By just about any standard, the Air Force’s science and technology budget is massive. The Air Force Research Laboratory spends about $2 billion per year conducting research with the Air Force’s own funds and handles another $3 billion worth of projects for other agencies.

But the service’s current leadership has questions about precisely how those dollars are spent, and so the Air Force will spend the next year studying the degree to which they’re producing scientific advances that will be relevant to their successors a decade or two from now.

ARL will lead the project, but leaders have already enlisted outside help, including from the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said Monday.

“We will listen broadly and engage those who are on the cutting edge of science, so that we can focus our research efforts on the pathways that are vital to our future as a service,” she said, during opening remarks at the Air Force Association’s annual conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “This strategy will guide both what we prioritize for research and how we conduct our research. It will define our highest research priorities to be sure, but it will also help us strengthen new relationships between our Air Force and the science community, our universities and our industry partners.”

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The four shipyards the Navy owns and operates to maintain its fleet are in very bad shape.

The Navy knows this, and has already requested an unprecedented amount of funding to help dig out of the massive backlog of maintenance involving both its ships and the facilities that keep them in good working order. But considering how long the facility problems have been allowed to fester, even the amount of money the Navy has proposed for 2018 seems unlikely to put it on a trajectory to fix the problems.

The shipyard facility maintenance backlog has grown by 41 percent over the past five years, according to a report the Government Accountability Office released last week. The same report revealed a host of details about how severely the shipyards have deteriorated.

For instance, they now include at least four dozen buildings — comprising 1.2 million square feet of space — that are “condemned, uninhabitable, or otherwise unusable” for ship repairs or any other work.

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Navy officials say there is still not a shred of evidence that malicious cyber activity had anything to do with the baffling string of four at-sea accidents involving its vessels in the eastern Pacific since the start of the year. But repeated public speculation on that front may be having a positive side effect: pressing the Navy to add cyber considerations to its investigations into major incidents and gaming out how it would actually respond in the event of a bona fide electronic attack.

The Navy did not immediately include cyber as part of its investigation into the collision involving the U.S.S. Fitzgerald in June. But after the second crash involving fatalities, the one involving the U.S.S. John S, McCain, the service did decide to dispatch a team of experts from its 10^th Fleet to try to find any signs of “anomalous activity.”

That team, along with technical experts from Naval Sea Systems Command and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, are currently dockside examining the McCain’s systems in Singapore, where it’s temporarily moored following the ship’s collision with a commercial tanker last month.

“We’re trying to do a couple of things,” Vice Adm. Jan Tighe, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last week. “One is to try to confirm that cyber had no role in the collision, but also determine how we move forward in making this a normal part of these kinds of investigations. It is something that we think about a lot, and we’ve got to have both the authorities and the human capital built that’s ready to respond to these types of events.”

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The Defense Department has published long-awaited regulations to implement a new personnel system for the civilian members of its cyber workforce, saying the new policies are intended to make the military’s various components “employers of choice” for top cyber talent.

Congress first authorized the new Cyber Excepted Service in December 2015 to give DoD broader flexibilities to hire, fire and pay employees with critical cyber skills. And while DoD initially said it intended to apply the authorities only to “high-end” operators, the final plan incorporates a broad range of occupations, ranging from entry-level technical administrative employees to senior managers.

In many ways, the new personnel structure closely resembles the civil service system that already governs the vast majority of the federal civilian workforce. It incorporates existing federal laws in Title 5, such merit system principles, prohibited personnel practices, equal employment opportunity and prohibitions against nepotism. Veterans preference would still apply, and pay rates would be linked to the General Schedule.

But it also differs from the traditional system in several respects.

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At least one member of Congress has taken notice of a newly disclosed investigation that found employees at the Navy’s largest shipyard ran an expensive and unauthorized police force for more than a decade.

In a letter to Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) demanded to know what actions the Navy has taken to discipline any employees who were found to have been at fault in the long-running scandal at Norfolk Naval Shipyard, why no one was prosecuted, and what steps the service has taken to prevent similar occurrences at other bases.

An internal investigation by Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), which was first reported by Federal News Radio, found that at least $21 million in public funds was wasted by shipyard employees and supervisors as they amassed unauthorized weapons and vehicles — including an armored personnel carrier — going so far as to manufacture their own license plates for the illicitly-acquired fleet.

“There is no plausible explanation for the egregious waste, misuse of federal property and outright theft that was allowed to occur under numerous commanding officers,” Speier said in a statement. “No one in the Navy appeared to demonstrate any concern about these abuses, despite obvious red flags. Seven different commanding officers were either oblivious to or complicit with what was going on. Either way, the public deserves accountability and I expect real answers to my questions about this violation of the public’s trust.”

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The Trump administration is throwing its weight behind a congressional proposal that would largely bypass the government’s existing mechanisms for buying commercial goods, giving a full-throated endorsement to the idea of Amazon-like “marketplaces” for federal purchasing.

The General Services Administration has worked closely with Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, on his proposal to require the government to create new business deals with at least two companies that already run commercial e-commerce platforms, said Alan Thomas, the newly-appointed commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service.

“We are pretty excited about the Thornberry bill and the ability of the commercial marketplaces and GSA’s role to sort of sponsor and broker those and help make those work within the construct of the federal procurement system,” he told a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee last week. “We think that’s a real step in the right direction, and from our standpoint, we’re supportive.”

The initial draft proposal for the marketplaces would have applied only to the Defense Department, but the final version of the National Defense Authorization Act that passed the full House last week would implement them governmentwide. The legislation would order GSA to contract with “two or more” companies that run existing online e-commerce portals so that federal agencies could use them to quickly purchase commercial goods.

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In what may turn out to be a thaw in the years-long congressional refusal to even consider the possibility of conducting another round of military base realignments and closures (BRAC), two key senators are circulating draft legislation that could finally authorize a BRAC-like process in 2021.

BRAC-like, because the draft proposal being quietly floated by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, differs in several major ways from the BRAC process Congress has used five times since 1988 to overcome the political difficulties of closing bases.

McCain has criticized that process in recent months, saying it’s an “act of cowardice” for members of Congress not to be involved in decisions about which bases to close.

So, for starters, the new round would skip the part of the process that involves an independent BRAC commission. Historically, those panels have been placed in charge of reviewing DoD’s list of recommended base closures, scrutinizing them in nationwide public hearings, determining whether they meet the objectives Congress has laid out for the closure round in question, revising the list, and then submitting it to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

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A year after then-chief information officer Terry Halvorsen first publicly floated the idea of killing DoD’s Common Access Card in favor of a collection of more flexible authentication technologies, the Pentagon is beginning to test drive at least one of the potential replacements for the CAC.

Last week, the Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental reached an agreement with Plurilock Technologies, a Victoria, British Columbia-based firm that holds several patents on behavior-based authentication (or, “behaviour-based,” to our friends to the north).

The company claims that after spending about 20 minutes monitoring and analyzing the specific patterns people engage in when using their computers — particularly their habits when pressing keys on their keyboards and their mouse movement techniques — its software can build a reliable digital fingerprint for any user that can be used later on to sound an alarm when an impostor is logged onto a system using someone else’s credentials.

“Human behavior has a degree of variability — it’s organic,” Plurilock’s CEO, Ian Paterson said in an interview. “A person may have had coffee in the morning, they may be tired at the end of the day, but they still retain unique characteristics, and that’s what we track.”

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Last week’s Senate markup of that chamber’s version of the annual Defense authorization bill was conducted with even more secrecy than usual, so it will be another few days before we see the actual text of the legislation the Senate Armed Services Committee approved. But it includes several provisions that are meant to crack down on what committee members believe is wasteful spending on software programs (and hardware programs that are highly dependent on software).

Perhaps most significantly, the Senate version of the NDAA would completely eliminate funding for the Army’s Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, the family of airborne, satellite and land-based communications systems the service has described as the backbone of its future tactical network. The Army has already spent $6 billion on WIN-T and had requested more than $400 million to continue developing and fielding its second increment in 2018. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the committee’s chairman, recently characterized the program as a “debacle.”

The committee’s decision was largely based on an independent report on WIN-T’s progress and status that Congress first commissioned two years ago. The results are now in, according to a congressional staff member who described them as “damning,” though they have not yet been made public.

“Our intent is to give the Army some space to take a look at the entire [tactical] network. It’s not just WIN-T, it’s the entire network, which is a very complicated thing,” said a second senior staffer who described the bill and the committee’s thinking to reporters on condition of anonymity. “The report is rather clear about the concerns, which, by the way, are the same concerns the chief of staff of the Army has.”

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Come next year, military retirees and family members might be required to kick in a few extra dollars when filling their drug prescriptions in order to fund a benefit program for military widows and widowers that’s perilously close to running out of money.

The program, known as the Special Survivor Indemnity Allowance (SSIA), currently pays $310 per month to about 63,000 Americans whose spouses died either on active duty or during retirement after having paid into DoD’s Survivor Benefits Plan. The fund that pays the SSIA benefits is due to expire next May, and at the moment, there’s no plan to replenish it.

In recent years, Congress has patched over the problem with short-term workarounds, but in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted last week to create a long-term funding stream for SSIA, paid by higher pharmacy copays in DoD’s TRICARE program.

The exact amount of the proposed fee hikes is unclear, since, as of this writing, the committee has not released the full text of the bill it approved. But an executive summary committee staff distributed on May 29 advertises the measure as a “permanent” fix to the SSIA program.

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