The secretary’s order, signed Friday but first made public Tuesday, came after an eye-opening investigation by ProPublica revealed Microsoft had been relying on China-based engineers to support DOD cloud computing systems.

Short on specific details, Hegseth’s order enlists the CIO — with the support of the department’s heads of acquisition and sustainment, intelligence and security, and research and engineering — to “take immediate actions to ensure to the maximum extent possible that all information technology capabilities, including cloud services, developed and procured for DoD are reviewed and validated as secure against supply chain attacks by adversaries such as China and Russia.”

Hegseth first referenced his order in a video posted to X on Friday, in which he said, “some tech companies have been using cheap Chinese labor to assist with DoD cloud services,” calling for a “two-week review” to make sure that isn’t happening anywhere else in the department’s tech supply chains.

The secretary, in both his video and the new memo, stopped short of calling out Microsoft specifically. However, a spokesperson for the company has since stated publicly that it has made changes to “assure that no China-based engineering teams are providing technical assistance for DoD Government cloud and related services.”

“This is obviously unacceptable, especially in today’s digital threat environment,” Hegseth said in the Friday video, claiming that the system at the center of the incident is “a legacy system created over a decade ago during the Obama administration.”

He added: “We have to ensure the digital systems that we use here at the Defense Department are ironclad and impenetrable, and that’s why today I’m announcing that China will no longer have any involvement whatsoever in our cloud services.”

The memo itself calls on the department to “fortify existing programs and processes utilized within the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) to ensure that adversarial foreign influence is appropriately eliminated or mitigated and determine what, if any, additional actions may be required to address these risks.” Specifically, it cites the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) — the final rule for which, as of Wednesday, is undergoing regulatory review with the Office of Management and Budget — acting CIO Katie Arrington’s new Software Fast Track program, and the FedRAMP process as existing efforts the Pentagon CIO should rely on to ensure the department’s tech is secure.

Within 15 days of the order’s signing, DOD’s Office of the CIO must issue additional implementing guidance on the matter, led by department CISO Dave McKeown.

On top of that, it taps the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security to “review and validate personnel security practices and insider threat programs of the DIB and cloud service providers to the maximum extent possible.”

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SDA announced the delay for Tranche 1 of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) in a statement on Friday, citing continued supply chain woes as the main contributor to the decision to postpone launch. The agency plans to conduct around one launch per month until all 154 Tranche 1 sats are on orbit.

The news marks yet another setback for SDA, which in recent weeks has been grappling with leadership changes and questions regarding the agency’s semi-independent acquisition authorities. However, the launch delay appears to be caused by supply chain bottlenecks related to the sheer number of satellites the agency plans to put on orbit.

“SDA continues to aggressively work toward the first Tranche 1 launch; however, as we progress through a normal assembly, integration, and testing campaign, with the added challenge of late supplier deliveries, it has become clear additional time is required for system readiness to meet the Tranche 1 minimum viable capability,” the agency said in a statement.

The PWSA is a planned constellation comprising hundreds of satellites stationed in low-Earth orbit. The program is divided into two main mission areas — data relay and communications in the transport layer, and missile warning and tracking in the tracking layer. SDA initially pursued an aggressive acquisition and launch schedule known as “spiral development,” which sought to put new satellites in space every two years.

The agency originally planned to begin launching Tranche 1 — considered the first operational batch of PWSA sats that would provide regional coverage of the Earth — in September 2024. That date was then postponed and re-slated for spring 2025, largely due to supply chain bottlenecks that have been a persistent hurdle in the architecture’s development.

Tranche 1 will consist of 158 satellites, including 126 in the transport layer, 28 in the tracking layer and four “missile defense demonstration” satellites. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, York Space Systems and L3Harris are all prime contractors on the program.

The number of sats is a stark contrast to previous military space constellations, which historically only included a small quantity of large and exquisite space vehicles. As a result, both SDA and the space industrial base have been challenged to deliver critical parts — including optical communications terminals (OCT) and encryption devices — on time and at the scale needed to launch the PWSA.

“OCTs have experienced some scaling issues, encryption devices are limited and subject to approval outside SDA, propulsion systems were a challenge on [tranche 1] due to business issues as a supplier that several [tranche 1] prime vendors were using,” an SDA official told DefenseScoop on background.

The launch campaign for tranche 1 will begin with the transport layer, the official added. However, the agency has not yet determined which vendor will be the first to go on orbit in summer 2025, or how many space vehicles will be part of the inaugural tranche 1 launch, they said.

SDA emphasized that despite the latest delay in launching Tranche 1, the agency is committed to finishing on-orbit test and checkout of the satellites by mid-2026 and delivering “the entire initial warfighting capability” in early 2027.

“We are conducting enhanced integration checks and testing on the ground between now and the start of launch which helps build a higher degree of operational confidence,” the SDA official said. “It should also smooth out the test and checkout process on orbit to allow us to get to initial warfighting capabilities in 2027, as the warfighter is expecting.”

The official said subsequent launch campaigns for tranches 2 and 3 are still on track, noting that SDA began the acquisition process for tranche 3 earlier to allow for more time between award and launch. Because the supply chain issues impeding tranche 1 are related to scaling up production, the agency believes it will experience fewer delays once the industrial base catches up to SDA’s demand, they added.

“SDA’s top priority is to quickly deliver capabilities promised to the warfighter. Launch is a major milestone but one in a much larger path to delivering viable capabilities. Our goal remains to rapidly deliver functional capabilities with a high degree of operational confidence,” the agency said in a statement.

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Sullivan shared new details about those takeaways and other defense-related discussions he’s engaging in amid the presidential transition — including the Pentagon’s fast-tracked drone-fielding initiative Replicator — with a small group of reporters at the White House on Wednesday. 

“[One] area where we’ve begun the process, where I think they need to move very rapidly, is in the integration of artificial intelligence capabilities into not just weapons systems, but everything — the back office, logistics and supply systems — all of it, basically,” he told DefenseScoop at the invite-only roundtable.

Broadly, the DIB encompasses the entities that provide the military with the material, products and services needed to deter and prevail in conflict and global competition. 

But beyond that, the Biden administration has also called on the DIB to produce those items for international partners currently engaged in warfare, including Ukraine and Israel — as well as Taiwan, for deterrence purposes. 

Sullivan noted that in his early months at the White House, his team was sharply focused on the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan and “working through kind of setting up [the administration’s] strategy with respect to a lot of other significant issues in the world.”  

“So, DIB was not at the top of the list for me, walking in the door. And it was really the lead-up to the war in Ukraine in the fall of ‘21 that I began to recognize that, in many respects, the cupboard was bare,” Sullivan said.

Around that same time, the AUKUS trilateral security alliance between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. was announced. Sullivan subsequently started looking into the submarine industrial base’s capacity for tasks associated with the partnership’s Pillar I aims.

“People would produce charts for me — basically going back to 1990 — the workforce challenges, the supply chain challenges, the under-investment. And it became clear to me that this has been a story that I don’t think has gotten the attention it’s deserved,” Sullivan explained.

Those experiences made him fully recognize what he called “the importance of a demand signal from the top.” 

During Sullivan’s tenure, Biden’s administration published the U.S.’s first National Defense Industrial Strategy and implementation plan to guide engagement, policy development, and investment in the DIB in the near term.

“Turning the vision into execution is difficult, and it takes persistence and repeat demand signal. And even then, you’re only going to get a portion of the things you are asking for. And so one of my pieces of advice for the incoming team is, right out of the gate, take this momentum that we’ve begun to build up and really push. Don’t kind of wait a year or two years on it. Let’s push now,” Sullivan said.

DefenseScoop asked the national security advisor to expand on some of the other tips he’s leaving behind to his counterparts in the Trump administration.

“One of the things that I have asked the incoming team to do is to take a brief on the elements of the defense industrial base that I’ve taken so that in the early weeks, they’re sort of fully up to speed on exactly what we’re still facing as deficits — with respect to subs, with respect to long-range strike. Those are two areas in particular that I would be focused on and that I told the next team to take a hard look at,” Sullivan said. 

On his way out, Sullivan said he’s also encouraging the incoming team to continue to focus on accelerating AI adoption across the Pentagon and military, which was also a top priority in Trump’s first administration.

“I think DOD is working that, but we have to go a lot further, a lot faster. So that’s another area that I’ve told the upcoming team to put attention to. We’ve got this national security memorandum. It has put out a lot of tasks for the defense enterprise. Those tasks are beginning to be completed, but that work is going to have to continue in a big way under the new team,” Sullivan told DefenseScoop. 

Also among what he considers to be the Biden administration’s DIB-enabling accomplishments is the long list of moves to support Ukraine’s military in response to Russia’s large-scale invasion.

“I think the single biggest thing about this war that we have not seen as acutely in previous conflicts is the need to constantly adapt and iterate — that it is a learning function on both sides. There’s an innovation in a capability, it produces great lethality. The other side adjusts, comes up with an electronic warfare solution to degrade that lethality, the other side then has to adjust. And so it’s war through some combination of technological adjustment and software update, and that is an unusual thing for people used to fighting a more static type of conflict,” Sullivan said.

The U.S., under Biden, committed to injecting more than $1.5 billion in multiple types of investments to help Ukraine get to a point where it can manufacture and produce drones at scale — steadily, during a still-unfolding war, he said.

“And the point that I’m trying to register for the incoming team is [that] whatever happens in Ukraine, the need for this sustained scale-up is there for U.S. deterrence and U.S. defense needs for this foreseeable future — and we just have to be able to somehow convert that reality into an actionable demand signal that industry can respond on,” Sullivan told reporters. 

Applying lessons learned from Ukraine domestically, the administration held what Sullivan called a “first-of-its-kind conference” with officials from across the U.S. combatant commands and Pentagon acquisition components “to take stock of, essentially, where does this UAV component fit into the future of warfare.”

Biden appointees leading the Pentagon launched the high-profile Replicator initiative to accelerate the delivery of next-generation warfighting technologies in repeatable processes — beginning with thousands of drones to be fielded by August 2025 to counter China’s growing military build-up. 

“The idea is basically to learn a lot of the lessons that we’ve seen over the course of the past couple of years from Ukraine,” Sullivan noted.

He declined to give reporters a precise timeline for Replicator system deployment plans but expressed confidence that it would carry on as a priority initiative in the Trump administration.

“I have no reason to believe the new team is going to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to take that away.’ You’d have to ask them, but I think that that has a momentum of its own that can and should continue,” Sullivan said.

To date, Trump’s team has not disclosed whether they aim to cut, keep or modify Replicator. Spokespersons from his transition team did not respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment before publication.

“What’s interesting to me is that if the U.S. actually went to war tomorrow — itself — I think that the pace of change would iterate much more rapidly. So, the possibility that this timeline can be accelerated just through agency is there. Now, agency typically is driven more by external imperatives. Necessity being the mother of invention, rather than just by us coming together to say we’re going to do it,” Sullivan told reporters.

“But my pitch to the incoming team is, with all the lessons we’ve now learned and the picture we now see so clearly, let’s take some steps, and let’s do it on a bipartisan basis,” he said.

The post What Jake Sullivan wants the Trump administration to know about the defense industrial base appeared first on DefenseScoop.

“We do not have the industrial capacity built today to get after this,” Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. Michael Guetlein said Dec. 7 during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “We’re going to have to start getting comfortable with the lack of efficiency in the industrial base to start getting excess capacity so that we have something to go to in times of crisis and conflict.”

Resilience through proliferation

Historically, the Defense Department tended to develop a few very large and exquisite satellites to conduct critical military missions. But with the growing use of space as a warfighting domain by both the United States and its adversaries, the Pentagon is now focusing on different ways to build resilience in its space systems — such as by launching hundreds of smaller, inexpensive satellites for a single constellation.

At the forefront of the relatively novel approach is the Space Development Agency’s spiral acquisition strategy that is being used for the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA). Once it’s built out, the constellation is expected to comprise hundreds of satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and include space vehicles carrying different communications, data relay, missile warning and missile tracking capabilities.

SDA plans to field systems in batches every two years, with each iteration carrying the latest technology available. Although the first operational satellites known as Tranche 1 were slated to launch in fall 2024, that deadline has since been delayed to March or April 2025 due to supply chain bottlenecks, according to SDA Director Derek Tournear.

“I will say that what we’re seeing in the supply chain in the small LEO market has caught up to what SDA’s needs are, but it took them about eight months longer than they anticipated to ramp up,” Tournear said during a panel at the Reagan National Defense Forum. 

A total of 158 satellites are being developed for Tranche 1 of the PWSA: 126 data transport sats, 28 missile warning/missile tracking sats and four missile defense demonstration sats. The agency will also launch 12 tactical demonstration satellites under the Tranche 1 Demonstration and Experimentation System (T1DES) initiative to test new capabilities that can be leveraged in future PWSA tranches.

Across that order, four prime contractors are on the program — York Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and L3Harris — and each of them is working with dozens of subcontractors.

Executives from various Tranche 1 primes who spoke to DefenseScoop acknowledged that they encountered supply chain bottlenecks in their work for the contract. Issues have now mostly been resolved and the vendors are on track to launch by the new deadline, they said.

However, companies are still using those lessons learned to mitigate setbacks for future tranches that go beyond just purchasing long-lead items.

“We’re seeing the results of that demand signal that SDA has been sending us on a very consistent basis through their spiral tranche acquisition. Is it perfect yet? No. We’ve got some places to go,” Rob Mitrevski, vice president and general manager of spectral solutions at L3Harris, said in an interview.

Tranche 1 isn’t the first time SDA has experienced delays. The agency was forced to push back the launch of Tranche 0 — a group of 27 satellites that served as a proof of concept for the entire PWSA — by about six months.

The holdup was attributed to supply chain bottlenecks that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when many manufacturers were forced to slow or stop production lines. Specific microelectronic components such as resistors were particularly difficult to buy, Mitrevski noted.

The recent issues aren’t caused by COVID-19 conditions, but are instead reflective of the sheer volume of systems SDA is asking of its contractors and an industrial base that wasn’t quite ready to meet the increased demand.

“I think a lot of that has been just scaling — getting past designing tens of things to designing lots of things,” Louis Christen, senior director of proliferated systems at Northrop Grumman, said during a tour of the company’s Space Park facility in Redondo Beach, California, where it’s manufacturing Tranche 1 birds.

To alleviate potential risk, Northrop Grumman has been moving through production as much as possible and building multiple satellites in parallel, Christen said. Working very closely with its multiple subcontractors throughout the process has been another critical strategy.

“Although they’re commercial suppliers, we’re not just buying stuff from them. We’re a partner. We’re there on a daily basis and helping prop them up,” he said.

Dirk Wallinger, CEO and president of York Space Systems, said challenges the company had weren’t specific to its Tranche 1 contracts, but actually reflect a lack of diversity in the supply chain that is affecting the entire space industry. 

“One of the key bottlenecks results from [requests for proposals] with subsystem performance specifications that inadvertently narrow the qualified vendor pool to a single supplier,” Wallinger told DefenseScoop. “This limits the value tradeoffs of all of the prime contractors and by creating dependency on sole-source suppliers, exacerbates delays.”

Addressing the problem would require rethinking high-level performance requirements in a manner that would diversify the supplier base and enable more competition in industry, he added.

L3Harris is also trying to move away from single or sole-source suppliers by building strong relationships with the swath of subcontractors it has worked with on all three of its contracts for the PWSA, Mitrevski said.

“The supply chain works to create scale over time, and the scale is created through a diverse group of suppliers,” he said. “What you’ve seen in the way we’ve evolved from [Tranche 0] through now [Tranche 1] and [Tranche 2] is a continual improvement of the scale and diversity in that supply chain.”

Wallinger noted that they’ve found the most effective way to mitigate supply chain risks has been to buy satellite buses from providers ahead of receiving mission specifications. In the future, it’s crucial that the government secures these long-lead items as early as possible to effectively eliminate delays, he added.

“Schedule risk is mostly induced from bus component suppliers, not mission payload developers,” Wallinger said. “Commoditized satellite buses are the only ones being considered, and by definition can support a range of mission sets. They are the critical component to procure in advance.”

Mitigating future delays

While SDA has tried to ensure its system requirements can leverage readily available hardware, Tournear said there are some components that must be tailor-made for the Tranche 1 satellites. Mesh network encryption devices that are approved by the National Security Agency have been a significant headache because there’s only one manufacturer able to make them, he said.

The agency has adjusted its timeline expectations for future PWSA tranches to allow more time for vendors to build their platforms, adding several months to overall production time.

Mitrevski also noted that SDA’s overall strategy to fund development of capabilities that can be tested early on is beneficial. 

“They have a number of efforts where they’ve clearly acquired leading-edge capabilities with the intention of driving the maturity level of those leading-edge capabilities forward and then make use of them later on,” he said. 

York Space Systems has also discussed with SDA ways to mitigate risks outside of supply chain diversification, Wallinger said. One area of improvement could be ensuring long-lead items are aligned with current and future mission requirements, he noted.

“We have had several instances where the second- and third-tier suppliers had stock on hand, but that stock didn’t have the right interface protocols or didn’t have the right form factor, and couldn’t be used to meet the actual mission needs,” he said. “So you had those suppliers spending capital on things that simply had to be completely redone at a cost to the [U.S. government] and us.”

But with plans to only grow the number of military satellites on orbit — not just for the PWSA, but also other programs across the Defense Department — SDA’s work is likely going to create a ripple effect of both growth and demand within the industrial base. The supply chain woes are serving as a “canary in the coal mine” for the national security space community writ large, and will require the entire department’s effort to fix them, Guetlein said.

“Because of the quantities that he’s ordering, he’s now starting to uncover the challenges that we have with the industrial base,” Guetlein said, referring to Tournear. “And these challenges are significant, and we need to figure out how to get after them.”

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Dubbed Arsenal-1, the new plant will allow Anduril to manufacture “tens of thousands” of autonomous systems by leveraging simplified, modular and software-defined design and production techniques not commonly used by traditional defense contractors, Chris Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, said during a meeting with reporters.

With a focus on long-range, survivable platforms with larger payloads that can operate in the Indo-Pacific, the company hopes Arsenal-1 will better position the United States in its ability to rapidly scale and field systems for current and future conflicts, Brose said.

“We will be able to deliver what the government has been asking for for years, which is a sufficient supply of defense capabilities that are actually capable of generating deterrence, that are capable of adapting with new technologies and with threats as they evolve, that are going to be mass-producible in the ways that we’ve known for a long time that we need them,” he said.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. defense industrial base has been consolidated to a handful of companies that produce very exquisite military systems for the Defense Department. But as the Pentagon prepares for large-scale conflict in the Indo-Pacific, the demand for new defense capabilities has greatly outpaced America’s ability to manufacture them — an issue that has been emphasized as the war in Ukraine continues.

“We’re struggling to do basic things like replace Stingers and Javelins, and this is like the baby version of the problem,” Brose said. “When you look at the Indo-Pacom version of that problem — where, again, war games have suggested for years that we would run out of critical munitions in the first week of a conflict — it takes even longer and harder to replace systems like that.”

To address the problem, Arsenal-1 will enable Anduril to produce autonomous systems that are specifically designed for simplicity, modularity and mass-producibility. As a result, the company should be able to easily modify systems with new technologies in order to meet new requirements and emerging threats, he said.

Anduril plans to leverage its software platform known as Lattice to manufacture systems at Arsenal-1. The technology gives the company “the ability to start with a mature software platform and then build modular, producible weapons from it, where we can control how all the different subsystems interface into the overall platform,” he added.

In addition, the company plans to leverage commercial industries as much as possible. That includes commercial supply chains, as well as a more generalized workforce that isn’t necessarily defense specific but is still able to build the systems, Brose said.

Traditional weapons programs are often defined by hyper-specific requirements and include exquisite subsystems, making it hard to effectively scale their supply chains and enable mass production, Brose noted. While Anduril doesn’t plan to eliminate military-specific components entirely, the company hopes it can minimize them from the beginning of the design phase.

“How you design these systems to take advantage of commercial supplies, commercial subsystems and simpler supply chains wherever possible? It’s a critical design feature,” he said.

Funding for Arsenal-1 will come from non-governmental sources. The company announced Thursday that it had secured $1.5 billion from investors to hyperscale defense manufacturing, part of which will be dedicated to the new manufacturing facility.

“Co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, Anduril’s Series F values the company at $14 billion and includes new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, Counterpoint Global, and Baillie Gifford, as well as major commitments from existing investors including Altimeter and Franklin Templeton,” according to a statement.

Anduril is currently scouting potential locations in the United States for Arsenal-1, and the company expects to announce when it will open in the coming months. The organization intends to build all the systems it is already developing — minus energetics due to their specific production and safety regulations, according to Brose.

The facility will likely include advanced manufacturing capabilities such as digital engineering and automation, but Brose emphasized that Anduril doesn’t believe that these technologies alone will be key to Arsenal-1’s success. Instead, the company intends to use the new tools where it most makes sense in the manufacturing process.

Still, Anduril sees inherent value in consolidating the means of production under one roof. In the future, the company hopes to open additional Arsenal facilities — both domestically and abroad, Brose said.

“Having this geographically concentrated, having this all under one roof, is what makes that sort of flexibility and hyperscale production possible, whereas it’s just not achievable when it’s as geographically disaggregated and bespoke as much of defense manufacturing is today,” he said.

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The effort, a collaboration between the Pentagon, the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), was included in a long list of initiatives released by the White House on Monday highlighting new efforts to strengthen the nation’s supply chains.

The organizations “will host a series of hackathons beginning in February 2024 to develop novel artificial intelligence approaches to assess domestic critical mineral resources,” according to a White House fact sheet.

The hackathons are a component of DARPA’s Critical Mineral Assessments with AI Support (CriticalMAAS) program.

“The goal of this AI exploration effort is to transform the workflow from a serial, predominantly manual, intermittently updated approach, to a highly parallel, continuous AI-assisted capability that is comprehensive in scope, efficient in scale, and generalizable across an array of applications,” a DARPA press release stated.

The effort builds upon a 2022 collaboration between DARPA and the USGS, MITRE and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, called the AI for Critical Mineral Assessment Competition, which held prize challenges focused on automated map georeferencing and map feature extraction.

DARPA posted an “Artificial Intelligence Exploration Opportunity” solicitation on Sam.gov in May that invited organizations to submit research proposals for four technical areas that expand on the previous effort’s focuses — extracting geospatial data from maps and documents, model extraction from knowledge, mineral potential mapping exploiting multi-model fusion, and human-in-the-loop and mixed-initiative modeling.

Last year, USGS released a list of 50 minerals that are considered critical to the United States’ economy and national security — from widely used resources like aluminum to so-called rare earth elements that are difficult to produce using domestic supply chains.

USGS is required to assess all of the nation’s critical mineral resources and update its list every four years, as mandated by the 2020 Energy Act. However, the process can be labor intensive — with USGS estimating that thoroughly assessing all critical minerals using current data, techniques and tools could take up to 50 years.

“Successful [critical mineral assessments] require fusing multi-modal data from geologic maps, mineral exploration results, geophysics, geochemistry, remote sensing and more,” the solicitation noted. “Many of the required data sources are not accessible in computable forms, either because the maps or tables were produced in the pre-digital era or because of lack of access to the original data sources, which may be proprietary. The result is that the USGS can only use a small fraction of existing data for a [critical mineral assessments].”

The solicitation also cited insufficient models of critical minerals, as well as constraints in time and personnel resources, as additional factors that bog down the assessment process.

Each of the four technical areas for CriticalMAAS aims to tackle different parts of these problems with AI-enabled solutions.

For example, DARPA is looking for algorithms that can pull data from various USGS maps and documents — some upwards of 100 years old — and turn it into high-quality digital maps that include “points, lines, and polygons accurately extracted and georeferenced.”

Other technical areas call on teams to create more detailed models of mineral deposits; develop algorithms that predict probability that a mineral deposit exists; and more broadly implement human-in-the-loop modeling and learning in each step in the critical mineral assessment workflow.

The program will be divided into a year-long phase 1 and optional six-month phase 2, according to the solicitation. Teams chosen for the first phase will participate in at least three hackathon events and an end-of-phase evaluation, the solicitation noted. Those who successfully complete challenges in phase 1 will advance to phase 2, where teams will participate in another hackathon and final evaluation and demonstration.

Although the primary focus of CriticalMAAS is on critical mineral assessment, DARPA expects that the resulting AI capabilities and data products can be transferred to other uses for government missions — including water resource management and new clean energy sources, according to the agency.

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Uncle Sam relies heavily on products and services such as computing systems, software and networks, to perform its missions, the GAO noted in a report published Thursday.

“Federal agencies have rapidly increased their reliance on commercially available products, contractor support for custom-built systems, and external service providers for a multitude of ICT solutions,” the watchdog wrote. “Many of the manufacturing inputs for these ICT products and services — whether physical materials or knowledge — originate from a variety of sources throughout the world. As a result, the federal government has also increased its reliance on complex, interconnected, and globally distributed supply chains that can include multiple tiers of outsourcing.”

Threats posed by foreign intelligence services or counterfeiters who could try to exploit vulnerabilities in the supply chain, are among the “numerous ICT risks that can compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of an organization’s systems and the information they contain,” according to the GAO.

Of the seven “foundational” practices for managing supply chain risks that GAO focused on in its report, the Pentagon has fully implemented four but only partially implemented three, the watchdog found.

The partially implemented risks management practices include developing an agencywide ICT risk management strategy, establishing a process to conduct a risk management review of a potential supplier, and developing organizational procedures to detect counterfeit and compromised ICT products before they’re deployed.

The fully implanted risk management practices include establishing oversight of ICT risk management activities, establishing an approach to identify and document agency ICT supply chains, establishing a process to conduct agencywide assessments of ICT supply chain risks, and developing organizational ICT risk management requirements for suppliers.

“Regarding the three partially implemented practices, the department has begun several efforts that are not yet complete. For example, the department has developed a risk management strategy but has not approved guidance for implementing it. DOD has also piloted the use of several tools to review potential suppliers but the review of the results is ongoing. However, DOD did not specify time frames for when these actions would be completed. Fully implementing the three remaining practices would enhance the department’s understanding and management of supply chain risks,” the watchdog said in its assessment, which was mandated by Congress in the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

The GAO made three recommendations to the Pentagon: have its chief information officer commit to a time frame to fully implement an agencywide ICT supply chain risk management strategy; have the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and the CIO commit to a time frame to fully implement a process to conduct risk management reviews of potential suppliers; and have the undersecretary for A&S and the CIO commit to a time frame to fully implement organizational counterfeit detection procedures for products prior to deployment.

The Defense Department concurred with all three recommendations, according to the GAO.

The Pentagon expects to finalize the draft of an enterprise ICT supply chain risk strategy in September, per the report.

“Regarding our second recommendation stating that the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and DOD CIO commit to a time frame to fully implement a process to conduct ICT SCRM reviews of potential suppliers … the department identified several key policies it is in the process of updating to incorporate relevant policies and procedures, as appropriate,” the GAO wrote.

The department also told the watchdog that it expected to complete its pilot efforts to evaluate various ICT counterfeit detection tools and development of related policies and procedures in fiscal 2023, and to incorporate those policies and procedures into departmentwide policy by the end of March 2024.

“If implemented effectively, the actions DOD described in its comments would address our recommendations,” the GAO stated.

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The three contracts combined are worth a total of $25 million, and were awarded by the Pentagon’s Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense Industrial Base Policy through its Office of Manufacturing Capability Expansion and Investment Prioritization (MCEIP) Directorate.

Hypersonic weapons are one of the top modernization priorities for the U.S. military, and each of the services have different missile systems at varying stages of research and development. The weapons are able to travel at speeds of Mach 5 or higher and are highly maneuverable mid-flight.

As development of the Pentagon’s systems have progressed, concerns have been raised regarding the United States’ ability to manufacture and produce their essential components — many of which must be able to withstand extremely high temperatures. The Biden Administration last month made moves to expand domestic hypersonics supply chains under the Defense Production Act.

General Electric was awarded $8 million to increase domestic production capacity for these high- and ultra-high temperature composites able to support hypersonic flight, “as well as the modernization of capital equipment to support the scale-up of aeroshell production,” the Pentagon release said. This effort will take place over a 39-month period.

Northrop Grumman also received a $9.4 million contract to expand domestic production capability for ultra-high temperature composites in order “to support multiple components of hypersonic and strategic systems.” The contract will allow the company to expand its production facilities in Elkton, Maryland with additional automated preform manufacturing equipment and high-temperature furnaces, according to the release.

The department also awarded C-CAT a $7.6 million contract to begin a 38-month effort to “build new production capabilities, expand existing manufacturing spaces, and acquire capital equipment for the manufacture of large complex assemblies made of carbon-carbon (C-C),” the release said. 

Carbon-carbon is a composite material critical for defense applications due to its strength and resistance to high-temperatures and thermal shock. Under this contract, C-CAT will work to increase production rates of nose times and aeroshell assemblies made with the material, per the release.

“The Department of Defense continues to deliver on the President’s strategic objectives of supporting industrial sectors critical to our nation’s national security needs and strategic interests,” Laura Taylor-Kale, assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, said in a statement. “The Biden Administration has identified hypersonics technology as a critical need for ensuring American national security. The Office of Industrial Base Policy — through the MCEIP team, is pleased to act on behalf of the nation to accelerate the advancement of hypersonics technology in the United States.”

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