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By Michael R. Gordon and Ian Talley from the Wall Street Journal

December 2, 2020

Top U.S. military commander for Central and South America cites ‘alarming and concerning’ presence of elite Quds Force

WASHINGTON—Iran has sent arms and dispatched paramilitary operatives to help Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro maintain his hold on power, the top U.S. military commander for Central and South America said Wednesday.

“We see a growing Iranian influence in there,” Adm. Craig Faller, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, told reporters, citing the “alarming and concerning” presence of military personnel from the elite Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Tehran has used the force to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other foreign allies and proxies.

Iran’s and Venezuela’s missions to the United Nations didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Iran is just one U.S. adversary backing the embattled Venezuela leader. Thousands of Cubans have been “basically owning” the country’s intelligence service and guard force that protects Mr. Maduro, Adm. Faller said. Hundreds of Russians have also been instrumental in providing support to “keep key elements of Maduro’s military just ready enough,” he added.

Adm. Faller’s comments on Iran come amid rising tensions between Washington and Tehran and represent a rare instance in which a senior U.S. military official has publicly accused Iran of shipping arms to Venezuela.

The U.S., he said, has expended considerable effort trying to distinguish between humanitarian cargo and shipments that run afoul of international sanctions aimed at undermining Mr. Maduro’s grip on power.

“We’re concerned about what we see…It’s not just oil shipments, it’s arms shipments as well,” he said. “We saw an uptick in that this year. We are watching the rate of change very carefully.”

Adm. Faller didn’t specify the arms that the U.S. says are being provided. In September, the State Department sanctioned an Iranian defense unit it said had ties to the Maduro regime, in what U.S. officials said was an attempt to deter sales of conventional weapons, including military jets, boats and tanks.

Iran and Venezuela have long shared diplomatic ties, but the Trump administration’s economic sanctions against the two countries encouraged them to strengthen relations.

Battered by the Americans’ “maximum pressure” campaign, Iran has been desperate to sell its petroleum products. U.S. and international sanctions against Venezuela have made that country an eager buyer.

Tehran has been swapping its fuel for Venezuela oil, which it has sold through the black market, U.S. and Western officials say. Iran has also been paid in gold from Venezuela’s vast deposits, proving Tehran with a commodity that is difficult for sanctions monitors to track, they said.

The U.S. has disrupted some of those fuel shipments, but Venezuela analysts say deliveries continue. The flotillas are often accompanied by Iranian naval vessels, including an intelligence ship that U.S. officials say has been used to transport missiles to Iranian proxies in the Middle East, according to U.S. officials.

Iran’s Mahan Air, an airline sanctioned by the U.S. for transporting men, money and arms for the terror-designated Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has also restarted flights between the two countries, according to the company and flight-tracking data.

Earlier this year, an Iranian conglomerate owned by the country’s military and tied to its missile program established a retail foothold in Venezuela, according to Western officials and records detailing the move.

In addition to providing a potential avenue for evading sanctions, the retail link may be a way for Tehran to export military expertise and technology, U.S. officials say.

Another concern for the U.S. is that Iran might use its presence in South America and its ties to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group also operating in the region, to retaliate against the U.S.

“We’re real concerned about what Iran is up to, not just globally, but here in this hemisphere,” Adm. Faller said, adding that some members of the large Lebanese diaspora in South America had ties to Hezbollah.

Appeared in the December 3, 2020, print edition as 'Iran Arms Bolster Maduro, U.S. Says.'

The original article can be found here

Others:

NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/us/politics/coronavirus-southern-command-china-latin-america.html

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-military-honduras/u-s-may-start-sharing-sensitive-intelligence-with-honduras-in-drug-fight-idUKKBN28C0KL

Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-military-honduras/update-1-u-s-may-start-sharing-sensitive-intelligence-with-honduras-in-drug-fight-idUSL1N2II32E

Inside Defense: https://insidedefense.com/daily-news/southcom-eyes-program-record-persistent-surveillance-network

Aviation Week: https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/sensors-electronic-warfare/stratollites-show-promise-southern-command

National Defense: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/12/2/commander-alarmed-as-china-makes-inroads-in-americas

News Beezer: https://newsbeezer.com/china-stands-ready-to-be-the-first-to-distribute-virus-vaccine-in-latin-america-us-official-says/

ExBulletin: https://exbulletin.com/world/593103/

Washington Examiner: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/trump-threatens-to-hold-defense-bill-hostage-in-his-war-with-social-media-platforms

Nach Welt: https://www.nach-welt.com/china-ist-bereit-als-erster-virusimpfstoff-in-lateinamerika-zu-vertreiben-sagt-us-beamter/

WTVB: https://wtvbam.com/2020/12/02/u-s-may-start-sharing-sensitive-intelligence-with-honduras-in-drug-fight/

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By Brian W. Everstine of Air Force Magazine

November 18, 2020

China and Russia have noticed an increase in USAF bomber missions in the Indo-Pacific, and they are starting to respond in their own ways, the top USAF officer in the region said.

The Air Force in April stopped permanently basing bombers at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, and started deploying short-term “dynamic force employment” task forces of bombers in the region on short notice. B-1Bs from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, recently deployed to Andersen under this model for training with partners in the region.

Since shifting to dynamic force employment, “We’ve actually flown more of the bomber-type missions than we did in the last nine months of the continuous bomber presence,” Pacific Air Forces boss Gen. Kenneth S. Wilsbach told reporters Nov. 18 during a virtual roundtable. In addition to flying missions from bases like Andersen or Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, there have been several long-range missions for bombers that begin and end at their continental United States home bases.

“They fly all the way to either the East China Sea, and sometimes we go [over] the South China Sea and execute the mission,” Wilsbach said. “And the really cool thing about these is that it’s not just one bomber or four bombers flying a straight line for sometimes 24 hours, there’s training events that are occurring all throughout. We train with our allies and partners, we train with the joint forces, and of course we do train with the United States Air Force.”

The missions have brought an uptick in Chinese and Russian intercepts.

“They’ll send their fighters out, and of course, through our collections we can tell that they see us with their radars, and then we have other methods to figure out what they’re thinking,” Wilsbach said.

Russia also has increased its “countering missions” near Alaska, he said. During the summer, the Air Force flew a large mission in the region “and then a few days later, the Russians reciprocated with a pretty large mission into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone,” he added. “And so there’s a little bit of back and forth there with flying missions inside of our air defense identification zone.”

China bombers also have been “quite active in the South China Sea, in particular, almost every day” and sometimes in the East China Sea, Wilsbach said. “So, we’re seeing their activities perhaps as counter to what we’ve been doing.”

The original article can be found here

Others:

AFCEA: https://www.afcea.org/content/seemingly-boundless-bombers-secure-skies

Washington Examiner: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/trump-plan-to-pullback-us-troops-from-iraq-and-afghanistan-draws-vigorous-bipartisan-pushback

National Defense Magazine: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/11/18/pacific-commander-wants-hypersonic-weapons

TASS: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/10040973

TASS: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/10041097

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By Jared Serbu of Federal News Network

November 13, 2020

The Navy made major progress toward eliminating maintenance delays in its shipyards in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, partly by setting more realistic goals for how long each period of upgrade and repair work would actually take.

In fiscal 2020, the total number of days by which ships overran their planned maintenance schedules fell by 80% compared to the previous year, according to the top official at Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA). In 2019, there were a collective 7,000 days of delays across the fleet. That fell to about 1,100 by last year.

“We did a fairly detailed analysis on availability duration and whether we were planning the duration of the availabilities correctly up front, and what we found is we were not doing that,” Vice Adm. William Galinis, NAVSEA’s commander told reporters Thursday. “We had a lot of data that showed us that after we went through and did the analysis. And after we reset the duration for availabilities going forward, that’s going to help us tremendously.”

But the 2020 gains were not purely a matter of moving the goalposts. Galinis said the Navy and its contractors truly are getting ships in and out of their maintenance periods more quickly than in years past. Even when compared against the earlier, unadjusted schedules, the number of days of delay in 2020 still would have been down by 40%, compared with 2019.

After a major hiring initiative in the late 2010s, the Navy had set a goal of eliminating maintenance delays completely by fiscal 2021. Galinis said it’s now clear the service won’t achieve that goal, but that’s mainly because of a few especially-difficult maintenance problems on a relative handful of ships.

The guided missile destroyer USS Oscar Austin, for example, was badly damaged in a 2018 shipyard fire, and repairs are taking longer than expected. And four Ticonderoga-class cruisers that require extensive upgrades to their electronic, hull and mechanical systems to stretch them to their planned 35-year service life are proving to be more complicated than originally planned.

“We’re not going to make the goal we set for ourselves, but we understand the discrete drivers behind that,” Galinis said. “That’s not to say there won’t be other ships that are that are out there, and we’ll continue to manage that, but overall, right now, we’ve got about 67% of our avails tracking to on-time delivery. That’s up from less than 50% last year. So I think we’re moving the needle in the right direction.”

The Navy’s persistent inability to process its ships through maintenance yards on time has been highlighted for years in independent watchdog reports. The Government Accountability Office argues — and the Navy generally agrees — that the problem poses serious readiness issues, since it consistently causes fewer ships to be available to military planners than they expect.

According to GAO, 75% of ships that entered a maintenance yard stayed there for longer than they were supposed to between 2014 and 2019. As recently as 2019, more than half of the delays lasted for longer than 90 days. GAO said the primary issues are insufficient capacity at the Navy’s public and private shipyards and a shortage of skilled personnel.

But NAVSEA has hired thousands of new workers over the past several years to help tackle the workforce problem. Galinis said training programs for that new cadre of shipyard employees is proceeding well, despite the challenges of COVID-19.

In the meantime, the command is looking to solve other problems that have tended to slow down the maintenance process.

One way is to minimize the amount of new, unplanned work that’s ordered after a ship has already gone into its maintenance period.       

“It’s been almost case-by-case, ship-by-ship, in terms of how we’ve been doing this. But our [Surface Maintenance Engineering Planning Program] has done a really good job of building and stabilizing the class maintenance plan — what we refer to as directed work, and we’re trying to push more maintenance work into that directed work category,” Galinis said. “What that does is it really provides a pretty stable baseline in terms of requirements and planning for a larger percentage of the work that we’re doing in an availability.”

In the meantime, Galinis said NAVSEA has been making more of a concerted effort to make sure the materials shipyards need to complete repairs are ready when a ship enters the yard, so that workers aren’t waiting for components to arrive.

“That’s another area that has caused us to go long in some availabilities, where either we didn’t order the material on time, or we ordered it and for whatever reason, the lead times were longer than anticipated,” he said. “We stood up a material group to really get after that.”

The original article can be found here.

Others:

National Defense Magazine: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/11/12/navy-working-through-columbia-challenges-still-on-schedule

USNI: https://news.usni.org/2020/11/12/navsea-cruiser-modernization-delays-biggest-hurdle-to-on-time-maintenance

USNI: https://news.usni.org/2020/11/13/fire-safety-discussions-after-bonhomme-richard-fire-centered-on-drills-fire-suppression-systems

Inside Defense: https://insidedefense.com/daily-news/galinis-navy-cutting-maintenance-delays-will-miss-goal-eliminate-them-fy-21

Inside Defense: https://insidedefense.com/insider/galinis-espers-500-ship-navy-plan-still-moving-forward-despite-secdefs-departure

Defense Daily: https://www.defensedaily.com/galinis-future-fleet-plans-still-moving-esper-fired/navy-usmc/

Seapower Magazine: https://seapowermagazine.org/on-time-delivery-of-navy-ships-from-maintenance-alleviates-shipyard-capacity-shortage/

Maritime Network: https://news.maritime-network.com/2020/11/12/navsea-cruiser-modernization-delays-biggest-hurdle-to-on-time-maintenance/

Washington Examiner: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/can-the-uniformed-military-hold-the-line-at-the-pentagon

Defense Daily: https://www.defensedaily.com/appropriators-knock-navys-large-surface-combatant-schedule-plan/navy-usmc/

Defense Daily: https://www.defensedaily.com/senate-appropriators-block-funds-second-frigate-cape-sends-updated-cost-estimate/navy-usmc/

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By Joe Gould of Defense News

October 29, 2020

WASHINGTON ― Amid reports the Trump administration is fast-tracking sales of the high-tech F-35 warplane to the United Arab Emirates, the State Department remains committed to consulting Congress on arms sales to foreign governments, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

The comments from Assistant Secretary Bureau of Political-Military Affairs R. Clarke Cooper seemed to signal the administration would not seek to bypass Congress, as it has done with certain sales to Saudi Arabia. Some lawmakers are taking steps to slow the F-35 deal, raising concerns about preserving Israel’s military edge in the Middle East and the UAE’s ties to Russia and China.

For decades, the State Department has informally consulted with the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees before formally notifying Congress of sales, which affords lawmakers a chance to block them. Asked broadly whether the department plans to honor that process, Cooper said it was “a good-faith protocol” and “we continue to do that.”

“To your question about consultation with Congress, it’s definitely something we’re committed to. It is something that is going to continue to be required of us,” Cooper said during a Defense Writers Group roundtable. He added that previous clashes between the White House and Congress over arms sale notifications were a “stress test” of the process.

Though Reuters has reported there is a goal to have a letter of agreement between the U.S. and the UAE by Dec. 2, Cooper said “there are no dates associated with the work that’s being done.” He also acknowledged the U.S. is working with Abu Dhabi to address its security requirements while maintaining Israel’s edge, but he otherwise declined to provide specifics.

Following an agreement between Israel and the U.S. to upgrade the former’s capabilities to preserve its edge, Israel said last week it will not oppose the U.S. sale of “certain weapon systems,” considered by some to mean the F-35.

“That process is moving along, it’s a good process,” President Donald Trump told reporters hours later. “We’ve had an incredible relationship long term. We’ve never had a dispute with UAE. They’ve always been on our side, and that process is moving along, hopefully, rapidly.”

Israeli opposition would have been fatal to the deal in Congress, where Israel enjoys strong support. Two key Democrats introduced legislation earlier this month that would place restrictions on F-35 sales to Middle Eastern nations to address their concerns about both Israel’s security and the security of the advanced F-35, which is equipped with sensitive technologies.

The original article can be found here.

Others:

Breaking Defense: https://breakingdefense.com/2020/10/trump-admin-sets-allied-defense-spending-targets-taiwan-deals-lead-way/

Defense One: https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/10/will-covid-stressed-countries-slow-their-arms-buys/169642/

Military Times: https://www.militarytimes.com/congress/2020/10/28/amid-uae-f-35-deal-trump-administration-wont-end-congressional-arms-sale-reviews/

Yahoo News: https://news.yahoo.com/amid-uae-f-35-talks-191901606.html

Jewish Insider: https://jewishinsider.com/2020/10/daily-kickoff-in-the-san-diego-race-between-ammar-campa-najjar-and-darrell-issa-a-spotlight-on-israel-in-the-closing-days/

Voice Of America (VOA) News: https://www.voanews.com/usa/west-danger-losing-turkey-us-warns

Eurasia Review: https://www.eurasiareview.com/29102020-west-in-danger-of-losing-turkey-us-warns/

TASS: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/9844499

TASS: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/9844081

TASS: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/9843839

TASS: https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/9843223

Inside Defense: https://insidedefense.com/insider/state-official-says-turkey-risks-new-sanctions-if-it-doesnt-walk-back-s-400

National Defense Magazine: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/10/28/state-department-hints-at-more-arms-sales-to-mideast

Politico: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-defense/2020/10/29/covid-again-hits-top-brass-791270

Daily Magazine: http://www.dailymagazine.news/us-says-very-real-risk-of-turkey-sanctions-over-russian-arms-nid-1345670.html

Boxun: https://www.boxun.com/news/gb/intl/2020/10/202010291445.shtml?__cf_chl_jschl_tk__=3ea510ea7de27a75b37bb75509c0f7885ce97611-1603989311-0-ASkCfTWkTNewWqIg7DkRTN5zBTUYf231OZa-XWNVWXzbdTn8GmR5k1pagE-MK74Dgkgtn8SPLbcapMXIdVsAS9HFca5Sa8TDctz7edJOrFpYws51pvhNpGzJSamcn_jr9Bnh8Kdt3-54HTBZPDp1uDV8JEgvjIJGPIWKvIOq8El_zFFUhmc3irTQgI5GLGZ_FRR43z7zKGHYaYSw0Y4UoQzb3kKUI-ruJdAGb0NEUDhObR5ADReC8JkyWi5X17gBjxBXVfr7ShC5VRq3QjoxMvZV1jtdhHdAClAHs9f7OpD6YCtO8KM26NpU93TKUhCFy1M365S6h5rT1OPUWjT6qWM

VOA Indonesia: https://www.voaindonesia.com/a/as-peringatkan-turki-agar-tidak-mengoperasikan-s-400-/5639889.html

VOA Albania: https://www.zeriamerikes.com/a/5639833.html

Indianapolis News. Net: https://www.indianapolisnews.net/news/266820564/west-is-in-danger-of-losing-turkey-us-warns

Press From: https://pressfrom.info/fr/actualite/monde/-740838-us-minimise-les-sanctions-chinoises-sur-les-armes-de-taiwan.html

Press From: https://pressfrom.info/au/news/world/-293043-us-plays-down-china-sanctions-over-taiwan-arms.html

Daily Magazine: http://www.dailymagazine.news/us-plays-down-china-sanctions-over-taiwan-arms-nid-1345040.html

Breaking Defense: https://breakingdefense.com/2020/10/trump-admin-sets-allied-defense-spending-targets-taiwan-deals-lead-way/

Yahoo News: https://news.yahoo.com/us-plays-down-china-sanctions-214459087.html

MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-says-very-real-risk-of-turkey-sanctions-over-russian-arms/ar-BB1aumv2

Yahoo News: https://news.yahoo.com/us-says-very-real-risk-211931943.html

Foreign Policy Insider: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/10/28/how-trump-lost-the-balkans/

Global Security. Org: https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/turkey/2020/turkey-201028-voa01.htm

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By Kimberly Underwood of Signal Magazine

October 9, 2020

The Defense Health Agency is relying on information technology as it grows as an agency and standardizes its operations around the globe.

For the last six months, the U.S. military has been on the frontlines in the fight against the pandemic, providing necessary supplies and medical support across the country. Meanwhile, internally, the U.S. Defense Department has faced the threat of the virus with its warfighters. More than 55,000 Defense Department personnel have had the COVID-19 virus, and there have been 79 deaths—including one active-duty member, seven reservists or National Guard personnel and 71 dependents, retirees or family members, reported Lt. Gen. Ronald Place, USA, director, Defense Health Agency (DHA). 

Gen. Place, a physician and combat surgeon who became DHA’s third director in September of 2019, spoke on October 8 to reporters during a Defense Writers Group call hosted by David Ensor, director of the Project for Media and National Security at George Washington University.

In addition to providing military heath care and services, the DHA performs medical-related tasks as requested by DOD and the U.S. Combatant Commands, whether it is COVID-19-related or for operational missions around the world, the general shared. Through the Military Health System (MHS), the agency is responsible for delivering care at more than 700 hospitals, clinics and medical centers across the world, and it does so in collaboration with DOD’s Tricare Health Plans and providers.

“In terms of tackling the pandemic and how we're handling those challenges, it really gets back to the core mission of the Defense Health Agency, which is to become an integrated system of readiness and health,” Gen. Place said. “With COVID, our responsibility is to then balance the delivery of health care along with the readiness of the force.”

The agency helps to optimize medical surveillance and research to identify health threats—including infectious disease threats—and then develops proposals or clinical practice guidelines to aid in the care of the 9.6 million beneficiaries in the MHS, the general said.

“That means understanding at the individual level, and taking care of individual people or assuring the readiness of individual service members, but also collectively having a scale and scope that supports all 2.9 million of the active-duty personnel and family members, and an entire beneficiary population of 9.6 million,” Gen. Place stated.

At its core mandate, the DHA is working to standardize its operations and platforms. The agency is only seven years old and was created to be a centralized health leader, as opposed to each service’s standalone efforts.

“Standardization is useful to drive improvements in our outcomes,” he noted. “Those outcomes may be clinical outcomes. They may be administrative outcomes or some combination thereof, but standardization, where standardization is appropriate. And in so doing, we have chosen health information technology tools that are in support of that standardization process.”

Gen. Place emphasized that over the next year DHA would continue to focus on the further development of GENESIS, the MHS’ comprehensive electronic health platform. GENESIS will securely integrate inpatient and outpatient information and connect medical and dental patient data, providing a full picture in the continuum of care for warfighters and their families. The agency is leveraging commercial off-the-shelf equipment and technology for the platform, which, when fully deployed, will provide a single health record for service members, veterans and their families, according to the agency.

The GENESIS platform is employing tools such as voice recognition. For notes to a patient’s chart, physicians or care providers no longer have to write or use dictation services. The agency is fitting another tool, natural language processing, into data analysis efforts, to allow providers to perform “the same sort of data elements or data review and help us see things that perhaps that we didn't see before,” he added. Other improved imaging capabilities are needed—whether advances in plain film imagery, X-Rays, computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging or ultrasound—which then could be combined with artificial intelligence, the surgeon shared. 

“How can we use those artificial intelligence protocols to do first-pass reviews of those imaging studies, to either put clues to the human being, the radiologist who is interpreting them,” Gen. Place said. “Or in some cases, if the computers demonstrate that they do better than humans, how do we transition some of that reading over to the computer systems, so that we can improve both the speed and accuracy in the reading of those imaging systems. That is the direction in which we are going.”

The agency has already seen success from a ground-breaking cloud project from the Program Executive Office, Defense Healthcare Management Systems (DHMS), completed in June. Called the Accelerated Migration Project, or AMP, DHMS, working with more than 20 vendors, constructed a cloud platform and moved petabytes of secondary health care data and related applications to that cloud, digitally transforming access to U.S. Defense Department medical records. 

Data management also will play a role in administering a COVID-19 vaccine across the DOD, when such a treatment becomes available under Operation Warp Speed, the general said. 

“A significant amount of effort has been done by my organization, the Defense Health Agency, because we have the requirement for the immunization system for the Department of Defense,” he specified. “And we exercise that plan every single year with our Influenza Plan. So, we've utilized the year-over-year Influenza Plan as the skeleton, the backbone, so to speak, for developing a COVID-19 vaccination implementation plan. And of course, there will likely be some differences.”

DHA’s plan will have to account for the fact that up to six separate manufacturers may present different types of COVID-19 vaccines, which may require one or two injections. In contrast, “the influenza vaccine is the same thing, no matter who the maker is, and in generation it is a single injection,” the surgeon said. “And so, we have to be able to figure out not just how we transport it, how we hold it, how we inject it, but also how does it fit in the system with six different makers? And how, if you get one injection, how do we make sure that the second dose is from the same maker, that sort of thing.”

The original article can be found here.

Others:

Military.com: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/10/09/military-brass-covid-19-could-get-same-treatments-trump-received-general-says.html

VOA News: https://www.voanews.com/usa/top-us-general-coronavirus-quarantine-having-no-impact-readiness

Federal News Network: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/10/covid-19-throwing-a-wrench-in-dha-transition-plans/

Military Times: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/10/08/senior-military-leaders-will-have-access-to-same-covid-19-treatments-as-trump/

Bloomberg Government: https://about.bgov.com/news/health-care-briefing-stimulus-disruption-threatens-vaccine-push/


Air Force Magazine: https://www.airforcemag.com/as-covid-19-spooks-joint-chiefs-dod-plans-ahead/

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By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. of Breaking Defense

The Pentagon is finding alternative clouds while waiting for JEDI, Dana Deasy said, so it can upgrade them to JEDI as soon as the courts allow.

WASHINGTON: After months of delays from a still-unfinished court battle, the long-awaited JEDI cloud contract will be neither irrelevant nor overtaken by events when it finally arrives, the Pentagon CIO said this morning. In fact, Dana Deasy told the Defense Writers’ Group, while JEDI itself is in legal limbo, the Defense Department is doing all it legally can to lay the groundwork for a swift adoption as soon as the judge permits.

The big thing the long-awaited Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure can do that alternative clouds can’t, he said: provide rapid access to data, across multiple levels of classification, not just to centralized command posts but out to frontline troops on the tactical edge.

JEDI, Ligado & Legal Limbo

JEDI’s not the only big issue in suspended animation. Deasy and his staff are also trying to convince the Federal Communications Commission to overturn its decision on Ligado, a 5G firm the FCC recently awarded spectrum now used by GPS and other military systems.

“You haven’t heard a lot about it, because we haven’t heard a lot about it,” Deasy told the press. After formally asking the FCC to stay its decision and reconsider it, he said, “we provided all the necessary documentation back to the FCC, all the engineering data. We met individually with each commissioner of the FCC and walked through on any questions they had. And we have simply not heard anything back from the FCC.”

With JEDI, likewise, the timeline is out of the Pentagon’s hands. “The court process is one we don’t control, so I’m not going to tell you, right now, when I think that’s going to come to an end,” Deasy said. “Do I think we’ve done all the right things now? Have we submitted all the right documentation that, I believe, allows us to move this on? Yes.”

While the legal battle over JEDI persists DoD is vigorously finding alternatives to JEDI for key functions – both business and warfighting – that need to move to the cloud now. At the same time, it’s also making sure it can quickly upgrade from those stopgap solutions to JEDI as soon as it’s available.

“Cloud, for me, has always been first and foremost about supporting the warfighter,” Deasy said. “When we got put on hold with JEDI, that didn’t mean we were going to stop working on figuring out ways to support the warfighter.”

That’s why you see initiatives like the Air Force’s CloudOne, a cloud computing project designed to support the nascent Advanced Battle Management System. ABMS, in turn, is the leading candidate to be the backbone of a future all-service command system called Joint All-Domain Command & Control (JADC2).

“We have clouds that are in place are helping us do many aspects of JADC2” already, Deasy said, even without JEDI. But, he emphasized, “it is still very much going to fill some very big holes that we have on our strategy, [because] it has always been first and foremost a tactical edge cloud.”

Without JEDI, “we still do not have an enterprise tactical edge cloud,” he said, “[and] there’s aspects of JADC2 where we’re still going to need that tactical cloud out at the tactical edge.”

Many other benefits of cloud computing that are not unique to JEDI don’t have to wait for it to clear the courts, Deasy continued. In fact, trying new techniques out on stopgap and alternative clouds can help ease adoption of JEDI when it’s ready.

“I know that everybody continues to be fixated on this contract,” he said. “For me…the cloud is nothing more than a facilitated environment that allows us to do what really matters — and that’s going to be the DevOps, agile development.”

DevOps is the private-sector practice of having development and operations teams, coders and users, work side by side to refine a piece of software, rapidly making small upgrades, getting feedback on how they work, and upgrading again. (DevSecOps is a variant that brings cybersecurity teams in too). That rapid back-and-forth collaboration contrasts sharply with traditional Defense Department practice of going from initial concept to R&D to testing, taking years or decades in the process, before asking actual users what they think. Cloud computing is an particularly important tool for DevOps because it makes it easier for different teams to share files, data, and development tools – but which specific cloud you use is less essential.

“We’re doing a lot of work with the services on getting them prepared to move their development processes and cycles to DevOps, so when the JEDI cloud finally does get awarded, we’re not starting at day one,” he said. “There’s tools that have to be identified. There’s integration environments to be identified. There’s directories that have to be set up that allow people to connect into these worlds. That’s all work that we can continue to do.”

What’s tricky, Deasy said, is you have to set up these stopgap and surrogate clouds so that users can easily transition to JEDI as soon as it’s available, rather than laboriously reinventing the wheel.

“We are telling people right now … if you have an urgent warfighting need that needs to be met in the short term, we continue to find homes in other platforms,” he said. “That is obviously okay in the short term — but over time, that starts to become problematic, because now you’re starting to set up a lot of different solutions, different environments.”

“We are going to have to go back and sort out some of the solutions down the road once we get JEDI in place,” Deasy said. “Whatever technologies, tools they were going to use, we need to do our darnedest to try to make sure that pivoting them back, bringing them back to JEDI… would not be a Herculean task.”

The original article can be found here.

Others:

National Defense: https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2020/9/30/pentagon-data-strategy-to-be-released-soon

MSN:https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/overnight-defense-congress-recommends-nuclear-arms-treaty-be-extended-dems-warn-turkey-militarys-eighth-covid-death-identified/ar-BB19xWuf 

Washington Examiner: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/national-security-is-not-among-tonights-presidential-debate-topics-but-here-are-five-ways-it-could-come-up

Inside Defense: https://insidedefense.com/daily-news/pentagon-moving-forward-where-we-can-cloud-jedi-remains-delayed

Federal News Network: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/09/congressional-task-force-doubles-down-on-dod-ai-needs/

Fedscoop: https://www.fedscoop.com/pentagon-cloud-missions-dana-deasy-jedi/

AFCEA: https://www.afcea.org/content/preparing-jedi

C4ISRNET: https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/09/30/pentagons-cio-shop-teams-with-armed-services-to-prep-for-move-to-jedi-cloud/

Defense Daily: https://www.defensedaily.com/pentagon-finding-interim-cloud-options-near-term-efforts-jedi-delayed-dod-cio-says/cyber/

 

The Project for Media and National Security is supported by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Additional support from The George Washington University, and gifts from CNA and The MITRE Corporation.

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