry about your IP leaking and someone getting ahold of it. But I haven't had any issues, and the benefit is the increased quality of your products at no cost—you get the analysis for free and you can put it in your commercial offerings." NGA's Saffel says the governance board that evaluates the apps at the end of the process is careful to stay vigilant so nothing goes into the store by accident. The board will still push back on apps or turn them away when warranted, but Saffel says the process has matured such that most of what the board sees these days is ready or very near ready to go live. And IGAPP prioritizes its patching process and infrastructure, to make it easy for developers to push bug fixes and improvements throughout the life of an app. All of this means a consumer-grade turnaround time for critical Department of Defense tools without the consumer-grade security concerns. "NGA is kind of a unique combat-support agency," Saffel says. "With the GEOINT App Store we chose to go into a very risky new frontier for DOD and the government in general, but I think we've demonstrated that we can do things differently and still be secure and still control access. We're supporting a lot of different mission sets, and I expect that the app store will keep growing." https://www.wired.com/story/dod-app-store-does-this-one-crucial-thing-to-stay-secure/

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  July 23, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Chinese Hackers Target Taiwan and US NGO with MgBot Malware

  Chinese hackers target Taiwan and US NGO with advanced malware. Daggerfly group upgrades cyber arsenal for espionage, exploiting vulnerabilities.