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By: Justin Lynch In the face of increasing cyberattacks, the Department of Homeland Security is creating a new center to share threat information with private companies and kicking off a 90 day sprint to identify the country's digital “crown jewels" that may be especially vulnerable, the agency's secretary said July 31. The National Risk Management Center is expected to provide a centralized home where firms and local agencies can turn for cybersecurity solutions. “The next major attack is more likely to reach us online than on an airplane,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. She added that “intruders are in our systems” and “everyone and everything is now a target.” The announcement came during a cybersecurity summit that the Department of Homeland Security hosted in New York City. The event aimed to bridge the gap between the government and some of the top companies in the United States that make up the critical parts of American digital life. It was envisioned as the start of a new relationship between the private and public sector. Nielsen said that the threat center is “driven by industry needs” and is spurred by a ”re-emergence of the nation state threat” and the “hyperconnected environment” of the United States. She said that previously some local governments have called 911 during a cyberattack. In the future, they would call the new cyber center. “Nation-state actors attempt to infiltrate critical infrastructure operations across multiple sectors,” a Homeland Security fact sheet on the new center read. It added there is a “need for an agreed-upon playbook to integrate government and industry response efforts.” The center also provides a playbook for risk management and identifying critical cyber supply chain elements. Although there are already government-backed risk-sharing initiatives, DHS leaders hope that the private sector will be more willing to share their challenges and expertise. Jeanette Manfra, the assistant secretary for the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications at Homeland Security, told reporters that the new center is "going to start small, we don't want to sign up for all sorts of things and then fail.” The hope is for the national counterterrorism center to be able to focus on incident response, and the center announced on Tuesday will focus on identifying national risk. The risk center will pull staff from other parts of government, Manfra said. A leader has not been named, and it has not received an increased budget. Throughout the conference, government officials were eager to entice the private sector to work with the new risk center. It appears that business participation is a necessary condition for the centers' success. The announcement comes just one week after Homeland Security warned that the Russian government is conducting cyberattacks against critical infrastructure sectors that include energy, nuclear, water, aviation and critical manufacturing. “The warning lights are blinking red," Coats said during a July 13 event at the Hudson Institute. Current threat sharing portals have been described as ineffective. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 already attempted to spur collaboration between the public and private sector. Some experts told Fifth Domain that they did not expect the new portal to be groundbreaking. Only six companies are currently sharing cyberthreats with government, according to Chris Krebs, head of the national protection and programs directorate at Homeland Security. “We have to age to establish a value proposition for an organization to share into the system,” said Krebs. He highlighted better supply chain risk management as an incentive that would set the new center apart from previous intelligence-sharing schemes. Companies can write into their contracts that their vendors must use the threat-sharing portal so they know that contractors are managing third-party risks, Krebs said. At the event in New York City, some of the largest corporations praised the new program while speaking onstage with top government officials. “This was an obvious thing to do for a decade but it didn't happen,” said John Donovan, the chief executive of AT&T. https://www.fifthdomain.com/critical-infrastructure/2018/07/31/homeland-security-announces-new-risk-management-center/

By: Justin Lynch The head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command is advocating for a more expansive partnership between the government and the private sector amid an array of cyberthreats. Gen. Paul Nakasone, speaking July 31 during the Department of Homeland Security National Cybersecurity Summit in New York City, said that partnerships are America's “advantage in cyberspace,” "We have tremendous, exquisite, foreign intelligence reporting,” Nakasone said, but added he wanted to understand what the private sector and firms who make up America's digital infrastructure were looking for “so we can really tailor the information.” Information from Cyber Command and the NSA will be used in a new National Risk Management Center that hopes to share cyberthreats between the government and the private sector, according to a department spokeswoman. ”Resiliency begins with a dialogue,” Nakasone said. The new center's announcement comes after DHS said that Russia was continuing to attackAmerica's electric grid. Last week, Sen. Claire McCaskill D-Mo., said that Russian hackers tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate her office. On the same day that Nakasone spoke, Facebook said that it removed 32 accounts in an apparent influence campaign. Ninety percent of America's critical infrastructure is in private hands, Nakasone said. Therefore, the Department of Defense is kicking off the new risk center with a “90 day sprint” to identify companies that are most essential to the U.S. way of life in an effort to protect them from foreign cyberattacks. “Not all risks are created equal,” Nakasone said of the initial effort. https://www.fifthdomain.com/dod/cybercom/2018/07/31/cyber-command-wants-to-partner-with-private-sector-to-stop-hacks/

This internal budget battle in the Army could cede the actual battlefield to high-powered Russian and Chinese jammers, electronic warfare advocates fear, with the same lethal consequences for US troops that Ukrainian forces have suffered since 2014. By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. CAPITOL HILL: Can the Army unite its rival tribes to retake the high-tech high groundof modern warfare, the electromagnetic spectrum? Those are the stakes in the service's ongoing internal struggles over doctrine, organization, and an obscure but critical program known as TLIS, the Terrestrial Layer Intelligence System. Army leaders see TLIS as a powerful synergy between Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), which eavesdrops on and locates enemy transmissions, and Electronic Warfare (EW), which jams those same transmissions and can be used for cyber warfare. But TLIS, as the “intelligence” in its name implies, began as a pure SIGINT system, before it absorbed the former Multi-Function Electronic Warfare (MFEW) program, and there's always the possible it might regress. At least some electronic warriors hear worrying rumors that the more powerful SIGINT branch wants to save money on TLIS by cutting back on its jamming capabilities, leaving it as a passive sensor rather than an active weapon. This internal budget battle in the Army could cede the actual battlefield to high-powered Russian and Chinese jammers, electronic warfare advocates fear, with the same lethal consequences for US troops that Ukrainian forces have suffered since 2014. “The intel people will finally be able to get rid of EW, again, by taking it over, again, and crushing it,” said Col. Jeffrey Church, who until his retirement last year was the most senior Electronic Warfare Officer (EWO) in the Army: There are no EW generals, in stark contrast to SIGINT and cyber. Church was also the last EWO to run the electronic warfare directorate on the Army's Pentagon staff: His immediate successor was an engineer — an expert on bridges and minefields, not electrons. Both the staff directorate and the EWO specialty have since been folded into Army cyber. “Next,” Church predicted in a bitter post on LinkedIn, “they will cancel the intel portions of MFEW they insisted be written into the EW requirements (i.e. when MFEW was folded into TLIS) and thereby kill the MFEW program.” “I don't think your article will affect anything for Army EW,” a weary Church told me. “The only thing that will is when a bunch of our soldiers get killed. Then the Army will act shocked by it and be compelled to bring EW into the force with real gear, real operators, real training and real EW leadership.” Synergy or Tension? From drones to foot troops, radio to radar, networks to GPS, everything in a 21st century military has to send and receive signals through the electromagnetic spectrum — which means everything can be detected, targeted, and disrupted. Russia and China have invested massively in electronic warfare since the end of the Cold War while the US disbanded most EW. Today, while the Navy and Air Forcehave high-cost jamming aircraft — the EA-18G Growler and EC-130H Compass Call respectively — they're too rare, expensive, and over-powered to support small units on the ground. But the US Army's own arsenal consists almost entirely of short-range jammers that fit in backpacks or on Humvees, most of them designed to disable radio detonators for roadside bombs. Meanwhile Russia and China have fleets of heavy trucks packed with high-power EW gear that can scramble US signals hundreds of miles away. The Army's original solution to this problem was called Multi-Function Electronic Warfare (MFEW), a common family of sensors and jammers meant to go on trucks, drones and manned aircraft — eventually. But the service decided to fold MFEW into the land-based TLIS and an as-yet-unnamed airborne counterpart instead. “We are specifically looking at putting SIGINT, EW and cyber on the same platform, both on the ground and in the air,” Maj. Gen. Robert Walters told a July 18 forumorganized by the Association of Old Crows, an EW professional group. As commander of the Army's intelligence center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., Walters is the Army's lead “proponent” for TLIS requirements, with the cyber center at Fort Gordon, Ga. in a significant supporting role. There's a natural synergy here, Walters said. SIGINT finds the enemy signals and analyzes them, then cyber and electronic warfare can target the weak links in the enemy network. While he didn't say so out loud, that's how it's done by the current masters of the art, the Russians, whose SIGINT and EW officers often sit side by side in the same vehicle so they can quickly coordinate devastating electromagnetic maneuvers, as in Ukraine. But there's also a tension between the two sides. Intelligence naturally wants to keep listening to the enemy signals to find out more, whereas cyber/EW warriors want to shut them down or use them to feed cyber weapons into. Now, you can try to shut down only the enemy's most secure networks so they have to use the ones SIGINT can easily crack. That's what the Russians did against the Ukrainians, forcing them off their military radios onto personal cellphones — but it's not easy to pull off. Second, when EW turns on its jammers, their powerful signal doesn't just disrupt enemy transmissions: It also provides a big target for enemy missiles and artillery radars to home in on. At best, that means the combined SIGINT/EW unit has to relocate frequently, disrupting listening operations. At worst, it means the combined unit blows up in one shot. (You can reduce the risk to your troops by putting the jammers on drones or ground robots operated from a distance by remote control, but that creates a new problem: The enemy can detect, decode and jam your communications with the robots). So how well will the Army balance these tensions? Right now, said one well-connected electronic warfare expert, the intelligence branch is in the driver's seat, and “once again intel has defaulted back to SIGINT, which disappoints me.....It's not looking too good.” This attitude may be overly pessimistic. But there's little cause for optimism in Army's unhappy history of internecine intramural rivalries and cancelled procurement programs. Is Big Six Missing One? The current Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, is trying to make a break with the service's dysfunctional past. He has named six modernization priorities, each with its own Cross Functional Team (CFT), led by a general who can pull in people from across the bureaucracy and put them in one room until they thrash out how to get things done. Those CTFs, in turn, will play a leading role in the new Army Futures Command being stood up in Austin. But electronic warfare has no clear home in this new structure. Of the six priorities — 1) long-range artillery, 2) armored vehicles, 3) aircraft, 4) networks, 5) air & missile defense, and 6) soldier equipment, in that order — the closest fit is with Priority No. 4, the network. That covers all the computerized communication and data systems the Army uses to transmit orders and intelligence: Lose all those and you're back to carrier pigeons. So, understandably, the emphasis of the network Cross Functional Team is on defending the US network from jamming and hacking, not on attacking enemy networks with our own jammers and hackers. A spin-off CFT on Precision Navigation & Timing has a similar defensive focus: How can US forces keep track of where everything is and when it has to happen if the enemy disrupts GPS? For that matter, the entire cyber center at Fort Gordon, despite having responsibility for electronic warfare, evolved when the old Signal Corps school took on a growing role in not just setting up communications networks but defending them. It's only recently taken on an offensive role, and primarily in cyberspace rather than electronic warfare. So all these leading Army organizations have the same focus on defense. Their job is to keep the network working under attack. But defense is not enough on its own. A tank doesn't just need armor: It needs a gun. Maybe a network doesn't just need cybersecurity and resilience against jamming: It needs to be able to attack the other side's network. A rmy Secretary Mark Esper has made clear the Big Six priorities are unlikely to change, so don't expect him to add electronic warfare as Big No. 7 any time soon. But there is still some wiggle room to spin off subsidiary priorities with their own Cross Functional Teams. In fact, from the beginning, there've been eight Cross Functional Teams, not six: The network priority is also supported by that Precision Navigation & Timing CFT, while the soldier equipment CFT spun off a training simulations CFT. Now, that eight-fold structure hasn't changed since the initial announcement in 2016. But there's no fundamental reason why the Army couldn't add a ninth CFT for electronic warfare, supporting the network priority area alongside the PNT team. What this would take — besides a memo from Esper and Milley — would be a fundamental change in how the Army thinks about “the network,” as an offensive weapon instead of a mere technical function. his is a philosophical shift. There's a longstanding tendency in Western militaries to focus on reducing what Clausewitz called the friction and fog of war, the innumerable minor mishaps, miscommunications, and misunderstandings that constantly impede military operations. The ambition to “lift the fog of war” reached its peak of hubris in the “transformation” movement before the invasion of Iraq, where the fog rolled in again unstoppably. Eastern tradition, by contrast, has long seen fog and friction as not only obstacles but weapons: You want to reduce them for your own side, of course, but also to increase them for the enemy. Hence Sun Tzu's maxim that “all warfare is based on deception,” a concept the Russians have embraced with their doctrine of maskirovka and which seems well-suited to the information age. So, instead of treating the network simply as an electromagnetic means to reduce our fog and friction, why not extend the concept to include electromagnetic means to increase the enemy's fog and friction? Instead of an asset to be defended, what if it's a weapon to attack? s the Network a Weapon? There are signs the Army is starting to think this way. At the Capitol Hill forum, Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty — current head of Army Cyber Command and former chief of the Cyber Center at Fort Gordon — even talked about the network as a “weapon” and (intentionally or not) echoed Sun Tzu. “We've truly started to operationalize the Army networks,” Fogarty said. “That's the foundational weapons platform for a modern military.” Without the network, he said, you can't do persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); long-range precision fires (LRPF) with missiles and artillery; logistics; medical evacuation; or command and control (C2, what the Army now calls “mission command”). Now, Fogarty's list is about how the network enables other parts of the Army, rather than the network taking the offensive itself. Still, calling the network a “weapons system” is a long way from the old-school Army view of it as a mere utility, a technical convenience the geeks set up in the back room so the real mencan go up front and fight. Why is the network so fundamental, in Fogarty's view? Because, he said, “our ability to operate and defend that network is what gives our commanders the ability to do two things: to see the adversary and see ourselves.” Once again, Fogarty is not talking about using the network to attack, only to “operate and defend.” Nevertheless, he's sounding an awful lot like Sun Tzu: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Or as Fogarty put it, with less elegance but more specificity: “In the multi-domain battlespace, not of the future but of today, against peer and near-peer adversaries, whoever has the ability to sense, understand, decide, and act faster than their opponent (will) enjoy decisive advantage.” (He's referring to an updated version of the classic OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, & Act). That requires bringing formerly disparate specialties together in new ways, said Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the deputy chief of Army staff for intelligence (G-2). “Our primary challenge is one of integration,” he told the AOC forum. “Future forces must integrate SIGINT, electronic warfare, and cyber capabilities to provide situational awareness” — i.e. know yourself, know your enemy — “and enable commanders to deliver kinetic and non-kinetic fires” — i.e. both physical attacks, like missiles, bombs, and shells, and intangible ones, like hacking and jamming. This transition can be intellectually and culturally wrenching, Berrier admitted. “While the tribes have come together, there are still members of the tribes that are a little obstinate,” he said to laughter. For those who don't see the inherent benefits, however, Berrier added, “another reason we're doing it is that the Chief of Staff of the Army told us to do it.” https://breakingdefense.com/2018/07/army-wrestles-with-sigint-vs-ew/

By: Kelsey Atherton Space is not so much hard as it is expensive. Satellites today are expensive machines, expensively built and expensive to launch, with the understanding that, once on orbit, they can work for years. That calculus assumes several eggs in every pricey basket, and as space moves from a home for military satellites to a domain where nations prepare for actual combat, building resilience in orbit means rethinking how satellites are done. It means rethinking costs in the billions and imagining them instead in the millions. And to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Paul “Rusty” Thomas it means creating a whole new ecosystem for payloads and launches. Thomas is the program manager for Blackjack, a DARPA initiative that wants to pilot a constellation of cheaper satellites for military communication, with the costs low, uplinks up and the resilience of the whole constellation baked-in. C4ISRNET's Kelsey Atherton spoke with Thomas about the program. C4ISRNET: There's a lot of interest in both low Earth orbit [LEO] and constellations of satellites. What is DARPA's specific goal with Blackjack? PAUL “RUSTY” THOMAS: Blackjack, as an architecture demonstration, will build a portion of a constellation, looking at about 20 percent of a fully proliferated LEO constellation. That's a range of 20 satellites, 20 percent of the 90 to 100 satellite constellation, which would give a ground user three to four hours per day or more of theater-level operations so that we could actually demonstrate what we're going to do with a full, fully proliferated 24/7 constellation that covers the entire Earth and gives global constant coverage and global constant custody. C4ISRNET: What was the logic behind accepting separate proposals for busses and payloads? THOMAS: Most exquisite spacecraft we built have been married to the bus and payload from Day 1. That's a wonderful model for exquisite spacecraft. But we're trying to build a proliferated LEO payload ecosystem — like the commercial commoditized bus ecosystem — that can match the numerous types of payloads. To do that you don't want to just show that one payload matches great and then move forward. That just gives you a great payload. To try and build that ecosystem out, you want to go to at least Program Design Review with the payload developers working to a generalized initial design covering numerous types of commoditized busses. Once you get deeper into the design phase, match that payload to a bus, which allows a large range of payloads to be developed. C4ISRNET: There's a lot of commercial interest in this space; does that pose any risk to deploying a new constellation? THOMAS: The goal of Blackjack is to prove you can leverage commercial approaches with potentially lower costs, lower cycle times, lower times for design and build. It also comes with the issue that we're not directing the approach to building the bus, we're not directing how the constellation is put together for these folks; therefore, the rest is getting the government itself to do that match and to put our systems into play in a way that marches in lockstep with them without directing their commercial elements will play. That brings risk. We have to learn how to do business a little different than it's been done in the past, and to move a little quicker than the government has in the past. C4ISRNET: So, there's no risk of LEO being too crowded to accommodate more constellations? THOMAS: No. Well, I wouldn't say no risk, there's always risk, the mega constellations that you're starting to see FCC filings for look like they're going to put hundreds, and some of them into the 10,000-plus range, and that's certainly going to be a challenge and it's going to be a risk. Fortunately, we have air traffic control systems on the ground that cover large numbers of aircraft in the air at any given time. We haven't actually taken that step into how to manage large numbers of spacecraft in space yet, but we believe that all the technology is there and it's just a matter of implementing an area where the government is going to be tracking what the commercial folks are doing. There's a risk — it's not major, space is big — but you absolutely need to track the spacecraft and make sure they can deorbit. But in terms of putting thousands or even tens of thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit, all of that seems very feasible and is not in the high-risk bucket. C4ISRNET: What's the rough timeline you're expecting for demonstrations? THOMAS: For the 20-satellite constellation, we plan to have the first two spacecraft that we have integrated to the commercial busses and the payload together ready by the end of 2020, with launch by early 2021. We will follow that in 2021 with the rest of the 18, once we've confirmed the first two are fine. We will have the full demonstration capability running late in 2021 with an expectation of theater-level autonomous operations from low Earth orbit in 2022. C4ISRNET: One argument for satellite constellations and against exquisite satellites is resiliency. How does that work here? THOMAS: You get a lower cost, the individual node becomes a bit expendable, you don't build your resiliency around the individual node, you don't try to protect that spacecraft to the nth degree like in exquisite billion-dollar-plus craft. If the Blackjack model works, spacecraft will be in the $3 million to $4 million range, $2 million to $3 million to put it into orbit. We're talking about a $6 million node, including the cost of getting it into space. Therefore, it's less than the cost of a high-end munition. The constellation itself becomes your resilient element. You can put your high-level availability, reliability and mission assurance at the constellation level instead of at the node, because of the numbers you're putting up. If one satellite has fallen, its replacement is coming over the horizon 10 to 15 minutes later. You have a different approach to resiliency, large numbers of spacecraft in play, which totally turns some of the counterspace elements on its ear. C4ISRNET: What counter-space elements might this be especially resilient against? THOMAS: You now have low-cost nodes, so a lot of the direct ascent type of methods out there no longer makes a lot of sense. Of course, you still have varied threats from non-kinetic and cyber. We still need to protect the constellation against all the other types of threats out there, so it probably helps the most on the kinetic side, but it certainly gives you lot of resilience in all the areas. C4ISRNET: What kind of communications presence will this enable? THOMAS: Blackjack is aimed at leveraging the new mesh networks being set up by these commercial companies. A user currently in the DoD might need to look up at two or three different options in space to actually talk and do communications in this space segment. Once we link up and do encryption, the user on the ground will look up and see hundreds or more potential network nodes overhead at any given point on the planet, North Pole to South Pole; it's going to drastically change how the DoD does communication. That is a bit independent of what Blackjack is going to do. If the commercial companies succeed and come out, that capability, call it raw gigabit-per-second class, not all of them it. But they all have many megabit data links from one point of the planet to another, at very low latency, 100-200 milliseconds, so you do really change the game for how any user, DoD included, does global communication. C4ISRNET: Is a desired end goal of Blackjack specifically a redundant spaceborne network that can function independently if access to internet on the ground is cut off? THOMAS: If you have a problem with your terrestrial network — whether it's a ground network system or point-to-point comms, fiber optics or others being interfered with — the space mesh network provides the ability to move the data up, move it through the space mesh, and move it back to the ground, without any other system being involved in that data transition. The switch network that Iridium has up right now, it's low bandwidth but a wonderful system in terms of moving data from one point to another on the planet through the Iridium gateways that DoD and its users have worldwide. Move that up to high broadband access, and not just two or three satellites overhead but dozens or hundreds, and it really does move us into a new realm. C4ISRNET: At what point in the program do bus and payload link? Is there a point where they're demoed together? THOMAS: In the [broad agency announcement] out right now, you can see we're looking for multiple payloads to go at least through phase one, potentially multiple buses to go through phase one. As we progress the programs through the preliminary design review into phase two and get critical design review, first two spacecraft built, we'll be selecting the ones to continue deeper and deeper into the program to match up and do the demo. We'll start with a wide range and narrow down to a smaller set to actually do the demonstration with a secondary objective of showing why a huge payload will work, why different types of payloads will be successful in this type of architecture, even though we've only got one or two of them. C4ISRNET: What does the future of Blackjack look like? THOMAS: We are looking at large numbers of types of payloads. We very much want to get into a rapid tech refresh cycle ... putting up payloads every two or three years that are newer version of the ones that have gone previously, have an open architecture standard so we can update over the air with better algorithms. https://www.c4isrnet.com/thought-leadership/2018/07/30/the-calculus-of-cheaper-military-comms-satellites/

By: Kelsey Atherton Every map is an outdated map. Buildings change, people relocate, and what was accurate a decade ago may mean nothing to someone on patrol today. Which is one reason the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is pursuing Fast Lightweight Autonomy, a program designed to teach drones to effortlessly scout and map unfamiliar locations, without the help of GPS or external guidance tools, so that the military can rely on the freshest scouting information possible. For Phase II of the program, DARPA split the task into three parts. One team worked on better flight outdoors in a natural environment at full speed. Another team pursued drone flight in an urban environment, with the drone building a semantic map of the cars and buildings it encountered, while a third team focused on navigating indoors. Taken together, the teams are demonstrating in part the way robots can do what humans do when in unfamiliar terrain, but then speed it up and transmit that information back to humans following behind. First and foremost are the military applications. If DARPA's program results in workable code and sensors, future missions equipped with quadcopters could let the robots scout a contested area before putting any humans at risk. And that area could include dense woods, civilian-lined streets in an area that's seen some insurgent action, or even shelled-out buildings that may be hiding snipers or other traps. The robot explores and informs, and then the humans can follow afterwards, with fresh information loaded onto their tablets and guiding their movements. There are applications for the technology beyond a shooting war. Rescue workers could use drones based on this software to see if a damaged building is safe enough to send rescuers into, or to see if there are even people alive inside who might need rescuing. Drones that can fly quickly through forests could seek out lost hikers, shifting the human energy from search to rescue. Some of this, notes FLA program manager Jean-Charles Ledé, could be done at present by skilled human pilots, the kind that race drones with first-person view goggles. But, says Ledé, “We don't want to deploy a world-class FPV racer with every search and rescue team.” Drones that can navigate by software alone reduce the skill needed to manage the flying robots. In a pinch, the algorithm is a substitute for expertise, and far more scalable a solution. https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2018/07/30/darpas-fast-lightweight-autonomy-program-tests-the-scouting-software-of-tomorrows-wars/

By Jack Corrigan A newly launched pilot program lets the agency's contracting experts help push deals over the finish line. Officials at the General Services Administration on Monday said a new pilot program will speed up the government's adoption of innovative technologies by helping companies in the Small Business Innovation Research program more quickly strike deals with federal agencies. Last week GSA launched a pilot that would open up Assisted Acquisition Services to agencies and vendors in the third and final phase of the SBIR program. Run by the Small Business Administration, SBIR is divided into three phases. The first and second phases focus primarily on research and development, and during the third, companies work to commercialize their products. Under the pilot, GSA would collaborate with both customer agencies and SBIR vendors to hammer out initial contracts. After the products become commercialized, GSA would work to make them more widely available across government. Most of the 13 agencies involved in SBIR don't have specialists dedicated to finalizing phase three contracts, and delegating that responsibility to GSA would enable speedier deals and make products more widely available, said Mark Lee, assistant commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service Office of Policy and Compliance. “Currently there isn't a shared services offering that provides assisted acquisition for SBIR contracts,” Lee said in a conversation with reporters. “[The pilot] would be setting up that capability across government.” While GSA will offer the additional services to all SBIR participants, Lee said he sees the program making a particular impact on the acquisition of cybersecurity and threat detection products, as well as emerging battlefield technologies. The pilot will be led by the GSA Assisted Acquisition Services' Great Lakes regional office and run through the end of fiscal 2019. Depending on the program's success, GSA will determine whether it can offer the service more broadly, said Senior Procurement Executive Jeff Koses. Koses told reporters the program originated after defense agencies approached GSA looking for ways to streamline the contracting process. The pilot comes as part of the administration's larger push to simplify acquisition policy, he said, while still including “a set of guardrails to make sure that we're innovative but with essential controls.” Koses added he hopes accelerating the contracting process would help attract more small businesses to the federal marketplace, which agencies have historically struggled to do. “I think this is a great example of us listening to our customer agencies, our industry partners and the Small Business Administration and [figuring out] where we can provide value in the federal marketplace,” said Lee. “We think this is an opportunity to inject innovation into the federal marketplace, help support commercialization of these unique solutions and ultimately help grow jobs.” https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/07/how-gsa-helping-small-businesses-get-contracts-faster/150151/

Over 17 years of fighting terrorists and insurgents, “our SIGINT forces mastered the art and science of identifying and tracking individual threats with pinpoint precision," Lt. Gen. Berrier said. "We now face a significant challenge on a much larger scale." By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. CAPITOL HILL: The Army has a new, two-pronged strategy for Signals Intelligence, its top intelligence official said at a recent forum here. First, SIGINT forces must continue their post-9/11 evolution from a secretive, insular priesthood to a hands-on helper for frontline troops. At the same time, SIGINT must scale up the “precision” techniques developed to track insurgents‘ and terrorists‘ transmissions so it can tackle much bigger and more sophisticated adversaries like Russia and China. Instead of pinpointing terrorist leaders for drone strikes or commando raids, SIGINT may be finding electronic weak points in enemy networks that US cyber and electronic warfare teams can then hack or jam. There is a foundation of success to build on, Army leaders told the Capitol Hill forum, which was organized by the Association of Old Crows, the leading professional association for electronic warfare. Intelligence in general and SIGINT in particular, they said, have gotten better integrated with other Army branches since 9/11 — and especially since 2016. “It has been a remarkable two years,” said Brig. Gen. Jennifer Buckner. Formerly deputy commander of Joint Task Force ARES, which led Cyber Command operations against ISIS, she is now cyber director in Section G-3/5/7 of the Army's Pentagon staff. Increasingly close cooperation between intelligence analysts and tactical commanders, she said, has made it possible “to normalize operations like this so we truly are using the intelligence to inform and enable further targeting.” Ultimately, said the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence (G-2), Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the Army and its fellow services need to integrate intelligence, cyber warfare, and electronic warfare to realize their vision of Multi-Domain Operations, in which US forces launch coordinated attacks, both physical and electronic, from land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Over 17 years of fighting terrorists and insurgents, “our SIGINT forces mastered the art and science of identifying and tracking individual threats with pinpoint precision,” Berrier told the forum. “We now face a significant challenge on a much larger scale, combat operations with near-peer and peer competitors.” Even if we never fight Russia or China directly, Berrier said — and let's hope we never do — we'll face the technology they sell around the world. In places like Ukraine, US partners are already fighting Russian proxies. So to meet this challenge, Berrier said, he recently approved a Signals Intelligence strategy with four main lines of effort: Build a SIGINT force that's responsive to and closely integrated with tactical units, from corps headquarters on down; Apply what SIGINT has learned in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism over the last 17 years to high-intensity warfare; Buy new equipment, ground-based and airborne, that's up to the challenge of great power adversaries; and Develop new doctrine, field manuals and concepts for large-scale combat. Thanks to enthusiastic support from both Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and recently departed chief of Pacific Command, Adm. Harry Harris, an experimental unit called the Multi-Domain Task Force is already exercising some of these concepts in PACOM. It's built around an Army artillery brigade — both cannons and long-range missiles — augmented with long-range sensors to find targets and an integrated Intelligence, Cyber, & Electronic Warfare (ICEW) team that can stage non-physical attacks. “If you want to shoot 500 or a thousand miles, you have to see 500 or a thousand miles,” Berrier said. “This is the way of the future.” Getting there, though, requires overcoming the ways of the past. The “Green Door” Problem For generations, Army commanders have complained that Signals Intelligence operated behind a “green door” of security restrictions that kept them from sharing vital intelligence in time to act on it. For its part, Army SIGINT tended to see its primary customer as the National Security Agency, not combat units. In this context, the SIGINT community was leery of anyone actually taking action based on intelligence, lest it give away a source of long-term strategic value for a short-term tactical gain. But in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the US military was trying to find, target, and capture or kill key insurgents and terrorists, who kept constantly on the move. That meant intelligence on their location had to get to tactical commanders fast, before the target moved again. If you wanted the drone to fire the Hellfire at the right target, or the special operators to kick down the right door, you needed to bust down the green door first. Conversely, once ground troops grabbed a High Value Target, they had to get his cellphone, laptop, and other devices to the intelligence analysts ASAP so his contacts could be tracked down and special operators could go after them before they scattered. The result was a self-reinforcing cycle that generated much more intelligence than you'd get by just passively listening to the enemy. So today, tight integration between signals intelligence and tactical commanders for such “intelligence-driven operations” has become almost routine — on a small scale. But there's a big difference between targeting a Taliban bomb-maker on his cellphone in someone's garage as opposed to a Russian general on a high-security network in the middle of a tank division. For the many scenarios in high-end warfare when a target is too well-protected for other forces to bomb or capture, the Army wants the option to hack the target's network or jam its radio signals — to disrupt what it cannot destroy. That requires SIGINT to hand the target data to so-called “non-kinetic” ways of disrupting the enemy through cyber and electronic warfare. But there's a profound institutional imbalance here. SIGINT is one of the most influential and well established technical branches of the Army, in large part due to its intimate relationship with the NSA. But cyber is the newest branch, albeit benefiting from rapid growth and high-level attention, with its offensive capabilities highly secret and tightly restricted. And Army electronic warfare was largely disbanded after the Cold War and remains a small, underfunded force with very little actual hardware beyond short-range jammers to keep roadside bombs from detonating. So while the “green door” between intelligence and operations may have been kicked down, very real barriers remain between intelligence, cyber, and electronic warfare. The CENTCOM Model Central Command — which oversees Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria — has forced intelligence officers and combat commanders to work together in new ways, said Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty. This is possible, in part, because intelligence has gotten better at “sanitizing” information so tactical operators can use it without inadvertently revealing intelligence sources and methods, he said. But intel has also grown more willing to take the “tremendous risk” that something might slip out anyway, because the greater risk was that not acting on the intelligence would cost lives. Fogarty lived all this first-hand. Now head of Army Cyber Command, he was previously head of the Army cyber school at Fort Gordon and the top intelligence officer (J-2) for Afghanistan and, later, CENTCOM as a whole. But Fogarty's far from alone: Not only his fellow high-level panelists, but two veterans in the audience members on Capitol Hill — a young officer and a retired general — took the microphone to agree with him. “What I saw in theater, [in] my time in CENTCOM and multiple trips to Afghanistan, is that SIGINT drove operations...down to the most tactical level,” Fogarty said. National Security Agency SIGINTers — “both civilian and military” — were actually sitting side-by-side with combat officers in Army brigade headquarters and, in some cases, even on company-sized Combat Outposts (COPs), he said. (This is very similar to how the National Reconnaissance Office has operated over the last decade on the battlefield with its Field Representative program.) Now many of the company, battalion, and brigade commanders who grew accustomed to this close support are leading the Army. “The guys who were lieutenants, captains, majors, lieutenant colonels that are now two, three, and four stars today, that's what they expect,” Fogarty said. Of course, what broke down the traditional barriers between intelligence and operations was “the tremendous pressure” of wartime, when US and allied lives were in danger every day. “What we've got to make sure,” Fogarty said, “is we maintain that pressure and that we don't regress to where we were potentially back in the Cold War.” What's New? So what is Army intelligence actually doing to build on the counterterrorist successes of the past and prepare for a great power conflict in the future? Most immediately, the Army is changing how it trains, everything from new schoolhouse courses for officers to new field exercises for entire brigades. When an infantryman or tanker gets promoted to a leadership role, Berrier noted, they attend specialized courses to help them develop a bigger-picture perspective on the battlefield. For their part, intelligence leaders need to go beyond technical training in purely intelligence tasks — as complex and challenging as that is — and learn how to “integrate our highly technical skills into tactical formations” alongside infantry, armor, artillery, aviation, cyber/electronic warfare, and the rest. Intelligence soldiers and officers also need to practice their technical and tactical skills in real-world conditions. That's not easy to arrange. First, the law is far more restrictive of training in the US than operations overseas, especially when it comes to intelligence collection in the vicinity of US citizens. Second, the electromagnetic transmissions SIGINTers need to practice detecting can interfere with civilian electronics, and the Army doesn't want to fight the FCC. Training for electronic warfare, which involves deliberately disrupting signals, is even trickier. The best site for such training in the US, not coincidentally, is the Army Electronic Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca, home of the intelligence branch. Berrier commanded Fort Huachuca until he handed the job over to Maj. Gen. Robert Walters. Since units testing or training there are isolated from civilian population centers by broad deserts and high mountains, Walters told the Capitol Hill forum, “they can turn their jammers on and we don't have planes crashing in Tucson.” Unfortunately, US electronic warriors don't have many jammers to turn on, not yet. (We'll delve into that tomorrow). But at least Army SIGINT systems like Prophet can train at Huachuca on detecting and analyzing real signals. The Army is also trying to replicate or simulate enemy signals at its Combat Training Centers in California, Louisiana, and Germany. Even so, some aspects of high-tech, high-intensity warfare may only be replicable in simulations, Berrier said. The Army's key tool here is a simulator called IEWTPT, the Intelligence Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer. Training to do better with current technology, however, is not enough. Current systems were designed and fielded at a time when the US could operate freely in the electromagnetic spectrum, Berrier said, where the main problem was not enemy activity but inadvertent interference from other US systems (known as “electronic fratricide” or “blue on blue”). Against Russia, China — or anyone who's bought their latest systems — the spectrum will become a battlefield. So the Army needs to develop new equipment designed to withstand hacking, jamming, and other rigors of high-tech combat, like advanced anti-aircraft systems that can shoot down scout planes, drones, and helicopters. Ultimately, the Army envisions multi-purpose systems that can not only detect and analyze enemy signals — the SIGINT function — but also disrupt or subvert those signals — the cyber/electronic warfare functions. That makes a lot of sense, in theory, since cyber/EW needs SIGINT to find its targets in the first place. But it's much more complicated to implement in practice, less because the technology is tricky than because of the intense tribal rivalries within the Army. We'll delve into those divisions and possible solutions in a second article, due out tomorrow. https://breakingdefense.com/2018/07/busting-the-green-door-army-sigint-refocuses-on-russia-china/

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 30, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity awarded Raytheon BBN Technologies (NYSE: RTN) a $14.5 million contract to develop a system that improves the accuracy of predicting a range of geopolitical events – including elections, conflict, and disease outbreak. The contract was awarded last year under IARPA's Hybrid Forecasting Competition. "Event forecasters have struggled with the best way to combine the capabilities of human and machine analysts," said Lance Ramshaw, principal investigator and lead scientist at Raytheon BBN Technologies. "We're identifying the optimal combination to develop the best forecasting system possible." While human analysts are flexible and can apply context to their event forecasting models, machines can more quickly process massive amounts of data to make unbiased forecasts. Together, Raytheon BBN's hybrid forecasting system uses the benefits of both by providing: Automated aids that increase human forecasters' efficiency, including intelligent search, automatically computed indicators and alerts about changes or new information. Tools for sharing machine reasoning and results with human forecasters. Automatic combination of varied human forecasts, with more weight assigned to predictions from historically accurate forecasters. As prime contractor, Raytheon BBN leads a team that includes Lumenogic and Wright State Research Institute, who contribute to the technology research. Subject matter expertise related to elections and opinion, military events, science, disease outbreak, conflict and leadership and macro-economics are provided by the American Center for Democracy, Ipsos Public Affairs, Systems and Technology Research and Tufts University. About Raytheon Raytheon Company, with 2017 sales of $25 billion and 64,000 employees, is a technology and innovation leader specializing in defense, civil government and cybersecurity solutions. With a history of innovation spanning 96 years, Raytheon provides state-of-the-art electronics, mission systems integration, C5ITM products and services, sensing, effects, and mission support for customers in more than 80 countries. Raytheon is headquartered in Waltham, Mass.Follow us on Twitter. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/iarpa-selects-raytheon-for-predictive-analytics-competition-300688409.html

Increasingly alarmed at foreign hacking, DOD and intelligence officials are racing to educate the military and defense contractors. The Pentagon is warning the military and its contractors not to use software it deems to have Russian and Chinese connections, according to the U.S. Defense Department's acquisition chief. Officials have begun circulating a “Do Not Buy” list of software that does not meet “national security standards,” Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said Friday. “We had specific issues ... that caused us to focus on this,” Lord told reporters at the Pentagon. “What we are doing is making sure that we do not buy software that's Russian or Chinese provenance,” she said. “Quite often that's difficult to tell at at first glance because of holding companies.” The Pentagon started compiling the list about six months ago. Suspicious companies are put on a list that is circulated to the military's software buyers. Now the Pentagon is working with the three major defense industry trade associations — the Aerospace industries Association, National Defense Industrial Association and Professional Services Council — to alert contractors small and large. https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2018/07/pentagon-creates-do-not-buy-list-russian-chinese-software/150100/