Shared situational awareness is the key to building combatant commanders’ confidence in US Cyber Command, Maj. Gen. David Senty, CYBERCOM chief of staff, said at AFA’s CyberFutures Conference last week. “Only through shared situational awareness” will commanders come to understand the extent to which the Defense Department’s newest command is going in order “to execute the things that are necessary for their operational plans,” he said. With the onslaught of smart data and data tagging filling up the cloud architecture, it’s imperative that cyber operators are able to determine where the information has been and where it came from so that they can figure out what information can and should be shared, Senty said. “Key terrain and command and control is something [about which] we are in constant discussion with our service components and the Cocoms and [Defense Department] policy [officials] because of the need to address the speed of cyber and the fact that we can touch anything from anywhere,” he said.
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.