After mounting public pressure, lawmakers passed provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2022 requiring the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and Defense Department to submit “a report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)” to appropriate congressional committees by Oct. 31 2022, and annually thereafter through 2026. A classified version of ODNI’s 2022 annual report was delivered to Congress on Wednesday, several months after it was due, and an unclassified version was released publicly Thursday.

In that public, 12-page review, officials provide brief details about “366 additional reports of UAP” since the government’s preliminary assessment identified 144 reports — a total of 510 cataloged accounts to date. 

The “majority of new” UAP reporting originates from Navy and Air Force aviators and operators who “witnessed UAP during the course of their operational duties and reported the events” to DOD’s now-defunct UAP Task Force and its recently formed All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, through “official channels,” the report states. 

“Broadly speaking, when it comes to the types of processes and procedures that have been established, [AARO], as you highlighted, has closely worked with each of the service branches to come up with a streamlined reporting system to be able to collect that information. And then, in addition to the military branches, it is also working with the interagency — so, organizations like NOAA, the Coast Guard, and the Department of the Energy, just to name a few,” Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told DefenseScoop during a press briefing on Friday.

“And so, by establishing those reporting procedures, what it does, and I think you’ll see this in the report, is it allows the collection of data, and more data allows us to be a little bit more rigorous in terms of how we go after investigating these incidents,” Ryder added.

Notably, when AARO was established by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks in July 2022, the Pentagon also updated its official terminology for UAP to mean unidentified anomalous phenomena — and no longer unidentified aerial phenomena — to account for reported objects that appear to move between mediums. NASA quickly followed suit.

DefenseScoop confirmed with a Pentagon spokesperson on Thursday that, while all the future annual UAP reports through 2026 will account for that update and include data on anomalous phenomena, this 2022 review refers to airborne happenings in U.S. airspace.

In that public assessment, officials wrote that “UAP continue to represent a hazard to flight safety and pose a possible adversary collection threat” to the U.S., at this point. However, improved coordination between the intelligence community, DOD and other agencies has resulted in more data sets that span air, sea and space. 

“AARO, in coordination with the IC, is focused on identifying solutions to manage and alleviate the resulting data problem, including the intake, indexing, visualization, and analysis of that data across multiple security domains,” officials wrote. 

Of the 366 newly-identified reports, 26 have been characterized as unmanned aircraft systems or other drone-like entities; 163 have been characterized as balloons or balloon-like items; and 6 have been attributed to clutter, like birds or debris, they noted. 

Those reports are not yet fully resolved — but again, some progress has been made.

At this point, though, the government also has evidence of 171 uncharacterized and unattributed UAP reports that each requires further analysis for clarity, according to the review. 

In an online response to the report, Chris Mellon — a national security expert who previously served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — argued that it demonstrates how “major progress in developing an effective government capability for investigating the UAP enigma and kicking down the doors of ignorance that for far too long have prevented progress in understanding the phenomenon.”

The war unfolding in Ukraine and recent conflicts in Armenia and in Yemen are revealing how drones are increasingly integral in modern military conflicts, another factor that plays into investigating UAPs.

“Therefore, any capability that helps to reduce clutter and identify genuine aerial threats is of great value to the military and national security. In that regard, Congressional initiatives related to UAP are already paying dividends by improving our ability to distinguish legitimate threats from innocuous balloons and other airborne clutter,” Mellon wrote.

Still, in his view, the new report also “presents the bare minimum of information needed to comply with Congress’ request” for an unclassified assessment. He noted that there was no indication if the uncategorized reports captured so far were in space or underwater, or they were attributable to foreign governments. 

“Unanswered questions abound,” Mellon wrote.

Since the IC’s first preliminary UAP assessment in June 2021, “UAP reporting has increased, partially due to a concentrated effort to destigmatize the topic” and instead recognize the safety risks or adversarial activity it implies, officials wrote in the first NDAA-mandated UAP annual assessment. They also expressed confidence that AARO, and its new analytic process being applied to its expanding portfolio of reports “will increase resolution of UAP events.”

Among other notable inclusions, the 12-page public assessment confirmed that there have “been no encounters with UAP confirmed to contribute directly to adverse health-related effects to the” observers to date. Military aviators in the past have reportedly experienced adverse health effects with symptoms like that of the mysterious Havana syndrome, which has impacted U.S. spies and diplomats.

When asked by DefenseScoop during the Pentagon briefing on Thursday whether the department or ODNI could share more details about what any anomalous health incidents associated with UAP sightings actually ended up being due to, Ryder said that he did not have further information to provide at the time.

“I would say, broadly speaking, I think one of the key points in this report, you know, is given the potential hazard that UAPs do present — notably — there’s been no reported collisions of military aircraft, or U.S. aircraft rather, and UAPs. But in terms of those specifics, I’d refer you back to the report,” Ryder said.

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To answer complex and constantly evolving intelligence questions, military and government analysts frequently have to comb through large amounts of uncertain and sometimes conflicting information. Through its new rapid explanation, analysis and sourcing online program (REASON) the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) will tap teams to develop AI-driven software that can automatically generate recommendations or comments on any draft analytic report that an analyst is working on, with the simple push of a button. 

“The suggestions that are automatically produced will do two things: They’ll suggest additional evidence bearing on the topic, and secondly, the suggestions and the comments will identify, automatically, strengths as well as weaknesses in the reasoning of the draft report,” IARPA Program Manager Dr. Steven Rieber told DefenseScoop in an interview on Thursday.

Rieber provided an early look at what this new project will involve — and how the AI it enables might benefit the U.S. military and intel analysts in the not-so-distant future.

The goal

“We’re developing new tools and technology for the intelligence community, so we’re working on problems that have not yet been solved,” Rieber said.

Rieber has never been an intelligence analyst, and he “doesn’t ever pretend to have been” one — but he has worked closely with many over the course of his career. 

“I got my [doctorate degree] in analytic philosophy, and I worked as a professor at a university for a number of years. After 9/11 I decided to change careers and come to the intelligence community to help it improve its analytic methods — the methods that intelligence analysts use,” he told DefenseScoop.

At the time he first joined the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Rieber worked in its integrity and standards unit. While there, he introduced sophisticated analytic methods to intel analysts, crafting thousands of different training courses for government experts.

“When it comes to developing training courses and training analysts, and facilitating structured analytic techniques, one thing I noticed — and that the analysts pointed out to me — is that the techniques and the training tend to require a lot of time and effort on the part of the analyst. But intelligence analysts, like most professionals, are busy people doing important tasks, and often don’t have sufficient time to take away from their work to use a structured method. So, my goal in coming to IARPA was to work with scientists to develop new methods for intelligence analysts that require much less time and effort on the part of any analyst,” Rieber explained.

The new REASON program he’s leading aims to accomplish exactly that.

The proposer’s day for the effort will be held Jan. 11 and the program will unfold under two phases — the first lasting 24 months and the second lasting 18 months.

Several scientific research and interdisciplinary teams — or “performer teams” in IARPA jargon — will likely be tapped to collaborate with the agency in this work. But they won’t be competing against one another.

“What IARPA looks for when evaluating proposals for a program like REASON is a diversity of approaches. So, we’re happy to fund — and we often do — several different ways of solving the technological problem that we put out in the [broad agency announcement],” Rieber said.

The agency’s technical description calls for proposals to involve a “mix of skills and staffing,” highlighting expertise in more than a dozen topics, including: applied epistemology; argumentation; cognitive psychology; experimental design; informal logic; judgment and decision making; linguistics; natural language processing; philosophy of language; psychometrics; rationality; software engineering; systems engineering; and systems integration.

The agency makes it a point to never prescribe in detail the exact technology performer teams should generate in efforts like this one, and broadly its approaches seek to promote creativity. Still, Rieber provided DefenseScoop with a hypothetical about the sort of innovation that IARPA envisions inspiring through REASON. 

Imagine “you’re an analyst working on a problem and you’ve written a draft report. You think you’ve covered the things that you need to. So what you do with REASON is you press a button and request that REASON produce automatic instantaneous comments on your draft,” he said. “And among the comments, you find that REASON has pointed out that there’s a piece of evidence from a report that you hadn’t noticed is relevant to the topic you’re working on. And that piece of evidence, let’s say, is contrary evidence. It’s some evidence against the claim that you’re making in the report.” 

He continued: “You see that piece of evidence, and as a result you reduce the level of confidence that you’ve assigned to your judgment, because there’s some contrary evidence that REASON pointed out that you weren’t aware of.”

While that, Rieber noted, was just one “sort of stylized, dramatic example” of what the imagined software might do, he said the novel AI-enabled tools might also point out supporting evidence for the judgment that an intel analyst is making. It could also reveal, he said, some weakness in the logic of the user’s analytic report.

“We all know how helpful it can be to receive comments from our peers and supervisors, and from friends on our drafts. So, you can think of REASON as producing these comments of a similar type that we get from our human peers — but doing so instantaneously and on demand — whenever the analyst wants the comments,” Rieber said.

Aiding — but not replacing — humans

IARPA intends for this program to pave the way for novel AI systems that can assist intel analysts as they hustle to solve complex national security puzzles by pinpointing critical information that’s available, pertains to their work and may have been overlooked. 

The hope is that those tools might one day help influence the accuracy and speed of reports those top thinkers deliver to policymakers and the administration. Right now, though, “such technology does not exist,” Rieber told DefenseScoop.  

One capability out there that REASON may be somewhat analogous to — once IARPA and its partners develop it — is the digital technology that automatically produces suggestions on grammar and style in written products, like essays. The envisioned AI tools would be similar in that they generate comments on experts’ work, however, the comments produced will be about the logic of the evidence of the analytic reports and not the writing and style.

“The automatic grammar checks technologies are pretty sophisticated. But the REASON problem is harder because there aren’t formal rules that guide the evidence and logic in real-life reasoning on complex issues the way there are formal rules for, say, grammar and spelling,” Rieber said. 

He noted that the REASON program does not seek to replace human analysts with fully automated production of analytic reports. Instead, those involved will produce and refine software that helps the analysts write better reports, faster, and with stronger reasoning than today’s technologies allow. 

“The fact that REASON doesn’t aim to do that is a good thing — because if we had automated production of analytic reports, that technology would have to be just about perfect, because we can’t risk making a mistake in intelligence analysis that informs our decision-makers in national security,” Rieber said.

Human experts can use their own judgment to consider the valuable suggestions the AI software might generate and discard the others. 

When asked whether REASON could be portrayed as a potential stepping stone to reaching sophisticated AI systems that are so intelligent they can independently write full analytic national security reports that are more accurate — and produced quicker — than those produced by humans, Rieber said he could think of several reasons why “that is still a long way off.”

For one, even incredibly advanced technologies that exist today for creating essays or other written products, still often pump out glaring errors, according to Rieber.

“Another reason to doubt whether technology will soon be able to produce analytic reports of high quality is that intelligence analysts are experts on their topics. And the technology would have to have an extraordinary level of … artificial intelligence to be able to compete with the human analysts who’ve been working on that topic for years,” he said.

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This expansion in terminology matches a move first made by the Pentagon recently to explicitly acknowledge its leaders’ intent to openly investigate and record a wider range of perplexing objects observed (or caught on sensors) near its personnel and assets, doing things that are seemingly impossible to do with contemporary technologies.

“To be consistent with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), NASA will be calling UAP ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena’ instead of ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,’” Katherine Rohloff, press secretary for the space agency’s Science Mission Directorate, said Thursday.

Still, she noted, “NASA’s UAP independent study will be largely focused on aerial phenomena.”

That independent study kicked off in October and is expected to unfold over the course of about nine months. Broadly, NASA is commissioning a team of 16 executives and experts to pinpoint how data captured by government, commercial and other sources can be analyzed to ultimately make sense of bizarre UAP-associated happenings that could threaten national security — and shed light on their origins.

With sights set on enabling data and other science and technology tools to advance humans’ understanding on a historically sticky topic, that independent cadre of experts will apply their learnings to recommend a roadmap for potential UAP data analysis that NASA can steer down the line.

The agency expects to release a full report on the findings from the investigation — and host a public meeting in the late Spring 2023 timeframe — where the UAP Independent Study Team will discuss the results.

While NASA is pursuing this comprehensive deep-dive on UAPs for its own science and air safety purposes, officials plan to share learningswith other government entities, including DOD’s new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

During a press briefing on Tuesday — days after the DOD announced its new definition for “UAP,” but before NASA officially changed its description for the acronym — Pentagon Press Secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told DefenseScoop that, at the time, he was not concerned the two agencies’ lack of common language for the term would cause challenges with information- and data-sharing on the topic, which both organizations are prioritizing in their overarching efforts.

“I think the important thing is, looking at the bigger picture, ensuring that we’re all working towards common objectives through interagency dialogues and — and discussions, which I would fully expect will happen in this case going forward,” Ryder said. “We have a very close working relationship with the — in the Department of Defense, with NASA — and I have no reason to think that that will change anytime soon.”

On Thursday, NASA updated a press release originally published in October, to reflect that it now means “anomalous” phenomena when it refers to “UAP.”

Both the space and defense agencies’ updates, and attempts to ensure more transparency and less taboo around the UFO topic, follow years of mounting pressure from the public and Congress. 

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Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) is the Defense Department’s novel concept to connect sensors, shooters, and associated technologies to provide battlefield commanders with the best information to make informed decisions more rapidly as conflicts evolve to be more digital. The Air Force’s major contribution to JADC2 is its in-development Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) architecture, which will underpin DOD’s network-centric approach for future-facing fights.

“We’re going to be putting someone in charge of that overall enterprise of C3 battle management for the Air Force. We’ll be naming someone very shortly and they’ll have responsibility for pulling it all together and focusing all that work and making sure it’s truly joint and interoperable with our allies, as well as works together for the Air Force,” Kendall said Wednesday at the Defense News conference. 

The secretary and his team are in the process of determining the service’s budget request for fiscal year 2024. He further confirmed that a bit of that funding will likely be focused on getting JADC2 and ABMS “right from the Air Force.”  

Though he would not go into great detail, Kendall added the next budget will focus heavily on the relatively recently conceptualized operational imperatives the Air Force crafted to confront war-related threats of the future and modernize contemporary assets. 

​​”I just got back from the Pacific. I visited Hawaii, Guam, Australia, Japan, and Alaska — and we clearly need to take steps to make our bases more resilient, and to make agile combat employment a priority,” Kendall noted. “And those are things that we can do relatively quickly.” 

Another operational focus, and anticipated area of more fiscal support in the coming years, involves introducing unmanned collaborative combat aircraft as components of a new family of systems for its Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program.

Those priorities and the other operational imperatives were structured by Air Force officials based on existing and “very foreseeable” gaps in the branch’s capabilities, the secretary noted. From that lens, Kendall also spotlighted the United States’ long-term, high-stakes technological competition with China and how it requires further strategic investments and innovation from the branch. 

“Let’s be clear about that. The strategic competitor or the pacing challenge is China — and China has been working for about 30 years now to develop and fuel capabilities designed to keep the United States out of the region of the western Pacific,” he said.

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With its partners in the Army Contracting Command-Rock Island and the Indiana Innovation Institute (IN3), the CDAO is targeting the first quarter of fiscal 2023 to “go-live” with the minimum viable product of this new “Tradewind Solutions Marketplace.”

Between now and Sept. 30, officials involved are crowdsourcing suggestions from industry, academia and government agencies on the concept and framework underpinning that hub and how such organizations could help “shape” it.

After that date, some comments received may be shared publicly. But those behind the emerging vendor space also plan to continue to collect feedback and engage interested parties throughout the existence of the Marketplace initiative.

In early 2021, DOD’s former Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) — which was recently absorbed into the CDAO — and the Army awarded an Other Transaction agreement to IN3 to create a business process and online environment called “Tradewind,” that would drive more efficient AI acquisitions for the U.S. military. Last month, FedScoop reported that the partners recently updated the tradewindai.com website and it is being tested as a modern channel to announce new AI-aligned challenge competitions.

On Aug. 26, the Tradewind Solutions Marketplace announcement was posted there and on the SAM.gov federal government contracting site. Both link to the Tradewind Exchange Challenge Summary landing page where responses are to be submitted.

Specifically, officials want feedback on how they might best provide a venue where defense and military insiders can search for the technologies of interest, and a single location to interact with external organizations that can deliver them through an established rapid contracting pathway.

A 10-page, attached “teaser” draft of the marketplace open call also provides details behind the evolving, and subject to change, notions informing the making of this new online shop — as well as some information about how it will operate.

“The Solutions Marketplace serves industry and academic organizations by providing a forum to showcase relevant research, products, and services to prospective government customers, and serves DOD by providing a forum to access data, analytics, digital and AI/ML solutions and rapidly ingest game changing technology solutions,” the document said.

Envisioned as “a digital environment of competed video pitches,” the marketplace will be designed as a venue for customer organizations “to search, view, review, compare, contrast, contact, negotiate, and procure data, analytics, digital and AI/ML” technologies.

The overarching idea is that once video pitches of capabilities pass through a deep assessment to ensure compliance with federal requirements, and they are approved for the marketplace, they will then be made available for funding via Other Transaction agreements or procurement contracts. 

“Thus, the Tradewind Solutions Marketplace serves as the DOD’s digital environment of post-competition, readily awardable, technology solutions,” the document said.

Video solution pitches will have to address one or more topics on a list of strategic focus areas that will also change over time based on the Pentagon’s needs.

Initially, those areas are: improving situational awareness and decision-making, increasing safety of operating equipment, implementing predictive maintenance and supply, streamlining business processes, assuring cybersecurity and discovering Blue Sky technology applications.

The latter essentially refers to future-facing domains where “real-world” applications are not immediately apparent. The CDAO’s press office did not provide further information by FedScoop’s deadline about what capabilities those involved want in that case.

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Speaking about the need for better domain awareness, Shaw referred to a “tyranny of volume,” noting that the command is focused on the entire area of space encompassed by Earth’s gravity well including the Moon.

“That’s a lot of volume, and that’s a lot of opportunity for us to miss things that are happening within that volume that we need to be aware of,” he said Wednesday at the DARPA Forward conference at the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Those “things” could be natural hazards, deliberate threats, or incidental hazards connected to debris or other objects in orbit.

He also highlighted the need to monitor signals and the potential for unintentional or deliberate electromagnetic interference.

Spacecom wants to use predictive analytics to understand what may happen next, or to detect possible changes that could impact the environment. 

“How are we going to do that better? Well, we need some innovation,” Shaw said.

“Historically, we have typically done that mission set mostly using sensors here on the planet,”  he explained. But looking forward, as the U.S. government tries to generate a more refined understanding of the cislunar environment — from the Earth all the way to the area around the Moon — “we probably need sensors in space,” he added.

The command wants to get the best possible picture of its area of responsibility. 

“That’s one particular challenge that we have that informs everything else that we do — we have to know what’s happening in the domain before we can actually do other things,” Shaw said.

Autonomous platforms are another area in which Spacecom leaders are keen to see further innovation.

While autonomous vehicles are typically associated with drones and self-driving cars and maritime vessels, Shaw proposed that “in no domain will it be more important to have cutting-edge autonomy enabled by machine learning than in the space domain.”

Future space-based platforms won’t be able to “wait for human operators or even machines necessarily back on Earth to tell them” how to behave, he noted. Instead, they’ll likely need to perform functions like avoiding debris and threats autonomously.

“So I urge you all to think — when you’re thinking on autonomous platforms — think not only about the terrestrial domains, but think about space. How do we take that cutting-edge innovation and capability and apply it to missions that we’re going to need to be able to do in the space domain?” Shaw said. “We’re going to need those capabilities.”

Space maneuver and logistics is another area of interest for the command.

Shaw said propulsion systems that humans have developed rely on Newton’s Third Law that requires an action and reaction activity to propel an object.

“I just want to point out that we’re kind of restricted right now by the tyranny of the rocket equation. I’ve got to have mass to eject in order to move myself around within the Earth gravity well and beyond. How do we get past that? I’m interested in any thoughts on that and innovation along that line. I don’t see really anything on the logical horizon that’s going to be a big game-changer on that. There may be ways, though, that we incrementally get after it,” he noted.

Shaw’s team at Spacecom is now particularly interested in DARPA’s existing work on nuclear thermal propulsion — and whether it could lead to a new kind of propulsion capability applicable to their missions. 

Relatedly, Shaw said the command wants to enable architectures and systems that “not only can maneuver on-demand and in new ways and such,” but also be completely supported logistically.

In his view, a new “logistic structure in space that allows us to refuel, to service, and extend lifetime and extend capability” of certain assets needs to be developed. 

Making such new and innovative breakthroughs won’t be easy, but the deputy commander is bullish about the opportunities ahead.

“I believe we’re entering a remarkable era,” Shaw said. “I think we could be seeing … the very beginning of a big surge into [the space] domain that will define a new era for us similar to the age of discovery in the 1400s.” 

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That role will mark a temporary promotion for Madsen, who currently serves as DIU’s deputy director and director of strategic engagement. 

Formed by the Pentagon in 2015, the unit is designed to strategically accelerate the military’s adoption of commercial technologies. It is headquartered in Silicon Valley and runs outposts in multiple U.S. tech hubs. 

Brown, a former CEO-turned-White House Innovation Fellow, has headed DIU for the last four years. He surprised many when he announced plans to depart this year when his term ends, despite an option to stay on.

“As deputy director, Mike Madsen will be acting director of DIU until a new person is identified and takes the helm of the organization,” a DIU spokesperson told FedScoop on Monday. Madsen “will stay in place to help in the transition until his [term as an appointed Highly Qualified Expert within the DOD] expires in 8 months.”

DIU’s next director will likely enter the position with expertise from the commercial sector, as Brown had. 

Madsen “is not putting his name in for consideration for [permanent] director of DIU,” the spokesperson said.

Applicants competing to take his reins as DIU’s next permanent director were required to submit materials to the Defense Department by mid-August. That review process is ongoing and will likely take at least a month, the DIU spokesperson told FedScoop.

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Years in-development, those tangerine-ish colored lenses on notably dainty spectacles were one of multiple mechanisms and capabilities AFRL officials highlighted for Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks during her stop at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base last week. At that Ohio-based lab, Hicks received classified briefings largely focused on several research efforts and capability advances associated with counter-directed energy technology that she said “will pay off as we look at potential adversary use.”

“As we already know just from laser pointers at commercial aircraft, for instance, that [there’s] already manifested use of directed energy and lasers, against either civilian targets — or as we look at the military, potential use on a more significant scale. So, really good work going on here to get after that problem set on the material sciences side,” Hicks told reporters towards the end of her AFRL tour. “I’m very happy with what I saw.”

When lasers are pointed at pilots’ eyes — on the battlefield or during commercial flights — it makes it very hard for them to see and can even force them to completely lose visual acuity. It’s a federal crime to aim lasers at aircraft, but also increasingly more common. 

“It’s a huge threat to our pilots — both commercial and military,” Richard Vaia, AFRL’s chief scientist for materials and manufacturing, told reporters during a briefing at the lab. “There’s been reports in the news, open reports, of this impacting the military operations. So in Africa, Australia — Navy pilots [recently] reported lasers in the South China Sea. And just in general, the FAA has reported incidents that are just skyrocketing year-after-year from commercial pilots. So, folks using directed energy to change the behavior of our personnel is a threat.”

The lab has a large materials and manufacturing directorate-led program confronting that specific threat from different angles. Officials on the personnel protection team explore and develop capabilities that can protect structures, sensors, platforms and pilots’ eyes from laser strikes. They are working on pursuits that are “very far out there — putting nanostructures on surfaces so that you can actually reject certain wavelengths of light or route certain wavelengths of light,” Vaia said.

Many commercial manufacturers have created and offered laser eye protection in recent years to support military and police pilots, but the products generally work by filtering out green or red light largely associated with lasers. That change in views of certain light, though, can make it harder for pilots to see certain elements and color indications on the instrument control panels of the machinery they fly.  

Over the last decade, researchers and scientists have been pushing R&D of laser eye protection options that solve that problem. It all recently culminated in recent tests of Commercial Aviation Low Intensity (CALI) — a tool officials produced by modifying the cockpit compatibility design software developed for Defense Department laser eye protection, for commercial use. 

Matthew Lange is a research scientist who heads the personnel protection team. He named CALI, and with his retired predecessor Bryan Edmonds and many others helped pioneer the eyewear.

“We can make the CALI design in spectacles and ballistics,” Lange told FedScoop at AFRL, referring to the lab’s industrial partners who can manufacture the different technologies and components of the protective glasses — including sleek frames that cover the face but don’t interfere with ear covers pilots must wear while in the cockpit.

“CALI provides relevant protection that’s been designed using the Air Force tool, with cockpit compatibility in mind, and so it’s just a different mentality,” Lange said.

AFRL also relied on commercial-off-the-shelf dyes for the lenses. 

“For CALI, we used all [International Traffic in Arms Regulations] unrestricted protection levels as determined by the State Department,” Lange noted.

Pilots from the Washington State Patrol tested CALI out last year and ultimately shared rave reviews. When asked by FedScoop about plans to share the spectacles with other units or police departments, Lange responded that he “sent a box of these to the FAA, and they’re doing flight testing actively.”

“Presumably, there’ll be a policy statement when they’re done,” he added, noting that those tests will likely take a while. “But we’re expecting the first round of evaluations from the FAA soon. We hope to hear good news — but if we don’t, we’ll fix it.”

Given the sensitive nature of the topics, Hicks did not share much with reporters about her classified briefings at AFRL while on the trip, but she confirmed discussions were partially focused on in-development counter-directed energy applications.

“For both the Air Force and for the Space Force, this is a big issue area and an area where they have invested in over time,” Hicks said. “I was able to see capabilities already fielded, and then the potential for more capabilities down the road.”

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It won’t be an easy feat to implement these technical and cultural shifts to enable the ultramodern cybersecurity framework. But according to Sherman, that near-term work will likely prove essential to winning future wars.

“What we’re aiming for is by 2027 to have zero-trust deployed across the majority of our enterprise systems in the Department of Defense — in five years. That’s an ambitious goal for those of you that are familiar with zero trust, but the adversary capability we’re facing leaves us no choice but to move at that level of pace,” he said at the FedTalks conference on Wednesday.

He and his team are leading a number of unfolding projects to meet that zero-trust intent. 

Within the last month, Sherman said he’s hired a new deputy chief information security officer. Officials under his purview are also preparing a comprehensive zero-trust strategy that will dig deep into how DOD is defining its approach from across the main controls to the most highly sensitive systems. 

“We should be publishing that out to you all perhaps as soon as next month,” Sherman told the audience. “I can tell you at DOD we’re taking this very seriously and we are committed to implementing zero-trust at scale for the 4 million-person-plus enterprise that we lead.”

The CIO also noted that Pentagon officials are also producing a new “cyber talent strategy” that should be completed in the next 2 months. Representatives from DOD teams associated with policy, personnel, readiness and other areas are working fervently to get the document out, Sherman said.

“It thinks differently about the environment we’re in. We’re all going after the same talent here. We’re all trying to expand the diversity aperture. This has got to be a whole-of-nation approach,” he said. “This is the space race of this generation.”

Following his speech, Sherman told FedScoop that — among those many zero-trust priorities — the most pressing cybersecurity issue he’s confronting right now is retiring all the “technical debt” DOD has accrued over the last 20 years fighting in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa and elsewhere.

“We have to get after that on our weapons systems and networks to make sure we are able to modernize and make sure we have safe systems to get after our adversaries,” he said.

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As DIA’s chief information officer, Douglas Cossa is steering that notable revamp of JWICS, a more than three-decades-old system that will evolve to integrate across all U.S. intelligence-aligned components and enable the secure transmission of top secret data and information between them. 

“My role as the enterprise provider for JWICS is to look at where we need those cloud access points and work with vendors around the world to determine where those priorities need to be. Right now, that doesn’t exist. And so that, at least in the near-term, forces us into a hybrid environment where I’m still hosting a lot of that myself in my own data centers. But in the future, I think that will swing the other way, especially as we build that infrastructure with vendors,” Cossa explained during a virtual event Tuesday hosted by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

Cloud access points are essentially the security conduits via which the Defense Department connects to the commercial cloud. Sensors enable DOD components to monitor traffic passing through it.

Operating in a hybrid-cloud environment in the near term, DIA intends to maintain its own data centers and host its own infrastructure, Cossa said, “because, simply, we don’t have connectivity today where those cloud access points need to be put in place in the future,” or it’s so sensitive that officials need more visibility into what’s happening. 

But that’s not the case for all applications. So far, DIA has “certainly taken advantage of cloud services” for back office and business applications, according to Cossa. 

“Things like our contract management system and our HR management system, all of those front-end business services, I’ve essentially moved all of those to the cloud,” he said.

While the intelligence agency can assume some risks associated with modernizing those business functions, the CIO noted that more challenges around data access, identity management, coverage, capacity and security requirements exist with mission-related processes. In those cases, DIA officials need to be able to “see the full threat of security of what’s happening behind the firewall on the vendor side,” Cossa said.

“That’s where we’re going to need to see how that plays out,” he added. “When it comes down to mission data, it’s really going to come down to visibility in a security sense and the access to where those services, that data, that infrastructure, needs to be accessed from. Right now, it does not exist.”

In Cossa’s view, there are also many new opportunities for collaboration between DIA and the United States’ closest international partners — including the Five Eyes coalition nations that are also increasingly turning to cloud-based services. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. are members of that intelligence-sharing group, through which they jointly cooperate on signals intelligence.  

In that sense too, though, challenges around identity management and data access and integration policies remain. 

“And that’s going to be tough — not from a technology perspective, but from a cultural perspective of how we share intelligence given the sensitive nature of it. I mean, it makes sense, but where a lot of the vendor community is going to come in is helping with that integration across cloud services,” Cossa said. “And I really do think that industry is going to lead in data access and the identity management area for the federal government.”

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