By Justin Katz
Mar 16, 2021
The U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday issued a declassified report concluding it has no indications that foreign actors attempted to alter technical aspects of the voting process during the 2020 elections. We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, according to the new report compiled by multiple intelligence agencies and published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The report draws on the conclusions of a classified document delivered to the White House in January and says Russia, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, undertook a series of actions to both denigrate President Joe Biden and support former President Donald Trump during the 2020 elections. It also states that China largely avoided any ta
By Lauren C. Williams
Mar 16, 2021
The Defense Department needs to embrace artificial intelligence at every leadership level, according to Robert Work, vice chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and former deputy defense secretary. We are shifting into an era of systems warfare, Work testified during a joint hearing with the House Armed Services Subcommittee on cyber, innovative technologies and information systems and the House Oversight and Reform national security subcommittee on March 12. Our adversaries explicitly say this and say the way we will defeat the U.S. military is to have better operational systems and the way to get there is to inject AI applications and autonomy into the systems.
By Lauren C. Williams
Mar 17, 2021
Could the Defense Department’s goal of having unified communications across the military along with an escalating tech competition with China be the impetus needed for true budget and acquisition reforms?
Bill Greenwalt, a fellow for the American Enterprise Institute who served as the deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy during the Bush administration, said the budget process “is the single most important process to look at if you want to have acquisition reform.”
“In the near term, we need to move fast because China’s moving fast,” embracing flexible budget pilots that could be for specific missions, while striving for long-term reforms, Greenwalt said during a March 5 virtual Hudson Institute event on budget agility and competing with China.
By Justin Katz
Mar 16, 2021
As more details have emerged about the breach into federal agencies involving SolarWinds Orion, senior administration officials and analysts have started calling the incident a supply chain attack. While the government continues to assess the scope and scale of that breach, the White House is now directing various executive departments to assess the risks in their respective supply chains.
The executive order calls for both 100-day immediate reviews of certain products such as semiconductors and high-capacity batteries as well as year-long sectoral supply chain reviews of the defense, health, transportation and agriculture industries, among others.
The Space Force wants a user-friendly portal, including back-end infrastructure, data storage, content management, development and testing infrastructure, user testing and validation.