Archive: October 3, 2023

Pentagon command-and-control official charged with dog fighting

WASHINGTON — A senior U.S. Department of Defense official was arrested and charged with participating in a local dog-fighting ring.

Frederick Douglass Moorefield Jr., a deputy chief information officer for command, control and communications, was one of two men the Justice Department on Oct. 2 said was apprehended following an investigation into the alleged animal abuse and underground gambling. The other was Mario Damon Flythe.

The Washington Post reported the Defense Department was “aware of the criminal complaint” and that Moorefield was “no longer in the workplace,” citing a department spokesperson.

The deputy CIO for command, control and communications lends expertise and guidance on policy and technical issues related to defense connectivity and data-sharing standards. It also plays a role in spectrum-sharing decisions.

Police searched the Maryland homes of Moorefield and Flythe in early September. They rescued 12 dogs, according to the Justice Department, and recovered veterinary steroids, training regimens, a carpet “that appeared to be stained with blood” and a weighted dog vest. An electrical plug and jumper cables — likely used to kill losing dogs — were also found, an affidavit alleges.

Moorefield was released after being arraigned, records show. If convicted, he could face five years in prison.

Air Force’s JSTARS flies last intel mission after 3 decades in service

The stalwart E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System plane flew its last operational mission Sept. 21, capping a three-decade career as a military “eye in the sky” in conflicts from Operation Desert Storm to the war in Ukraine.

The sortie is a stepping stone on the airframe’s journey into retirement, as the Air Force reshapes its inventory for the demands of modern combat.

“It’s bittersweet,” 116th Air Control Wing boss Col. Christopher Dunlap said in a release Monday. “I’ve been flying this mission on this aircraft since the spring of 2003. There’s been a lot of changes over the years.”

JSTARS is a modified Boeing 707 that uses a long sensor on the belly of the jet to track the movement of ground forces around a region and share that information with other aircraft and troops below. Combat units rely on the fleet to highlight potential targets and stop friendly forces from veering into harm’s way.

Its final mission departed from Ramstein Air Base in Germany, a hub for U.S. military operations across Europe and points farther south. The Air Force declined to answer where the sortie took place or what it entailed.

“The aircraft’s sensors provided invaluable intelligence, guiding strategic decisions on the ground and enhancing operational effectiveness,” the service said in the release.

The fleet’s exit from military operations signals the end of an era in battlefield intelligence.

E-8Cs have flown in military operations from Desert Storm in 1991 to Iraq and Afghanistan a decade later, to the surveillance of Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border. They have also assisted in noncombat missions like transnational drug busts.

The fleet withdrew from U.S. Central Command in 2019 after an 18-year deployment supporting counterterror operations.

“The E-8C JSTARS has played a vital role in countless operations, supporting troops and safeguarding nations,” the Air Force said on Facebook.

The fleet, which initially included 16 jets, has been managed by two Air Force units: the active duty 461st Air Control Wing and the Georgia Air National Guard’s 116th ACW, both at Robins Air Force Base.

Together, they have flown more than 14,000 sorties since 2002, when they merged as the service’s first “blended” wing, the service said. The 461st ACW logged its last operational sortie in June.

Plans to sunset the JSTARS fleet have gradually come to fruition over the past several years.

The Air Force briefly launched an effort to solicit another aircraft to replace JSTARS but abandoned that program in fiscal 2019. After sparring with Congress over the fate of the fleet, the service began retiring E-8Cs in February 2022.

Instead of maintaining a vast inventory of jets that are purpose-built for highly specialized missions, the Air Force now wants to use a network of satellites, aircraft sensors and ground radars to collect the same targeting and tracking data.

The service hopes that approach will make it more resilient against potential attacks on its command-and-control enterprise, save money on aircraft maintenance and use its airmen more effectively.

Two of the original 16 aircraft remain at Robins, according to the Air Force release. The last JSTARS is slated to depart for the Air Force’s graveyard of retired aircraft at Davis-Monthan AFB, Arizona, during the first week of November.

Airmen may still use the jet for flight proficiency training until it is formally retired, Air Force spokesperson Capt. Dustin Cole said.

As its centerpiece fleet dwindles, Robins has started taking on new missions that the Air Force views as more relevant in future wars.

Nine E-11A airborne communications relay planes will be based at the central Georgia installation, as well as a command-and-control squadron, a group focused on electromagnetic spectrum warfare, and an office to handle the Air Force’s acquisition of future communications technologies known as the Advanced Battle Management System.

Some airmen are already working to open those units, while others are in training to staff them.

“You can’t expect a wing who has a long history of excellence to sit around and do nothing when there is plenty of work left to do,” Dunlap said in an emailed statement. “It is not in our DNA.”

Space Force can bolster Greenland ties by buying local for Arctic base

The latest U.S. Space Force Base is in located northern Greenland, 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It sits on land the indigenous Inuit call Pituffik.

The site has been strategically critical to the U.S. since the Second World War when Greenland was a Danish colony and Denmark was controlled by Nazi Germany. During the war, Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Danish Envoy Henrik Kauffmann concluded a security agreement by which the U.S> would “have the right to construct, maintain and operate such landing fields and sea plane facilities and radio and meteorological facilities as may be necessary.”

The Agreement also provided that the U.S. “respect all legitimate interests in Greenland …pertaining to the native population.” Soon after the establishment of Thule Air Base in 1952, the indigenous population was forcibly relocated by the Danish colonial administration. Pituffik was renamed Thule, and became America’s northernmost military installation, including a deepwater port and a 10,000 foot runway.

In subsequent years, the two nations concluded further international agreements pertaining to the construction, maintenance and operation by the U.S. of military facilities in Greenland. The arrangements served U.S. and Allied security interests well, through World War II, the Cold War and into the current geopolitical era.

The war in Ukraine, Russia’s Arctic presence, China’s quest for high north resources, and climate change have further enhanced the strategic value of Greenland to the U.S.. A trilateral U.S.-Denmark-Greenland Joint Committee was formed in 2004, with the Government of Greenland becoming an equal partner in the cooperation, and the American Air Base at Thule was uppermost on the agenda.

The governments agreed that for base maintenance and expansion, services would be procured directly from Danish/Greenlandic sources. This was confirmed in American law via a 2022 U.S. Court of Claims case holding that Greenlandic offerors must be accorded priority in U.S. government solicitations pertaining to the base.

Space base

On April 6, 2023, Thule reverted to its former indigenous Inuit name Pituffik and became home to the U.S. Space Base including the 821st Space Base Group, the 12th Space Warning Squadron and 23rd Space Operations Squadron enabling force projection, space superiority and Arctic scientific research.

“This renaming represents our wish to celebrate and acknowledge the rich cultural heritage of Greenland and its people,” Chief of Space Operations U.S. Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman said at the ceremony.

U.S. Ambassador Alan Leventhal also acknowledged that the creation of this base “caused the movement in the 1950s of the community who called this place home, resulting in hardship and pain for those people and their descendants.”

Those descendants, among many Greenlanders, have been thinking about independence from Denmark, America’s NATO ally. On April 28, 2023, a Greenland Government Commission submitted a draft Constitution to the Parliament at Nuuk.

General Saltzman observed that “renewed strategic competition in the Arctic can be expected with Russia’s historically significant presence in the region and the People’s Republic of China self-proclaimed near-Arctic power, seeking opportunities to expand its influence.” Because of the geopolitics of our time, the U.S.-Greenland partnership is again a strategic priority. And by virtue of longstanding commitment and moral obligation, it merits strong American support.

A first step is to abide by international agreements and U.S. law which provide that services for American military bases, including our new Space Force, be procured directly from Greenlandic companies. This small step would yield substantial dividends including good will.

As the world’s largest island evolves to an independent state, the citizens will have choices including strategic partnerships. Cementing that partnership now by supporting indigenous Greenlandic business, is in the American interest.

Charles C. Adams, Jr. is a partner in the law firm Orrick, Herrington, Sutcliffe LLP and a former U.S. Ambassador to Finland.

Charles H. Norchi is the Benjamin Thompson Professor at the University of Maine School of Law

NATO’s ‘Dynamic Messenger’ test uses 5G mesh to link underwater drones

MILAN – A recent NATO military exercise highlighted the value of weaving 5G marine testbeds into the Alliance’s operations for use with unmanned underwater vehicles.

On Sept. 29, the second edition of Dynamic Messenger, organized by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation and Allied Maritime Command, concluded in the areas of Tróia, Sado River, and offshore from the Sesimbra Peninsula, in Portugal.

The eleven-day event focused on testing the maturity of maritime unmanned systems, or MUS, and demonstrating their level of interoperability with NATO assets. It brought together 16 allies and one partner nation: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.

In addition, other non-NATO nations sent observers, including Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

One of the interesting conclusions shared by a NATO official who took part in Dynamic Messenger, was concerning the fielding of MUS and 5G technology.

“The utilization of unmanned underwater vehicles and 5G mesh networks for the passing of information in the underwater realm has much promise,” the military official told Defense News in an email.

The concept of developing 5G sea testbeds, at least within the military sector, is fairly new. Ultimately, it would allow for the seamless integration of several 5G-ready devices, sensors, vehicles and endpoints to provide for an advanced communication capability in remote operations.

In August, Lockheed Martin delivered the final Phase 1 initial prototype of the 5G testbed variant for the Open Systems Interoperable and Reconfigurable Infrastructure to the U.S. Marine Corps program.

OSIRIS is a 5G communications network infrastructure experimentation that was awarded to the defense company in 2021. The second phase will see the integration of specific mission applications onto the network for evaluation.

In the commercial sector, Vodafone developed last year a private 5G network operated by the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the U.K., to serve as a testing ground for sea applications. According to a company statement, the infrastructure is open for use by local and international companies to create 5G marine use cases for free.

Experts in the field of naval warfare have suggested that 5G may also offer the potential of modernizing navies’ undersea systems without intrusive environmental operations, such as digging trenches for underwater cables.

Other uncrewed potential

In the context of the DYNMS exercise, several warfare areas were identified to experiment with deployed maritime unmanned systems supported by other autonomous air and surface assets.

These realms included protecting critical undersea infrastructure; enabling mine warfare operations with crewed-uncrewed teaming when possible; force protection with an emphasis on convoy escort operations and counter-unmanned aerial systems; and conducting light and fast amphibious operations from ship to shore.

“UAS such as Scheibel’s Camcopter S-100 and [Portuguese-made] Ogassa OGS42 provided outstanding persistent air surveillance capability while others such as the Spanish Kaluga DS USV allowed for covert identification of suspicious surface activity,” the NATO official participating in who Dynamic Messenger said.

“Autonomous underwater vehicles such as the Gavia [manufactured by Teledyne Marine] and its side scan sonar allowed for the detection of anomalies and informed decisions on how to best deal with potential threats or disruptions to critical underwater infrastructure,” the military official added.

A total of 34 systems were deployed comprising three AUVs, two unmanned underwater vehicles, one autonomous surface vehicle, eight unmanned surface vehicles and thirteen drones.

Booz Allen Hamilton invests in AI security startup HiddenLayer

WASHINGTON — Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the largest U.S. defense contractors, said it invested in HiddenLayer, a smaller company specializing in digital defenses of artificial intelligence and sensitive networks.

While Booz Allen did not specify how much it spent, or exactly when the deal was completed, it did say the move was made to bolster its adversarial AI portfolio, which aims to shield the increasingly popular algorithms and applications from malign manipulation.

“Our clients operate in complex environments that require AI models be highly specialized, rapidly deployable, and secure,” Matt Keating, who leads Booz Allens’ adversarial AI efforts, said in a statement. “The HiddenLayer investment by Booz Allen Ventures better positions us to integrate startup, commercial, and open-source innovation to rapidly augment our existing capabilities.”

The U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community are leaning into AI, autonomy and the like to gain advantages on the battlefield and more effectively parse mountains of national-security information.

Increased adoption, though, can open the door for vulnerabilities, such as data poisoning or code tampering. Systems or equipment with pattern-recognition capabilities require significant amounts of exposure — plentiful, verified information upon which they are trained — to get the job done.

Palantir wins $250 million US Army AI research contract

“HiddenLayer’s powerful platform and expert team has proven effective in securing AI from a broad range of threats, so we quickly identified them as a partner that can support and protect our AI deployments,” Travis Bales, managing director at Booz Allen Ventures, said in a statement.

The commitment to HiddenLayer, which in September announced a $50 million funding round, is the latest made by Booz Allen in the AI arena.

The company previously invested in Shift5 and Synthetaic. The former concerns itself with cybersecurity and predictive maintenance. The latter made headlines when it used its AI tools to independently track the Chinese spy ballon that zigzagged across the U.S. earlier this year. Synthetaic in August also announced a cloud-computing partnership with Microsoft.

Booz Allen in 2022 earned nearly $6 billion in defense revenue, securing it the No. 18 spot on the Defense News “Top 100,” a list of the world’s largest defense contractors. The company reaped $5.5 billion the year prior.

Britain pumps nearly $5 billion into future AUKUS submarine pipeline

LONDON — The British Government has committed nearly £4 billion, or $4.9 billion, to the next phase in the development of nuclear-powered submarines as part of the tri-national AUKUS program with Australia and the United States.

BAE Systems, Babcock Marine and Rolls-Royce received contracts with that combined total sum, with work aimed at developing a nuclear attack submarine for Britain and Australia.

Design, prototyping and purchase of key long-lead items for the first U.K. submarines set for delivery in the late 2030s are covered by the investment, new British Defence Secretary Grant Shapps announced in a speech to the governing Conservative party conference, which opened in Manchester on Oct. 1.

BAE said in a statement that the funding will cover development work up to 2028, enabling the company to begin detailed design and start to procure long-lead items.

Australia announced in March it would partner with the British in designing and building a submarine known as SSN-AUKUS.

The boat will incorporate Australian, British and US technologies.

Primarily, the AUKUS deal, agreed in 2021, covers submarine construction, basing and operation, but a second element of the deal also includes a range of separate high-tech weapons.

The first SSN-AUKUS boats will be built at BAE’s Barrow-in-Furniss, northwest England, yard as a replacement for the Royal Navy’s Astute class attack submarines starting in the late 2030s.

Barrow is currently building the final two of seven Astute boats and has also begun construction on three of what will be a fleet of four Dreadnought-class nuclear missile-equipped submarines.

BAE said that the new contract with the MoD also includes significant infrastructure investment in its Barrow shipyard, investment in the supply chain and recruitment of more than 5,000 people.

The company has been looking at design options to replace the Astute since at least 2018.

Australian-built boats will follow first deliveries to the British, with the first platforms from a site near Adelaide scheduled for handover in the 2040s.

The conventionally armed British and Australian boats will both use nuclear power plants built in the U.K. by Rolls-Royce, although elements of the propulsion system will come from the United States.

Speaking to Conservative Party members, Shapps said: “This multi-billion-pound investment in the AUKUS submarine program will help deliver the long-term, hunter-killer submarine capabilities the U.K. needs to maintain our strategic advantage and secure our leading place in a contested global order.”

Up to five Virginia-class boats are slated for purchase from the U.S., with deliveries in the 2030s allowing the Australians to get to grips with the operation of its first nuclear-powered submarines ahead of delivery of the SSN-AUKUS.

House passes a 45-day funding plan, sends it to Senate as clock ticks

On the brink of a federal government shutdown, the House on Saturday swiftly approved a 45-day funding bill to keep federal agencies open as Speaker Kevin McCarthy dropped demands for steep spending cuts and relied on Democratic votes for passage to send the package to the Senate.

The new approach would leave behind aid to Ukraine, a White House priority opposed by a growing number of GOP lawmakers, but the plan would increase federal disaster assistance by $16 billion, meeting President Joe Biden’s full request. The package was approved 335-91, with most Republicans and almost all Democrats supporting.

Are you ‘essential?’ What happens to your job in a government shutdown

With hours to go before the midnight deadline to fund the government, the Senate was also in for a rare weekend session and prepared to act next.

“We’re going to do our job,” McCarthy said before the House vote. “We’re going to be adults in the room. And we’re going to keep government open.”

With no deal in place before Sunday, federal workers will face furloughs, more than 2 million active-duty and reserve military troops will work without pay and programs and services that Americans rely on from coast to coast will begin to face shutdown disruptions.

The House measure would fund government at current 2023 levels for 45 days, through Nov. 17, moving closer to the bipartisan approach in the Senate. But the Senate package would have added $6 billion for Ukraine to fight the war against Russia and $6 billion for U.S. disaster relief.

Both chambers came to a standstill as lawmakers assessed their options, some decrying the loss of Ukraine aid.

“The American people deserve better,” said House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, warning in a lengthy floor speech that “extreme” Republicans were risking shutdown.

For the House package to be approved, McCarthy, R-Calif., was forced to rely on Democrats because the speaker’s hard-right flank has said it will oppose any short-term funding measure, denying him the votes needed from his slim majority. It’s a move that risks his job amid calls for his ouster.

After leaving his right-flank behind, McCarthy is almost certain to be facing a motion to try to remove from office, though it is not at all certain there would be enough votes to topple the speaker. Most Republicans voted for the package Saturday while 90 opposed.

“If somebody wants to remove me because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy said of the threat to oust him. “But I think this country is too important.”

The White House was tracking the developments on Capitol Hill and aides were briefing the president, who was spending the weekend in Washington.

The quick pivot comes after the collapse Friday of McCarthy’s earlier plan to pass a Republican-only bill with steep spending cuts up to 30% to most government agencies that the White House and Democrats rejected as too extreme.

“Our options are slipping away every minute,” said one senior Republican, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida.

The federal government is heading straight into a shutdown that poses grave uncertainty for federal workers in states all across America and the people who depend on them — from troops to border control agents to office workers, scientists and others.

Families that rely on Head Start for children, food benefits and countless other programs large and small are confronting potential interruptions or outright closures. At the airports, Transportation Security Administration officers and air traffic controllers are expected to work without pay, but travelers could face delays in updating their U.S. passports or other travel documents.

An earlier McCarthy plan to keep the government open collapsed Friday due to opposition from a faction of 21 hard-right holdouts despite steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions.

The White House has brushed aside McCarthy’s overtures to meet with Biden after the speaker walked away from the debt deal they brokered earlier this year that set budget levels.

Catering to his hard-right flank, McCarthy had returned to the spending limits the conservatives demanded back in January as part of the deal-making to help him become the House speaker.

After Friday’s vote, McCarthy’s chief Republican critic, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, said the speaker’s bill “went down in flames as I’ve told you all week it would.”

Gaetz has warned he will file a motion calling a vote to oust the speaker.

Some of the Republican holdouts, including Gaetz, are allies of former President Donald Trump, who is Biden’s chief rival in the 2024 race. Trump has been encouraging the Republicans to fight hard for their priorities and even to “shut it down.”

At an early closed-door meeting at the Capitol, several House Republicans, particularly those facing tough reelections next year, urged their colleagues to find a way to prevent a shutdown.

“All of us have a responsibility to lead and to govern,” said Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York.

But the lone Democrat to vote against the package, Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois, the co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, called it a victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin and “Putin-sympathizers everywhere.” He said, “Protecting Ukraine is in our national interest.”

Congress avoids government shutdown, drops Ukraine aid

WASHINGTON ― Congress on Saturday passed a short-term funding bill to avoid a government shutdown mere hours before the deadline and after lawmakers dropped additional support for Ukraine from the bill.

After trying and failing to pass a Republican measure that would slash non-defense spending and enact strict immigration policies, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., reversed course on early Saturday morning and offered a stopgap funding bill similar to the bipartisan Senate version – minus $6 billion in Ukraine aid.

This ensures troops and Defense Department employees will continue receiving their paychecks and avoids furloughing hundreds of thousands of the department’s civilian workers. However, it raises questions about Congress’ ability to pass additional Ukraine assistance only a week after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Capitol Hill in a direct appeal to lawmakers, warning that his country would lose the war without more support.

The House passed the stopgap measure to fund the government through November 17 in a 335-91 vote. The Senate then passed it in an 88-9 vote.

The Defense Department no longer has funds for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative and the $1.5 billion it has left to backfill U.S. stockpiles of weapons that have been sent to Kyiv expires on September 30. The Pentagon says that a previous accounting error means it has approximately $5.5 billion in funds to keep transferring weapons to Ukraine past the end of the fiscal year.

The White House in August asked Congress for an additional $24 billion in additional military and economic aid to Ukraine. But even in the Senate, where Ukraine enjoys broad bipartisan support, appropriators scaled that back to $6 billion.

That amount included $1.5 billion in replenishment funds to backfill U.S. stocks and another $1.5 billion for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, which allows the Pentagon to place contracts for defense manufacturers to build weapons systems for Kyiv over the longer-term.

But even an extra $6 billion for Ukraine proved to be too high a bar for McCarthy. While a strong, bipartisan majority of the House still supports Ukraine aid, roughly half the House Republican caucus now opposes it.

House Republican leaders had to strip a separate $300 million in Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative funding from the defense spending bill on Thursday in order to pass that legislation largely along party lines. The House then voted 311-117 to send that $300 million in Ukraine funding separately to the Senate. Dozens more Republicans who had previously voted to preserve that funding in July reversed course and voted against it on Thursday.

Dropping the Ukraine aid also allowed the Senate to expeditiously pass the stopgap funding bill. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., had spent the past week delaying votes on the bill to protest the Ukraine aid, but dropped his hold after its removal.

Congress has passed a cumulative $113 billion in economic and security assistance for Ukraine since Russia’s invasion last year.

While a shutdown would have been the worst-case scenario for the Defense Department, short-term funding bills still impose considerable constraints.

Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti testified before Congress in September that the Navy will not be able to proceed with procurement on four of its nine shipbuilding programs until Congress passes a full fiscal 2024 defense spending bill. Those programs are the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, the Virginia-class attack submarine, the Constellation-class frigate and a submarine tender replacement.

The stopgap funding bill includes a carveout that would allow the Navy to procure the Columbia-class submarine – but not the other ships – before Congress approves a full budget.

If Congress fails to pass a full budget by the next calendar year, the May debt ceiling agreement mandates that all federal agencies – including the Defense Department – operate on a one-year continuing resolution with a 1% cut for the rest of FY24.