First reported by Politico, the circumstances of Beck’s resignation from the Defense Innovation Unit were not immediately clear. A DIU spokesperson declined to comment, and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for details.

Beck, a Navy Reserve captain and former Apple executive, took the helm of DIU in 2023. At the time, the organization was at an inflection point. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had just elevated the small, experimental unit to report directly to his office and Congress was proposing nearly $1 billion in funding for the office. Beck’s role was to help DIU field commercial technology to military units on faster timelines and in much larger quantities.

DIU and Beck have played a key role in major Pentagon programs like Replicator, an effort to change the way the Defense Department prioritizes, tests and buys high-need technology.

His departure follows the sudden announcement last week of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin’s retirement and the firing of Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse on Friday.

“Terran Orbital brings a high throughput, robotic manufacturing capacity and high-performing modular space vehicle designs,” Lockheed said in a statement. “Combined with Lockheed Martin’s record of performance and innovation, this transaction will usher in an even broader range of capabilities and value for customers.”

The company expects the deal to close by the end of the year. The announcement comes just three months after Lockheed withdrew an earlier bid to purchase the company.

As part of the transaction, Lockheed will pay off Terran’s debt obligations and establish a $30 million working capital facility — a financing approach that will allow it to continue operations until the deal closes.

While Lockheed has traditionally built large satellites for national security missions, the Defense Department recently has moved toward smaller spacecraft built by firms outside of its traditional industrial base.

Terran Orbital, founded in 2013 in Boca Raton, Florida, is one of those firms. In addition to building spacecraft for Lockheed, its biggest customer, the company has also collaborated with the Defense Department and NASA on various space-focused projects. Terran provides the satellites for Lockheed’s contracts with the Space Development Agency to build missile-tracking and communication spacecraft.

Lockheed currently owns one-third of the smaller firm due to its satellite production partnership and the myriad investments it has made in Terran through its venture capital arm, Lockheed Ventures, since 2017.

In recent years, Terran has largely focused on building satellites designed to operate in low Earth orbit, about 1,200 miles above the planet’s surface. But over the last year, in response to broadening customer demand, the firm has expanded its reach to build spacecraft destined for higher, geosynchronous orbits.

CEO Marc Bell told Defense News in March the company designed a geosynchronous satellite with a similar price point to its low Earth orbit satellites.

“We now have a solution that’s cost-effective and we can build it in mass quantity and give them what they want,” Bell said.

Bell noted in a statement that Lockheed’s acquisition of the company will help the firm build on that growth.

“Access to Lockheed Martin’s incredible engineers and world-class facilities will only accelerate our business plan to provide low-cost, high-value solutions to our ever-growing customer base,” he said.

“I’m happy to share that I’m starting a new position as Acting Chief Information Officer at United States Department of Defense,” Beavers wrote in July on LinkedIn. The department’s website now lists her as acting CIO.

A spokesperson for the Pentagon did not immediately return a request for comment.

As the primary IT adviser to the defense secretary, Beavers is taking over from former CIO John Sherman, who stepped down in June to take a position outside government as dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

Previously serving as the principal deputy CIO at the Pentagon, Beavers is well acquainted with the Defense Department’s many ongoing initiatives meant to secure the defense-industrial base, develop 5G technologies and explore artificial intelligence.

Since she came to the department, Beavers has worked on landmark endeavors like Project Herald, the Pentagon’s plan to transform digital intelligence sharing, and Fulcrum, the recently announced IT transformation strategy. The latter is where she is most focused now on building momentum, she said in her LinkedIn post.

“[That] gives you tangible steps to turn that strategic vision into an operational reality,” Beavers said at the 2024 TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore, which took place June 25-27. “It’ll be followed by an implementation plan, which will give some more information.”

The former Air Force intelligence officer and retired brigadier general comes to the position at a time when the DOD is beginning to put many of its theories around zero trust, cloud computing, machine learning and cybersecurity into practice.

The department for several years now released guidance thanks to the help of working groups and testing approaches via pilots. Now, officials say, it’s in a position to actually phase in solutions. The department has a goal to come up with a data tagging and labeling strategy by the end of the calendar year.

Beavers also said at TechNet Cyber that she anticipates growth in the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability procurement vehicle as other contracts begin to expire.

At the same time, challenges persist for Beavers and her office, including cyber workforce shortages, unpredictable funding and technical debt that separates the services from the modern approaches they’re after.

All the while, China looms as a major U.S. adversary on the digital battlefield, and attacks on public infrastructure underscore the urgency of predicting and intercepting cyberthreats.

The DOD is seeking $14.5 billion in fiscal 2025 for its cyberspace programs. According to the DOD’s website, Kevin Mulvihill is the new acting principal deputy CIO.

Randy Resnick, director of the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office at the Pentagon, said there’s a need to independently validate whether vendor products and services are, in fact, up to snuff. And creating a standardized, multistep process for ensuring zero-trust compliance will give the DoD confidence in what it buys.

The evaluation begins with an assessment that will give an overall reading of cybersecurity design and pinpoint areas where developers can address gaps early in the process.

“You can’t really game it because it’s 250 questions, and odds are you’d have to lie on a lot of them to skew the results,” Resnick said at the TechNet Cyber conference presented by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International in Baltimore on June 25. “And if you’re in design with something and you honestly go through the process … it’s going to tell you your gap between wherever you are and the 91 [minimum] activities. That’s a useful thing to know because then you could design or engineer or fix whatever you have to do to get to target.”

The Pentagon’s Chief Information office is pushing 2027 as the year for the department to be fully aligned with zero trust. It has already offered a roadmap for doing this, called the ZT Strategy from 2022 that Resnick said is unlikely to be updated. Instead, the department is focused on finding ways to reliably test its designs for security against vulnerabilities. The department has received ZT plans from the services and other DoD agencies, but it now seeks a more automated, replicable process for evaluating them to free up man hours and keep to aggressive pacing.

After the initial assessment, Resnick said then a tool will go through a simulation that will actually test for weaknesses, providing feedback as many times as needed to fix holes. Then, the tool will need to go through a “purple team” report that summarizes the outcome of defensive and offensive attacks on the system.

“We are testing for specific ZT outcomes as each part of the step of the test,” said Resnick. “This is not just a random experiment for red teaming. This is actually very detailed, very specific on what we want the purple team to go after to prove it’s a zero-trust configuration.”

The process is well outlined, but there are some challenges in actualizing it. Resnick said his biggest constraint is the lack of purple-team experts.

“We don’t have enough talent,” he said. “We don’t have enough people. It is a drain. They have other missions that they need to do.”

To accelerate designs through purple teaming, Resnick said he wants to find a way to enlist the help of industry and to test in a neutral environment with minimal costs. He mentioned there has been thought around bringing in multicomponent Reserve or Guard personnel to perform some purple-team duties, but they have to be National Security Agency approved, and that’s hard to find, he added.

The end goal is to use technology and automation to create repeatable, efficient processes that ultimately result in a department official signing off on a ZT solution that has the backing of a well-informed examination.

“That would be the gate to allow the components to assuredly procure target or advanced level ZT solutions prior to 2027,” he said. “We want to allow the department to choose from a menu of solutions … to reduce the risk that what they’re buying doesn’t work.”

Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey, the team’s director, will be succeeded by Brig. Gen. Patrick Ellis, according to a personnel announcement shared by the Department of Defense. Rey has led the team at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, since 2021. He pinned a second star in his time there.

Ellis is expected to take over this summer. Rey will become the director of architecture, operations, networks and space at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-6.

The Network Cross-Functional Team is an outgrowth of Army Futures Command, established in 2018 to tackle the service’s modernization requirements. It is one of eight original teams convened and works closely with the Program Executive Office for Command, Control and Communications-Tactical, or PEO C3T.

Other foundational cross-functional teams include Long-Range Precision Fires, Next-Generation Combat Vehicles, Future Vertical Lift and Synthetic Training Environment.

The change of directors comes as the Army pays increasing attention to connectivity and digital security. Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George at the Association of the U.S. Army convention in October described an overhauled network as his priority.

“Soldiers need to shoot, move and communicate,” he said at the time. “Technology should facilitate those fundamentals, not encumber them.”

The so-called hunt-forward missions, conducted by CYBERCOM’s elite Cyber National Mission Force, or CNMF, totaled 22 deployments, with some happening simultaneously across the world, Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh said in testimony submitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 10.

“Enhancing the security of government, private sector and critical infrastructure systems grows ever more imperative,” said Haugh, who took the helm at CYBERCOM and NSA in February. “Foreign adversaries continuously update how they operate, and frequently work through American-owned networks and devices.”

Hunt-forward missions are executed at the invitation of a foreign government and are not always disclosed. They’re part of CYBERCOM’s persistent engagement strategy — a means of being in constant contact with adversaries and ensuring proactive, not reactive, moves are made.

Haugh’s disclosure offers a rare look at the CNMF workload, which is often nebulous, as some countries prefer to keep quiet the digital cooperation.

The mission force has in the past worked with Ukraine, ahead of Russia’s invasion; Albania, on the heels of Iranian cyberattacks; and Latvia, where malware was unearthed. Other previous deployments included Estonia, Croatia, Lithuania, Montenegro and North Macedonia.

President Joe Biden said in late March that he’ll tap Michael Sulmeyer, the U.S. Army’s principal cyber adviser, to be the Department of Defense’s inaugural cyber policy chief. The role of assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy was established by the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act.

The Defense Department sought $14.5 billion for cyber activities in fiscal 2025. The figure is about $1 billion more than the Biden administration’s previous ask. It is also up from FY23, when it sought $11.2 billion.

“We work every day against capable and determined cyber actors, many of them serving adversary military and intelligence services,” Haugh said. “Our operational experience reinforces the importance of campaigning globally in and through cyberspace across the conditions of competition, crisis and armed conflict.”

Chief Digital and AI Officer Craig Martell is exiting after two years in the job, a department spokesperson confirmed to C4ISRNET. DefenseScoop first reported the move March 14.

No reason was given for the unexpected departure.

Martell, who previously worked on machine learning at Lyft and served as an associate chairman of computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School, will be replaced by Radha Plumb, the current deputy under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. The transition is expected to take place April 8.

Martell was the Defense Department’s first CDAO, hired months after Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the establishment of the office. Initially seen as an overseer and expediter of all things data and software, the CDAO has since evolved into a key player in the realization of Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2.

Hicks last month announced a basic version of CJADC2 had been reached, but declined to say how and where it was being used.

Martell in a statement said he was brought onboard to jumpstart the CDAO, including “developing a strategy for the organization and the DOD as a whole, developing the right roadmaps to deliver on that strategy, and creating the right organizational structure to support those roadmaps.”

That has since been achieved, according to Martell. He gave no indication of what his plans are.

“We brought together four distinct organizations into one, and we accomplished so much in such a short time,” he said.

The CDAO subsumed what were the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Defense Digital Service, the Advana data-and-systems platform and the chief data officer position.

“The minimum viable capability for CJADC2 is real and ready now,” she said Feb. 21 at the Defense Data and AI Symposium in Washington. “It’s low latency and extremely reliable.”

There is still more work to do, but recent progress on implementing advanced communication and information-sharing processes has made the concept a reality, at least in a limited capacity, Hicks said.

“For security reasons, I can’t say where or what that capability is for, but I can tell you it was no easy task,” she said.

The achievement is an outgrowth of the Global Information Dominance experiments, or GIDEs, led by the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO. The office revived the GIDE series in 2023 with the intent of advancing coordination across the military, as well as to get a better understanding of AI’s role. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command previously led them.

“CDAO and its partners have used a series of Global Information Dominance experiments to set a blisteringly fast pace for this work,” Hicks said. “Every 90 days we’re iterating on capability development and delivery, and we’ll be keeping it up in 2024.”

Future GIDEs will tie into the Army’s Project Convergence as well as exercises with Indo-Pacific Command, whose remit includes China and North Korea. U.S. lawmakers have pushed the Defense Department to prioritize INDOPACOM’s long-range networking and intelligence-relaying needs.

Defense officials want to digitally tether forces across land, air, sea, space and cyber in order to outwit and outmaneuver tech-savvy adversaries of the future. The quicker battlefield information can be collected, analyzed and disseminated, the quicker and more precisely targets can be taken down. Folding in AI and other pattern-recognizing programs to tackle tides of data will be critical.

“That’s the beauty of what software can do for hard power,” Hicks said. “Delivery doesn’t take years or decades. Our investments in data, AI and compute are empowering warfighters today.”

The Defense Department’s fiscal 2024 budget blueprint allocated $1.4 billion for CJADC2. Budget documents described the connectivity campaign as transformative to the way the military operates, especially alongside foreign partners.

Speaking at the West naval conference in San Diego on Feb. 15, Del Toro, a former businessman, said that in a time of war abroad and political uncertainty at home, the U.S. needs companies to deliver weapons, warships, aircraft and more on time, on budget and without excuses.

“You can’t be asking the American taxpayer to make even greater public investments while you continue, in some cases, to goose your stock prices through stock buybacks, deferring promised capital investments, and other accounting maneuvers that, to some, seem to prioritize stock prices that drive executive compensation rather than making the needed, fundamental investments in the industrial base, in your own companies, at a time when our nation needs us to be at all-ahead flank,” he said.

“Through initiatives like the Taxpayer Advocacy Project, I have directed our contract community and the Office of General Counsel to ensure that we will leverage all legal means at our disposal to ensure that the American people are also getting what they paid for,” he added.

The message was delivered to a standing-room-only crowd teeming with some of the world’s largest defense contractors. Del Toro did not single out any one company.

The defense industry in the aggregate is financially healthy, and that status has improved over time, according to a Pentagon contracting study published in April. Traditional defense firms outperform commercial counterparts in many key financial metrics, it found.

Shipbuilder HII this month reported revenue rose 13 percent to $3.2 billon in the fourth quarter of 2023 from the same period a year earlier, as operating income almost tripled to $312 million. General Dynamics said it earned $1 billion, or $3.64 per diluted share, on revenue of $11.7 billion, the highest quarterly EPS and revenue in company history.

Del Toro said the Navy would hold accountable contractors with poor performance, including through a “deep dive” investigation of the most chronic offenders.

“We must endeavor to ensure that contracts with the Navy are delivered on time and on budget,” he said. “The global strategic situation demands it.”

Putin also said that Russia stands ready to negotiate a potential prisoner exchange that would free Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was detained last March on espionage charges he denies, and hinted that Moscow wants the release of its agent imprisoned in Germany.

Most of the interview, released Thursday, focused on Ukraine, where the war is nearing the two-year mark. Putin repeated his claim that his invasion of Ukraine, which Kyiv and its allies described as an unprovoked act of aggression, was necessary to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine and prevent the country from posing a threat to Russia by joining NATO.

Putin pointed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s refusal to conduct talks with the Kremlin. He argued that it’s up to Washington to stop supplying Ukraine with weapons and convince Kyiv, which he called a U.S. “satellite,” to sit down for negotiations.

“We have never refused negotiations,” Putin said. “You should tell the current Ukrainian leadership to stop and come to a negotiating table.”

Putin warned that the West will never succeed in inflicting a “strategic defeat” on Russia in Ukraine and rejected allegations that Russia was harboring plans to attack Poland or other NATO countries.

It was Putin’s first interview with a Western media figure since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby tried to minimize the impact of Carlson’s interview ahead of its release: “Remember, you’re listening to Vladimir Putin. And you shouldn’t take at face value anything he has to say.”

In Russia, the interview received wall-to-wall coverage in state media on Friday morning, with major TV channels repeatedly airing excerpts and one state news agency describing it in a column as “a dagger blow through the curtain of propaganda of the dishonest media of the civilized world.”

In the days leading up to the release of the interview, Russian Kremlin-backed media also extensively covered Carlson’s visit to Russia, trying to follow him around Moscow and reporting in great detail on where the former Fox News host went.

Putin has heavily limited his contact with international media since he launched the war in Ukraine in February 2022. Russian authorities have cracked down on independent media, forcing some Russian outlets to close, blocking others and ordering a number of foreign reporters to leave the country. Two journalists working for U.S. news organizations — The Wall Street Journal’s Gershkovich and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Alsu Kurmasheva — are in jail.

Asked by Carlson whether Russia would release Gershkovich, Putin said Moscow is open to talks but repeated that the reporter was charged with espionage, an accusation Gershkovich has denied.

“He was caught red-handed when he was secretly getting classified information,” Putin said of Gershkovich, adding that he doesn’t exclude that the reporter could return home.

“There is no taboo on settling this issue,” Putin said. “We are ready to solve it but there are certain conditions that are being discussed between special services. I believe an agreement can be reached.”

He pointed to a man imprisoned in a “U.S.-allied country” for “liquidating a bandit” who killed Russian soldiers during the fighting in the Caucasus: “He put our soldiers taken prisoners on a road and then drove a car over their heads. There was a patriot who liquidated him in one of the European capitals.”

Putin didn’t mention names, but he appeared to refer to Vadim Krasikov, a Russian serving a life sentence in Germany after being convicted of the 2019 brazen daylight killing of Zelimkhan “Tornike” Khangoshvili, a 40-year-old Georgian citizen of Chechen ethnicity.

German judges who convicted Krasikov said he had acted on the orders of Russian federal authorities, who provided him with a false identity, a fake passport and the resources to carry out the hit.

The Wall Street Journal reaffirmed in a statement that Gershkovich “is a journalist, and journalism is not a crime,” adding that “any portrayal to the contrary is total fiction.” “We’re encouraged to see Russia’s desire for a deal that brings Evan home, and we hope this will lead to his rapid release and return to his family and our newsroom,” it said.