The Pentagon plans to work with a range of commercial companies to rapidly develop artificial intelligence capabilities "responsibly and ethically," according to a new Defense Department strategy.

President Trump has nominated Christopher Scolese, director of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, to be the next head of the National Reconnaissance Office. Before heading Goddard, Scolese served as the associate administrator at NASA headquarters as well as the organization's chief engineer. Prior to his work at NASA, Scolese was a senior analyst at McLean, VA-based General Research Corp., where "he participated in several SDIO programs," a NASA bio reads, referring to the Strategic Defense Initiative Office, a predecessor to the Missile Defense Agency.

A defense intelligence official told reporters this week that the biggest threat to U.S. space superiority is likely not a single adversary capability, but rather actions in recent years by Russia and China to better organize and integrate space capabilities within their militaries -- actions that could help the Pentagon as it makes a case to create a new Space Force.

The Air Force, Army and Navy secretaries recently signed a new memorandum that would require them to adopt common standards for cross-domain information-sharing on future systems.

The Navy formulated its fiscal year 2020 budget with the service's new maritime strategy at the "very front" of the process, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson told Inside Defense in a Feb. 7 interview.

The Pentagon's acquisition executive agreed to allow the Missile Defense Agency and Raytheon to transition the Standard Missile-3 Block IB into production more than a year ago only after mandating continued flight tests in order to ally concerns about the reliability of the interceptor in the wake of several developmental flight-test failures.

A senior Pentagon official responsible for data management is calling for immediate action to secure networks based on a recent assessment of threats, a call that comes as the Defense Department is moving aggressively to modernize its systems under the chief information officer's expanded authority provided this year by Congress.

The Air Force's strategy to develop the next generation of missile warning satellites on an aggressive schedule using new acquisition concepts and resiliency standards hit a snag last fall when Congress partially denied funding for a reprogramming request, delaying the start of payload development by about four months, according to a service official.