Sean M. Gallagher

The US Navy’s Second Fleet has migrated  the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) as part of its establishment of a Maritime Operations Center, according to a Navy spokesperson.  Second Fleet, which had a waiver from using NMCI because of its command and control mission,  will now operate both its unclassified but sensitive (NIPRnet) and secret-classified (SIPRNet) systems on NMCI, which is operated for the Navy by Hewlett-Packard’s EDS.

EDS’s NMCI contract ends on September 30, 2010. However, the Navy is still working on the procurement strategy for Next Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN), the follow-on to NMCI–which will “in-house” operation of the Navy’s networks again–and the Navy is preparing to offer a no-compete contract to EDS to continue to operate NMCI’s services during a transition period to the new network.  The contract will also give the Navy access to the intellectual property EDS has generated around the operation of NMCI.  So while the NMCI contract is close to its end, the lifecycle of the NMCI infrastructure is far from over.  Migrating also helps Second Fleet save on network operation costs, and will probably improve overall security since the command will benefit from EDS’s patch management and information assurance operations, served up out of EDS’ enterprise Network Operations Centers in Norfolk, San Diego and Pearl Harbor. (A fourth NOC at Quantico serves the Marine Corps.)

The decision to move to NMCI was made by Commander Second Fleet  independent of the NGEN program. A spokesperson for NMCI characterized the move as being a purely operational decision. But it speaks to the maturity of NMCI, in its 10th year of operations, that a C2 organization would move to what was originally devised as a purely administrative network.  And  Navy CIO Robert Carey has been beating the drum for the consolidation of the Navy’s multitude of legacy and “waiver” networks into a smaller number of service-wide networks as part of his NNE 2016 vision for Navy IT — which Second Fleet’s move, while executed independently from the DON CIO’s office, conforms to.

Carey recently blogged about the value of “thinking like an enterprise” with the Navy’s networks in a discussion of the current Navy shipboard IT procurement, Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES).  ”It is important for the Department of the Navy to think and act like an enterprise because of the potential to realize a number of important benefits including increased integration of our operating forces, improved interoperability, and consistent and improved information assurance,” he wrote. “These benefits are in addition to cost savings, cost avoidance and more effective use of the Department’s resources.”

The space shuttle Discovery launched August 28,  to deliver, among other things, a new room for the International Space Station and a humorously-named treadmill.   As the shuttle prepared to launch, it was getting a boost from a report commissioned by the president, The Observer reports:

The US space shuttle, scheduled to be scrapped next year, could be thrown a last-minute lifeline this week. A reprieve is to be included as an option for rejuvenating America’s beleaguered space programme in a report commissioned by President Barack Obama.

Like client-server, Web applications and services-oriented architecture before it, cloud computing is capturing the imagination of health IT system developers. But just like a cloud, the term “cloud computing” is nebulous – people see different things when they look at it, depending on their perspective.  So defining its value to healthcare organizations can be a challenge.

Healthcare enters the cloud .

When the Aegis combat system was deployed on USS Ticonderoga in 1982, its display technology was state of the art and almost entirely based on hardware and software created specifically for that job. But today, the latest generations of Navy data display systems are being built mostly from commercial hardware and increasingly with free and open-source software.

Tech refresh brings HD video to Aegis — Defense Systems.

Lt. Gen. Carroll Pollett, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, reiterated the importance of the contract workforce to DISA at an industry presentation Aug. 7, especially, he said, as the agency faces moving its staff to Fort Meade, Md., next year.

DISA director emphasizes contractor workforce importance — Defense Systems.

“U.S. defense officials are insisting that by reorganizing their cybersecurity strategy to give new powers to the director of the National Security Agency, they are not attempting a power grab. The military will continue to focus on protecting its own networks, they said, rather than expanding the military’s role to protecting civilian-run electrical and transportation networks.”

Cyber-overhaul – C4ISRJournal.com – Military Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance.

iRobot pushes robots into new territory — Defense Systems.

ThinkPad W700 Review — FedTech Magazine .

“Earlier this decade, a movement called “downshifting” sprung up among older professionals who sought to simplify their lives and have more time for family, pet projects and personal fulfillment off the clock. Now, the recession has brought a whole new spin to downshifting. Senior-level professionals accustomed to high salaries have lowered the expectations they have for their next positions in hopes to just make ends meet.”

See the article at TheLadders.

Lockheed Martin's AML

Lockheed Martin’s Airborne Intelligence Test Bed has completed its maiden flight, getting an air-worthiness certificate from the FAA.  The Airborn Multi-Intelligence Laboratory (AML – a name clearly sculpted to avoid the AIL label) is a reconfigured Gulfstream III business jet loaded with sensors and computing equipment.

The AML has an ample radome on the bottom of the aircraft that can be crammed with various sensors and data links. “We’ve designed the AML so that we can easily test a myriad of sensors to advance the science and art of correlating diverse types of intelligence – with the goal of rapidly providing high-quality data,” said Jim Quinn, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Services-Defense’s vice president of C4ISR Systems, in a company statement.

Because of its reconfigurable, “plug and play” architecture for sensors and computing systems, the AML can be used for a variety of evaluations at the same time. The aircraft is currently slated to participate in the C4ISR On-The-Move exercise at Ft. Dix in New Jersey at the end of August.