Pentagon

The Defense Department is reversing gears on plans to halt the Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii project, exploring a new potential location for the sensor at the Navy-controlled Pacific Missile Range Facility, charting a course to continuing the program in the face of united support by all four congressional defense committees to reinstate funding for the effort in fiscal year 2021.

Cloud service providers Microsoft and Amazon are working on solutions to help contractors reach compliance with the Defense Department's Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program through a shared responsibility model.

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is focusing on helping organizations across the Defense Department use AI, as it will release the initial version of an enterprise platform for AI development in the coming year, according to the center's new director.

New planning guidance from Chief of Space Operations Gen. John Raymond highlights the need for the Space Force to invest in resiliency and next-generation capabilities and announces the service's intentions to create a Space Warfighting Analysis Center tasked with creating future force design alternatives.

North American Aerospace Defense Command, along with U.S. Northern Command, is conducting what it calls the Pathfinder Initiative, aiming to incubate a new data ecosystem that improves current “detect and defeat” mechanisms for defending U.S. and Canadian air space against advanced Chinese and Russian threats.

The Government Accountability Office says it is unable to “assess the quality of the analysis” that led the Defense Department to claim $37 billion in efficiency-related savings because of “a lack of detailed documentation,” though it agrees DOD has made progress over previous years.

The Defense Department has slammed the door on public access to a Google-like research tool that allows users to quickly navigate the U.S. military’s unclassified and unwieldy annual budget -- now more than $700 billion and spread across scores of volumes, some thousands of pages long -- moving the important resource behind a firewall where it sits with classified research accessible to government employees only. 

The Defense Department this week moved to turn the tables on China, forming a new University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics to accelerate work on ultra-fast weapons by increasing collaboration with academic communities -- a project that aims to replicate an idea born in Beijing where professors and students work closely to advance national aims.

The Pentagon will require government contractors to submit a self-assessment of their compliance with the 110 controls in National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication 800-171 starting Nov. 30, establishing a new cyber regime for contractors under the Defense Department that will have a wide-ranging impact on the DOD supply chain.