Homeland Defense Watch

The United States and Canada expect to finish by next spring a study of potential replacements for the early warning radars positioned along the northern border of North America, according to the head of U.S. forces on the continent.

The Trump transition team officially announced Monday the nomination of retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly to be the next homeland security secretary, a pick that emphasizes the incoming administration's focus on the department's border security and immigration mission, over other wide-ranging responsibilities such as data protection.

The U.S. government may invoke special national-security authorities to ensure enough personal protective equipment can be purchased to deal with a domestic Ebola crisis, according to a Federal Emergency Management Agency official.

The U.S. Forest Service sees an enduring role for the Air Force in combating wildfires, even as the agency brings additional airtankers online through commercial contracts and an airplane transfer arrangement with the Coast Guard and Defense Department, a spokeswoman for the Forest Service said this week.

House authorizers are pushing the Defense Department to devote more resources to U.S. Southern Command, which is unable to meet its counter-narcotics and crime interdiction goals today due to a lack of available military assets.

The Coast Guard is standing up an asset project office at its air station in Elizabeth City, NC, in order to oversee the service's acquisition of 14 C-27J Spartan airlifters from the Defense Department as part of a wider inter-service plane swap deal, a service spokesman has confirmed.

The Federal Aviation Administration is working to propose a ruling on small unmanned aircraft systems sometime this year, an administration spokeswoman said on Jan. 14. The highly anticipated draft ruling is expected to define what constitutes a small UAS and where it can operate.

Officials from the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Governors Association are preparing a joint statement of principles for shared situational awareness in the cybersecurity realm, a pact that Guard and Reserve advocates hope will provide a new reference point for how federal and state authorities fight cyber threats, according to sources following the issue.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency is looking for contractors to help run the U.S.-based share of a network of international listening stations for detecting nuclear tests, according to a sources-sought notice issued by the agency this week.