This will be the eighth mission for the Boeing-built space plane, which has served as an on-orbit, experimental testbed for emerging technologies being developed by the Pentagon and NASA. The platform is designed to conduct long-duration flights before returning to Earth, where it can be repurposed for future missions. The system has already spent more than 4,200 days in space, according to Boeing.

Personnel are currently preparing the vehicle — which will fly with a service module — for another launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, according to a press release issued Monday. Mission partners for OTV-8, as the effort has been dubbed, include the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit.

The service module will expand capacity for laser comms demonstrations, per the release.

Laser communications demos in low-Earth orbit “will contribute to more efficient and secure satellite communications in the future. The shorter wavelength of infrared light allows more data to be sent with each transmission,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman wrote in post on X.

“We’re also demoing the world’s highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space. Bottom line: testing this tech will be helpful for navigation in contested environments where GPS may be degraded or denied,” he added.

According to Boeing’s press release, the mission will include the first in-space demonstration of a “strategic grade” quantum inertial sensor.

“OTV 8’s quantum inertial sensor demonstration is a welcome step forward for the operational resilience of Guardians in space,” Space Delta 9 Commander Col. Ramsey Hom said in a statement. “Whether navigating beyond Earth-based orbits in cis-lunar space or operating in GPS-denied environments, quantum inertial sensing allows for robust navigation capabilities where GPS navigation is not possible. Ultimately, this technology contributes significantly to our thrust within the Fifth Space Operations Squadron and across the Space Force guaranteeing movement and maneuverability even in GPS-denied environments.”

The launch date is targeted for Aug. 21, according to Saltzman.

During the space plane’s most recent mission, which started in 2023 and wrapped up earlier this year, efforts included experimenting with operating in new orbital regimes, testing space domain awareness technologies and investigating radiation effects, according to officials.

For the mission before that, the X-37B spent a whopping 908 days in orbit.

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Via its commercial solutions opening contracting mechanism, DIU is trying to find solutions that meet the U.S. military’s need for undersea kamikaze drones and UUVs that can be launched from submarines.

To address the first challenge, the organization is looking for hunter-killer systems that can be deployed from a government-provided platform or pier.

“The host vessels can either be surface or housed subsurface and most likely be uncrewed. The vehicle must be able to deliver a payload with the speed and endurance necessary to hone in and interdict a static or moving target,” per the solicitation for low-cost “undersea effectors.”

The Defense Department is aiming to acquire systems that are about 12.75 inches in diameter, 120 inches in length, and less than or equal to 800 pounds while equipped with government-furnished payloads.

To address the second challenge, DIU is also on the hunt for UUVs that can be launched and recovered via a torpedo tube without the need for drivers.

“The Vehicle should operate for at least 2 days and/or 120 nautical miles while operating with a payload,” officials wrote. “The proposed UUV should be able to support multiple communication pathways to the host submarine. Tethered options will be considered. Accurate long-range navigation systems limiting the need for GPS, transponders, or bottom lock is preferred.”

The system must not be more than 21 inches in diameter and 256 inches in length, according to the solicitation.

DIU noted that the DOD has a critical need for “affordable small and medium” UUVs that can perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and expeditionary missions.

“Current and legacy systems are designed to be multi-mission, exquisite systems requiring long production timelines, significant training, reconfiguration prior to mission, and technical experts to process data. However, there are situations where a single use, mission specific UUV can be more desirable to the end user in the kinetic, ISR, and expeditionary domains,” officials wrote.

DIU has played a major role in the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, which aims to add thousands of low-cost uncrewed systems and counter-drone platforms to the U.S. military’s arsenal. The solicitation released Wednesday didn’t explicitly say whether it was tied to Replicator efforts, but it appears to be focused on those types of technologies.

Industry responses to the solicitation are due July 24.

The DOD is looking to award other transaction agreements.

“Companies are advised that any prototype OT agreement awarded in response to this [effort] … may result in the award of a follow-on production contract or transaction without the use of further competitive procedures. The follow-on production contract or transaction will be available for use by one or more organizations in the Department of Defense and, as a result, the magnitude of the follow-on production contract or agreement could be significantly larger than that of the prototype OT,” officials wrote.

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Next year will mark the fourth iteration of the educational ICAP initiative, which DIU runs in partnership with the Defense Acquisition University. This fellowship is designed to provide DOD’s leading procurement professionals with hands-on experience and virtual training to help them more effectively buy in-demand commercial technologies from non-traditional military contractors. 

“We have other acquisition officers from across the department who can apply to the year-long fellowship with DIU — to learn our process, how we work with industry, and then bring that back to wherever they’re going. And [the next ICAP application] just opened today,” DIU’s Deputy Director for Commercial Operations Liz Young McNally told DefenseScoop during a panel at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Expo.

If tapped for the fellowship, personnel will get a chance to work on a variety of real-world, military service-aligned projects alongside a DIU contracting officer, project team and commercial solution providers.

The fellows will also gain in-depth instruction on a flexible contracting mechanism designed for rapid prototyping and acquisition of commercial tech, known as other transaction (OT) authority. That mechanism, as well as DIU’s commercial solutions opening (CSO) solicitation process, helps the Pentagon operate at a pace that is closer to commercial speeds, when buying certain technologies.

Pointing to recent internal DIU stats, McNally said that for roughly 40% of the companies that win a new CSO deal each year, “this is the first time they ever worked with the DOD.”

“We’ve built all of these processes [to accelerate acquisition]. So we’re asking for a problem statement as opposed to a requirement. It’s a short response, right — like a few pages or a few slides, as opposed to something more — very rapid. And [the ICAP fellowship] is one of the processes that we have built to help not just do it ourselves, but then scale it across the department,” she noted.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently issued new guidance to inform how the Pentagon buys software capabilities. In it, he directed Pentagon officials to prioritize OT and CSO procurement options when purchasing digital assets for the military.

“[DIU is] also working very closely with [the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment] and others in the department to implement the president’s new executive order on acquisition. And programs like that fellowship are a real way that we’re going to be able to help upskill, and train, and drive the culture change required so that we bring in more commercial technology,” McNally told DefenseScoop.

Those who wish to apply for ICAP must be permanent government civilians or active component military contracting officers. Each fellow will produce a capstone project that will serve as a training plan for their home organization, based on what they learn throughout the 12-month program.

Applications will be accepted until July 31. DIU aims to notify selected candidates in September and begin the program in October.

“To ensure our warfighters maintain a decisive advantage, we need contracting professionals who are fluent in both the defense and commercial sectors, and who can help their teammates across the department to develop that same fluency. That is what the ICAP fellowship delivers, and we need to keep scaling it — and its impact — for the department’s critical needs,” DIU Director Doug Beck said in a statement.

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The sea service’s maritime operations centers, or MOCs, are part of the Navy’s approach to fleet-level command and control and are expected to be “the center” of how sailors fight in a distributed manner in future battles, according to the CNO Navigation Plan released last year.

“MOCs and the processes they execute, whether in one location or disaggregated, are how fleets convert data into information to deliver decision advantage for the commander. MOCs must be capable of integrating with the Joint Force, Allies, and partners to link our fleet commanders to the range of sensors, shooters, and effectors distributed across the battlespace. To integrate a maneuvering, distributed, information-centric fight requires that we treat MOCs as the weapons systems they are,” then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti wrote.

She tasked all fleet headquarters, beginning with Pacific Fleet, to have MOCs certified and proficient in command and control, information, intelligence, fires, movement and maneuver, protection, and sustainment functions by 2027.

Franchetti was fired in February by the Trump administration amid a broader removal of senior military leaders at the Pentagon in the early months of President Donald Trump’s second term. Adm. James Kilby has been performing the duties of CNO since then.

Navy leaders have identified AI as a tool that could help commanders and the MOCs.

“One area that can help in that is probably in the area of decision-making, in terms of whether it be AI or some other way of creating an advantage for the commander in terms of that OODA loop that [Pacific Fleet Commander] Adm. [Stephen] Koehler referred to, where we take all this tremendous amounts of data that we have and are able to fuse it quickly into a coherent picture that matches the commander’s timing and tempo and sequencing of events that needs to occur as he or she makes those decisions,” Vice Adm. Michael Vernazza, Naval Information Forces commander, said earlier this year at the WEST conference.

The latest outreach to industry from the Defense Innovation Unit comes via a new solicitation for the Situational Awareness by Intelligent Learning Systems, or SAILS, program.

“U.S. Navy assets generate vast amounts of multi-source tactical data from various platforms, including space-based, shipboard, and airborne assets, as well as unstructured data (intelligence reports, watch logs, etc.) produced by sailors. Currently, Maritime Operations Centers (MOCs) must manage and analyze large volumes of multi-source data generated across the fleet to make critical resource allocation decisions for geographically dispersed fleet and national assets,” DIU officials wrote in a problem statement.

“The Navy seeks commercial AI/ML applications that accelerate the convergence of MOC-destined data inputs (e.g. intelligence reports, satellite-derived data, and existing common operational picture tools, etc.) to improve situational awareness for operators, and optimize existing decision support tools by offering track confidence scoring and real-time recommendations to assist commanders in allocating geographically dispersed resources (e.g. satellites, aircraft, vessels, etc),” they added.

Desired attributes for the technologies include watchfloor workflow automation via connection to third-party software and data platforms through APIs to deliver models developed for MOC use cases; provision of models to generate track confidence scores and threshold-based alerts to end-users; generation of sensor and resource allocation recommendations that take into account communication bandwidth conditions, geographic constraints, sensor reliability, past model performance, watchstander availability and other information to inform MOC commanders of asset availability and readiness; and “natural language-based model tuning that allows MOC end-users to interactively adjust objective functions, factors, and constraints” while ensuring that the model’s decision-making process is “maximally interpretable and/or explainable,” among other characteristics.

Solutions should enable role-based access control and cross-domain data sharing, comply with NIST 800-171 cybersecurity controls, support deployment on government or contractor-provided infrastructure and allow for operations across different classification levels, among other technical attributes, according to the solicitation.

Industry responses to the solicitation are due June 6.

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DIU issued a solicitation to vendors this week via its commercial solutions opening acquisition pathway for a “combat autonomous maritime platform.” The move comes as the Navy is pursuing Project 33 and other initiatives to beef up its fleet with robotic platforms and prepare for a potential war with China in the Pacific region. Maritime drones are seen as a cost-effective means of boosting the sea service’s capacity and capabilities while reducing risks to sailors by keeping them out of harm’s way.

“To maximize operational effectiveness in contested environments, the United States military requires enhanced capabilities for deploying large payloads across extended ranges. Current UUV capabilities present limitations in range and payload capacity, hindering the effective deployment of critical resources in certain operational scenarios,” officials wrote in the new solicitation. “The DoD seeks commercially available, demonstration-ready uncrewed systems that address these limitations, offering a scalable and cost-effective solution for long-range, high-capacity payload deployment.”

The CAMP program isn’t DIU’s first rodeo when it comes to UUVs. Last year, in partnership with the Navy, the organization awarded contracts to Anduril, Oceaneering International and Kongsberg Discovery to prototype large displacement unmanned underwater vehicles. However, the new CAMP platforms will be much bigger and have additional capabilities, a DIU spokesperson told DefenseScoop.

“These are an order of magnitude larger, much longer range, and carry even larger payloads. This is a different class of vehicle. For example, think of LDUUV as a sprinter van and CAMP as a moving truck,” the spokesperson said in an email. “These will be pier launched vs shipboard launched, based on anticipated size.”

The new solicitation isn’t being issued because the LDUUV prototypes didn’t meet expectations, according to DIU.

“Quite the opposite. We are building from the success from the LDUUV project, and attempting this with even larger and longer range UUVs,” the spokesperson said.

Officials want an autonomous system that can transit more than 1,000 nautical miles, go deeper than 200 meters underwater and release a variety of payloads of various sizes — including payloads that are 21 feet in length and 21 inches in diameter.

They also desire platforms that can communicate “across the air/water interface (acoustic and Radio Frequency)” and operate in GPS-denied environments, among other attributes.

Vendor responses are due May 1. DIU plans to move quickly into phase two — which is expected to start just four weeks after the close of the solicitation and include in-water live demonstrations of companies’ offerings.

Prototype other transaction agreements that are awarded may result in follow-on production contracts or agreements after successful prototype completion, according to DIU.

“The follow-on production contract or agreement will be available for use by one or more organizations within the Department of Defense. As a result, the magnitude of the follow-on production contract or agreement could be significantly larger than that of the Prototype OT agreement,” officials wrote.

Meanwhile, the Navy is pursuing other underwater drones, such as the extra-large UUV named Orca. That platform, built by Boeing, is an 85 ton, 85-feet-long unmanned diesel-electric submarine. Its design was inspired by Boeing’s Echo Voyager, which has a range of up to 6,500 nautical miles and can accommodate a modular payload section up to 34 feet in length, according to a Congressional Research Service report. However, the Orca differs in some respects to meet military requirements and it appears to be significantly larger than the Echo Voyager.

Construction of the Orca XLE-1 is complete, and developmental and operational testing of the system was slated to continue through the third quarter of this fiscal year.

“Orca, and other platforms like her, are an important step forward as we drive towards our future hybrid fleet, which is going be composed of manned and unmanned platforms. It’s a hybrid fleet that we know we will need to maintain our warfighting advantage,” then Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti said late last year while touring Boeing’s manufacturing facility, according to a Navy release.

Franchetti was later fired as CNO by President Donald Trump in February along with several other senior military officers. Since then, Adm. James Kilby has been performing the duties of CNO as observers wait for Trump to announce his pick for a new service chief.

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Caine, President Donald Trump’s pick to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is a former F-16 pilot who held a variety of roles throughout his 34-year military career, including with the active-duty Air Force and National Guard, the special operations community and the CIA.

But at Tuesday’s hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee, he also highlighted his private sector experience.

“I’ve been an entrepreneur and investor in the business sector while a citizen soldier in the National Guard,” Caine noted. “I’ve also had the privilege of serving alongside incredible business leaders, starting and scaling companies as an entrepreneur. And along the way, I learned what a different kind of grit looks like. Our American entrepreneurial spirit is a force multiplier, and my time as an entrepreneur has made me a better general officer and leader. And if confirmed, I’ll bring more of that spirit into the joint force.”

After his recent retirement from the military, Caine became chairman of the national security advisory board at Voyager Space, a venture partner at Shield Capital, an advisor for Thrive Capital and a venture partner at Ribbit Capital, according to his LinkedIn bio.

“I also may be the only officer ever nominated for this position with experience in the venture capital world, an experience I will draw on as the DoD looks to modernize its business systems and revitalize America’s Defense Industrial Base,” Caine wrote in his responses to advance policy questions from senators.

Caine’s confirmation process comes as the Pentagon is trying to buy more technologies from the commercial sector, including software and hardware, and bring more nontraditional companies into its acquisition fold. The department’s Silicon Valley-headquartered Defense Innovation Unit has been spearheading many of these efforts.

Caine told lawmakers that the U.S. commercial marketplace is “teaming with innovative solutions” for defending the nation. However, the biggest challenge is bringing them into the force.

“The Department must work to exploit these solutions via rapid prototyping programs, defense innovation organizations, and congressionally granted authorities,” he wrote.

The DOD needs to make investments that promote resilient supply chains, workforce readiness, closer collaboration with commercial industry, flexible acquisition, and support from international allies and partners, he suggested.

“The Joint Force should re-evaluate its interactions with industry and fight for access to the commercial space, leveraging organizations like the Defense Innovation Unit,” Caine wrote.

The Pentagon’s research and engineering directorate has been focusing on 14 “critical technology areas” as it pursues next-generation capabilities, including hypersonics, FutureG wireless technology, advanced materials, integrated network systems-of-systems, directed energy, integrated sensing and cyber, space technology, quantum science, trusted AI and autonomy, microelectronics, renewable energy generation and storage, advanced computing and software, human-machine interfaces, and biotechnology.

Caine noted that DOD also needs to spend more money on advanced manufacturing technology.

“Investments in advanced manufacturing will have impacts across the listed 14 critical technology areas and enable the United States to produce complex components and systems more quickly and cost effectively. If confirmed, I’ll work with [Defense] Secretary [Pete] Hegseth to refine the development and acquisition of these technologies in order to enable rapid employment to meet the needs of the Joint Warfighter to fulfill the Administration’s strategy,” he wrote.

If confirmed, he promised to work with Hegseth and his team to evaluate the budget for next-gen capabilities.

Caine told senators that there’s “room for improvement” in how investments in next-gen capabilities are synchronized across the department.

“There is a lot of good work going on, but I do have some concerns that innovation entities are actually colliding with each other in the incubation process. The DOD must have a greater level of collaboration between entities in order to maximize the return on the [U.S. government’s] invested capital,” he wrote.

He said he’s “encouraged” that there are new leaders coming into the department with substantive business backgrounds. Although he didn’t mention any by name, Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg, Navy Secretary John Phelan and other senior officials were wealthy businessmen and investors when they were tapped by Trump to serve on his national security team during his second term.

Pentagon leaders need to have an “entrepreneurial mindset” as they pursue reforms, Caine said.

Trump surprised many in February when he announced Caine, an unconventional pick, as his choice for chairman after firing Gen. Charles “CQ” Brown.

Caine is expected to garner enough votes to get confirmed. Republicans have a majority in the Senate with 53 GOP members. Apart from Hegseth, who narrowly won confirmation in January, Trump’s nominees for top Pentagon posts during his second term have been confirmed by comfortable margins during final voting.

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Questions have swirled inside the DOD since President Donald Trump directed all federal agencies to dramatically shrink their civilian workforces early into his second administration. 

Those efforts began with actions by multiple agencies across the federal government to fire recently hired or promoted workers who are in a trial period known as probationary status. Several recent legal decisions, however, have reversed those terminations — at least temporarily. The decisions include an order from a Baltimore-based federal district judge affecting 18 federal agencies and another from a San Francisco-based federal district judge affecting six agencies, including DOD.  

Although it’s not a definitive number of all probationary employees separated from DOD to date, a new declaration filed in the case before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California sheds light on some of the early impacts defense personnel are experiencing as a result of Trump’s order. 

In the filing, Timothy Dill — the official performing the duties of the assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs — revealed DOD records indicate that since Feb. 13, the department “separated, or notified of termination, 364 probationary employees in light of recent” guidance from the Office of Personnel Management.

Since then, the Pentagon “directed DOD military departments and components to offer reinstatement or revoke pending termination notices for these employees,” he noted. The department started a process to rehire roughly 65 employees, so far.

“The remainder are pending notification, declined to accept the offer of reinstatement, or requested additional time to consider the offer,” Dill wrote.

This declaration came after Judge William Alsup requested information from the government about placing reinstated probationary employees on administrative leave. 

Alsup cited “news reports” that at least one agency had placed reinstated staff on administrative leave, and said that was “not allowed by the preliminary injunction.” He later followed up that request, noting that the documents the government provided showing compliance with an order from the District of Maryland didn’t include DOD, and asked for an update from the Pentagon.

In the declaration, Dill confirmed that staff being reinstated are being placed on administrative leave from the time of their termination until they complete appropriate onboarding procedures. Those with pending statuses will remain on administrative leave until a decision is made about their future.

That process appears to reflect a similar approach being taken at other agencies. In the declarations provided in the District of Maryland case, most of the 18 agencies said they were placing reinstated workers on administrative leave.

In a response Thursday, the unions and other organizations that brought the Northern District of California case argued that the information the government provided — including the statement from DOD — doesn’t show compliance with the preliminary injunction.

Specifically, the plaintiffs said the government falls short “by failing to communicate the information ordered by the Court; and by placing previously-terminated employees back only on ‘administrative leave’ rather than returning to service.”

The plaintiffs include AFL-CIO affiliates the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Main Street Alliance, the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, and other groups.

In an off-camera press briefing Tuesday, two senior defense officials noted that removing probationary employees is one of three primary mechanisms DOD is applying to carry out its workforce reduction process across a pool of more than 900,000 employees. Originally, as part of the plan, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced aims for the department to part ways with about 5,400 probationary employees.

“The first removals of probationary employees were directly focused on employees that were documented as significantly underperforming in their job functions, and/or had misconduct on the record,” a senior defense official told reporters.

They also suggested that in recent weeks “there has been no other signal from the department on future intended removals of probationary employees.”

It remains unclear on Thursday where technology-aligned positions fall among the Trump administration’s priorities for what roles will be retained during their major workforce reduction effort. 

DefenseScoop sent requests for more information to spokespersons at DOD’s personnel and readiness directorate, Chief Information Office, Chief Digital and AI Office, Defense Innovation Unit, All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office and the Defense Information Systems Agency.

A communications official for the P&R directorate referred DefenseScoop to each of those individual offices for breakdowns of their probationary terminations and reinstatements. 

Spokespersons from the department’s CIO and DIU acknowledged the inquiries but haven’t yet provided responses. CDAO and AARO spokespersons declined to provide personnel numbers or share details about the impacts on their workforce.

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U.S.-based drone companies AeroVironment and Dragoon, as well as U.S.-based software firms Swan and Auterion, were chosen to compete in the project called Artemis, DIU said in a news release. Notably, the two software companies are each partnering with separate unnamed Ukrainian drone manufacturers.

DIU initiated Artemis in response to a congressional mandate, which directed operational testing of low-cost loitering munitions that can fly in electromagnetic contested environments and be deployed in large numbers. The unit wants to have a successful prototype by the end of fiscal 2025.

“We are excited about the non-traditional companies who are providing low-cost, adaptable, long-range, UAS platforms with the potential to maximize operational flexibility for the Joint force,” Trent Emeneker, DIU’s Artemis program manager and contractor, said in a statement. “This was the intent of Congress’ direction to rethink how to get capabilities to the warfighter at speed and scale that can deliver much faster than traditional Programs of Record.”

After releasing a solicitation in October 2024, DIU and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment evaluated 165 proposals from vendors, held flight demonstrations and then down-selected to four industry teams, according to DIU.

With contracts in place, “the next step is meeting an aggressive testing and integration schedule to complete prototyping and demonstrate success by the end of May 2025,” DIU stated in a release.

The solicitation called for one-way, ground-launched drones from commercial vendors with an operational range of 50 to 300 kilometers or more. DIU wants Artemis prototypes that can carry a 10-plus kilogram payload more than 50 kilometers, and are “capable of supporting high-speed, low-altitude, beyond line of sight flight operations in [disrupted, disconnected, intermittent, and low-bandwidth] environments,” according to the RFP. Ideally, the organization would like the drones to be able to carry a 25-plus kilogram payload upwards of 300 kilometers.

Officials emphasized the Artemis program is directly linked to emerging trends on modern battlefields. Throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, inexpensive kamikaze drones from commercial vendors have provided warfighters on both sides with key capabilities. In the Middle East, Iranian-backed Houthis launched multiple complex attacks on U.S. Naval forces stationed in the Red Sea last year, as well.

“With Artemis, DIU and A&S are moving rapidly to provide an option for Services and Combatant Commands to choose from, delivered years in advance of current Program of Record timeframes,” DIU stated in a release.

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Sealing Technologies — a Parsons company — World Wide Technology and Omni Federal were tapped to develop prototypes for the Joint Cyber Hunt Kit, self-contained “fly away” technology that provides a security operations center in a box, according to DIU and budget documentation.

DIU is running the acquisition on behalf of Cybercom.

The effort is significant because the new kits will, for the first time, create a baseline standard for the gear cyber protection teams use for both the traditional defensive missions of the network as well as hunt-forward operations performed by the Cyber National Mission Force, Cybercom’s elite unit tasked with protecting the nation against significant digital threats. Hunt-forward operations, conceptualized over five years ago, involve physically sending defensively oriented CPTs to foreign countries to hunt for threats on their networks at the invitation of host nations.

Since Cybercom’s inception, there has never been a standardized defensive cyber kit for cyber protection teams — groups that hunt for malicious activity on Pentagon networks and respond to incidents — despite efforts in the past to create them. Those systems, referred to as Deployable Mission Support Systems (DMSS), varied across all the services.

Cybercom’s forces are constructed such that each of the services are responsible for providing a set number of offensive and defensive teams to the command to conduct operations. In many cases, the kits across each service varied despite cyber protection teams being largely trained to the same missions and standards, albeit with some variation.

As currently planned, the JCHK kits will provide a baseline of standardization across all the types of defensive CPTs, but offer a level of customization and tailoring for specific purposes and missions.

“The big thing is that flexibility and that modularity and the scalability, just to have the ability to tailor what they’re taking to the mission at hand. Whether that mission is going out and doing a vulnerability assessment or whether it’s a onboard mission where you’re looking for bad guys on an active network, being able to dial your kit into exactly what you’re going to do just makes things much easier and the outcomes from the missions are much better,” Brad Hatcher, chief product officer for SealingTech, said in an interview. “Sometimes what they need might be constrained by their space and how many people they can take to a location. Sometimes it will be more driven by the size and the volume of a network. And we build a kit that lets them tailor it specifically to each mission and take what they need and get there quick and do their mission and report back.”

According to budget documents, the forthcoming JCHK kits will be used by CPTs to secure and protect DOD networks and data centers by hunting, clearing and assessing in friendly, neutral and adversary cyberspace.

“Definitely a step forward in that it’s the latest and greatest technologies that we can put into a kit to run their missions faster to give them the ability to pull in more data, do more analytics — bigger, better everything than previous versions,” Hatcher said. “One of the bigger requirements and what can often be a limitation is the storage space that you’ve got. You’re hooking these kits up to networks and you’re trying to pull in all the traffic that’s flowing across that network to do analysis, to see what should be there, what looks odd. And those bigger storage capacities really allow the teams to really get in there and analyze as much as possible to find any anomaly on a network.”

Omni Federal’s offering, dubbed REDHOUND, provides proactive threat detection, comprehensive network analysis, threat intelligence integration, scalable investigation tools, incident response support and behavioral monitoring. The technology also boasts fast speeds leveraging a modular ARM processor architecture augmented with NVIDIA GPUs for low power for high compute in edge environments to provide flexibility, the company said in a statement.

The companies that were awarded deals will develop their prototypes between now and this summer. They’ll be tested in a lab-based environment with actual users for a period of time, and the government will eventually select one vendor to move on to the next phase of the program.

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Hegseth issued a memorandum last week mandating all Defense Department components to use the Software Acquisition Pathway (SWP) — initially rolled out under the first Trump administration — when purchasing software that supports business and weapon system programs. The new directive also calls on DOD personnel to prioritize commercial solutions opening and Other Transaction authority as the default solicitation and award options when procuring these types of technologies.

DefenseScoop viewed an internal unclassified email delivered to senior department and military leaders on Tuesday that further emphasized the strategic imperative of the new SWP instruction. 

“The operational landscape is changing rapidly. Our adversaries are leveraging technology to adapt at unprecedented speed. We must do the same,” wrote Robert Salesses, the official performing the duties of deputy secretary of defense, who penned the email.

“To ensure success, we will provide the necessary training, resources, and guidance to acquisition professionals at all levels. I encourage active engagement between leadership and acquisition teams to understand how this shift affects your respective missions,” Salesses wrote. 

Detailed timelines for the delivery of those support materials were not shared in the correspondence. However, Hegseth stated in his March 6 memo that the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, in coordination with the Defense Innovation Unit chief, would develop and submit an implementation plan for his directive “within 30 calendar days.”

“By delivering secure, scalable software capabilities at the speed of relevance, we will enhance lethality, readiness, and adaptability across the force,” Salesses wrote in the email.

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