Services provider KBR was awarded a $71 million task order from the Defense Health Agency (DHA). […]

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) move to the cloud is fueled by the agency’s desire to improve interoperability and adopt emerging technologies, according to officials speaking during yesterday’s MeriTalk webinar. On the webinar, which was underwritten by AWS and Red Hat, Stephen Moon, senior solutions architect, DoD at Amazon Web Services, and Ted Brunell, chief architect, DoD at Red Hat discussed why cloud is mission-critical and how DoD sees it shaping the future.

Brian Sadler, senior scientist for intelligent systems at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, today discussed how the expanse of artificial intelligence (AI) research activities across the Army is bringing to light even greater challenges.

La’Naia Jones, Deputy CIO of the Intelligence Community, said today that the commoditization of hacking capabilities, expansion of IT supply chain exploits, and nation-state use of ransomware have come to the attention of the IC as primary areas of interest in the fight for better cybersecurity.

The Army could soon be leveraging more autonomous vehicle capabilities and commercial communications solutions to bring it closer to a goal of persistent communications, persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and faster decision speed.

Charles Phalen, director of the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB), said Sunday in an appearance on Government Matters that his organization has been working with the Defense Department since December 2017 to shift the entirety of its operations over to DoD, long ahead of a coming executive order from President Trump that will make the move official.

General Paul Nakasone, head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and U.S. Cyber Command (CyberCom), recommended keeping the agencies under the same leader for the next two years, according to a report by the Washington Post

The Defense Department is pushing full speed ahead on modernization efforts, with recent strides made on a $28 billion R&D project, a $10 billion cloud infrastructure proposed contract, efforts to move cyber defense infrastructure to the cloud, along with myriad advanced research and futuristic projects. They’re even working to overhaul their travel planning system. Call it AirDoD, perhaps?

The Department of Defense (DoD) has hired Michael Conlin as its first chief data officer (CDO). According to his LinkedIn profile, Conlin started in his new position in July.

The Department of Defense (DoD) announced the selection of SAP Concur for a $9.3 million contract to develop a new system to replace the current Defense Travel System.

The Defense Department announced Tuesday that it awarded 15 companies the right to compete for task orders in a potential nine-year, $28 billion technology research and development contract for its Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).

The Army needs help from academia and the private sector to modernize its workflow, explained Maj. Gen. Garrett Yee, acting deputy CIO for the U.S. Army, during an Avaya webinar today. Yee specifically stressed an interest in industry helping to make the Army’s workflows interoperable and said that “workflows at the installation level must be scalable” to achieve true modernization.

The Pentagon is moving to protect its personnel from unintentionally advertising when they’re in an operational, and possibly secret, location. The new policy is a response to the revelation in January that a global heat map posted by fitness tracking company Strava could be used to identify the locations and activities of military personnel, even down to individuals, at military outposts around the world or in high-security areas such as the National Security Agency.

Stacey Dixon will be the next director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).

The idea that you can’t trust everything you see on the Internet is a conventional, if sporadically followed, wisdom. But as hackers become increasingly skilled and sneaky, as “fake news” officially enters the dictionary, and as fake video and fake audio become more of a thing, you might not necessarily be paranoid to wonder if you can trust anything.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) welcomed several new faces to cybersecurity and IT leadership positions on Monday, as FBI Director Christopher Wray announced four appointments to leadership positions.

The National Security Agency published a news feature today that provides a new, NSA-developed resource for organizations looking to promote the well-being of their cybersecurity personnel. Dr. Celeste Lyn-Paul, senior researcher and technical advisor at NSA Research, and Dr. Josiah Dykstra, deputy technical director of NSA Cybersecurity Operations, developed the Cyber Operations Stress Survey (COSS) to help gauge stress levels of security personnel in high-risk environments.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded to TekSynap, a small business based in Reston, Va., a $435 million contract for enterprise IT services and support for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA).

MITRE, a manager of Federally-funded research and development centers targeting Federal defense, intelligence, and cybersecurity functions, recommended in a new report released today that the Defense Department (DoD) undertake a sweeping menu of actions to improve military supply chain security, and warned that maintaining the status quo of current security policy may have ruinous consequences.

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk.