Page 28 - FCW, January/February 2020

Trending 800+ Interior Department drones were officially grounded on Jan. 28 over potential cybersecurity concerns
Navy seeks unmanned fleet, but Congress needs convincing
Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said the service’s future fleet must incorporate more unmanned vehicles, but officials have yet to convince Con- gress that the technology is fully devel- oped and reliable.
“We’re going as fast as we can in terms of the funding we’re getting for \[unmanned vehicles\],” Modly said at a Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments event in January. “We’re trying to make the case for more of this, but I think Congress, at least mem- bers on the \[Senate Armed Services Committee\], has some reticence about us betting too much on this until it’s more of a proven technology.”
A Jan. 24 report by the Congres- sional Research Service bolstered such concerns and stated that “such a change in fleet architecture could alter, perhaps substantially, the mix of ships to be procured for the Navy and the distribution of Navy shipbuilding work among the nation’s shipyards.”
Modly said he understood lawmak-
“We’re going as fast as we can in terms of the funding we’re getting
for \[unmanned vehicles\].”
— Thomas Modly
ers’ concerns because unmanned vessels are still in the research and development stages. He added that the Navy is looking into alternatives such as minimally manned or lightly manned platforms that can support full autonomy in “a warfighting scenario or
a high-end fight.”
The Navy has been working on
its Integrated Naval Force Structure Assessment, which is expected to be released this spring as a follow-up to an assessment published in 2016. The Navy has set a goal of having 355 manned ships by 2030 while increasing the number of unmanned surface and underwater vessels.
“We need to at least present a plan that gets us there...within the decade,” Modly said.
— Lauren C. Williams
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Treasury tests use of blockchain for tracking grants
The Treasury Department is finishing up tests of a blockchain-based letter- of-credit capability — its latest push to explore how the distributed ledger technology can help streamline opera- tions.
Craig Fischer, innovation program manager at Treasury, said the program tokenizes the details and payments in electronic federal letters of credit sent from the National Science Foundation to grant recipients. Rather than hav- ing to rely on regular reporting from the prime and sub-grantee recipients, NSF can use the blockchain to track the payments and ensure that the terms
of the grant are being followed.
As a result, financial transactions are more secure and grantees are relieved of some of their reporting
requirements.
The blockchain-based letter of cred-
it enables peer-to-peer fund transfers, Fischer said at a recent conference on financial modernization. A grant recipient must have an electronic wal- let associated with a bank account to receive the tokenized letter, and access to the letter can be role-based for secu- rity purposes, he added.
Fischer said the innovation group has been working on the program with
NSF, San Diego State University and Duke University since September 2019. It was set to conclude at the end of January.
The department has been investigat- ing ways to leverage blockchain for a couple of years. In 2018, it worked on a pilot project to develop a proto- type to manage physical assets such as computers and cell phones. At the time, officials noted the technology has “great potential for streamlining bur- densome reconciliation operations that are involved in many financial trans- actions.”
— Mark Rockwell