By Debbie Gregory.

A high-stakes gambling addiction that resulted in the embezzlement of $2.7 million from the federal government has landed a 27-year Naval officer in prison.

Navy Lt. Randolph Prince, 45, will serve more than four years in federal prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud and making a false statement on his 2014 tax return.

As a supply staff member of Explosive Ordinance Disposal Training and Evaluation Unit 2, Prince steered government contracts to three sham companies that were run by his friends and co-conspirators Lt. J.G. Courtney Cloman, a naval flight officer, and Clayton Pressley III, a former sailor. Both have pleaded guilty to participating in the fraud.

Effective and efficient procurement for an organization as large and complex as the U.S. military is notoriously difficult. The needs of the nation’s military must be balanced with effective accounting methods, controlling cost, as well as mitigating fraud and waste.

This particular scam operated as follows: When a contract landed on the desk of one of these companies, Prince, and his co-conspirators would generate fraudulent documentation to suggest the company had honored its end of the bargain. Once “delivered” the Navy would then pay the invoice. However, the sham companies never provided the Navy with anything, least of all the “inert training aids,” or fake bombs that were supposedly delivered.

“It’s a shame that he squandered an otherwise outstanding 27-year Naval career,” defense attorney Shawn Cline said in an email. “He suffered from a terrible gambling addiction and abused a position of trust to fuel that addiction.”

In addition to the prison sentence, U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar ordered Prince to pay $2,719,907 in restitution.

Pressley, who netted more than $644,000 from the conspiracy, was sentenced last year to two years in prison. That is on top of four years and two months he received for stealing the identities of his subordinates in an unrelated federal case.

Cloman is set to be sentenced Feb. 7.

By Debbie Gregory.

Senior artificial intelligence managers with tech giant Google recently participated in a day-long Air Force event to trade ideas on how best to curb hypoxia-like events from happening to pilots, giving Air Force officials a glimpse into how the services can leverage developing technologies faster.

The Joint Physiological Episodes Action Team, or J-PEAT, has already fostered a collaboration between the Air Force and the Navy, which until now have been separately trying to find the causes of, and solutions to, the so-called unexplained physiological episode (PE) events.

Pilots, physiologists, data scientists, engineers and maintenance personnel were joined outside of the nation’s capital in December by Google managers at the event known as an AF PEAT hackathon, to assist pilots flying aircraft such as the T-6 Texan II, F-22 Raptor, F-15 Eagle, F-35 Lightning II and A-10 Thunderbolt II.

For each type/model/series aircraft, the J-PEAT team is using a methodology called root cause corrective action analysis to trace fault trees, allowing a thorough, data-driven and methodical approach to identifying causes of PE events.

“Working closely with the Navy, NASA and other industry partners, the Air Force is making huge strides to better understand and solve issues,” said Brig. Gen. Edward Vaughan, the AF PEAT team lead. “We are in a period of very positive, but disruptive, innovation. There are hundreds of efforts across the human physiology and aircraft ecosystems moving in many directions.”

The symptoms, including disorientation, shortness of breath, confusion and wheezing, mimic both hypoxia, deficiency in the amount of oxygen reaching the tissues, and hypocapnia, which is reduced carbon dioxide in the blood.

“Physiological episodes happen to people, not equipment,” said Jennifer Farrell, chief engineer for the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Human Systems Program Office. “We must focus on design that enhances the human element.”

The symptoms experienced by pilots, including disorientation, shortness of breath, confusion and wheezing, mimic both hypoxia, deficiency in the amount of oxygen reaching the tissues, and hypocapnia, which is reduced carbon dioxide in the blood.

By Debbie Gregory.

Robotics manufacturers are scrambling for more than a half billion dollars in Pentagon contracts for compact battlefield robots that will defuse bombs and scout ahead for soldiers on the battlefield. The Army’s immediate plans envision a new fleet of 5,000 ground robots of varying sizes and levels of autonomy.

The fight to win the contract shines a light on the need to stay competitive in the merging of technology and national defense, as international adversaries could come to dominate battlefield robotics.

During a Senate hearing last May, Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley warned that China and Russia “are investing heavily and very quickly” in air, sea, and ground bots.

“My personal estimate is that robots will play a significant role in combat inside of a decade or a decade and a half,” Milley added.

The intention of the project is to someday help troops “look around the corner, over the next hillside and let the robot be in harm’s way and let the robot get shot,” said Paul Scharre, a military technology expert at the Center for a New American Security.

Concerns that popular commercial drones made by Chinese company DJI could be vulnerable to spying led the Army to ban their use by soldiers in 2017.

The biggest contract, worth $429 million, calls for mass producing robots that are light, easily maneuverable and can be “carried by infantry for long distances without taxing the soldier,” said Bryan McVeigh, project manager for force projection at the Army’s research and contracting center in Warren, Michigan.

A $100 million contract for a mid-sized reconnaissance and bomb-disabling robot was won in late 2017 by Endeavor, a spinoff of iRobot which makes Roomba vacuum cleaners.

Unlike the efforts by China and Russia to design artificially intelligent war-fighting arsenals, the U.S. Defense Department is cautious about developing battlefield machines that make their own decisions.

A report from the Congressional Research Service in November stated that despite the Pentagon’s “insistence” that a human must always be in the loop, the military could soon feel compelled to develop fully autonomous systems if rivals do the same.

By Debbie Gregory.

An investigation conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has revealed that of the $6.2 million budget allocated to the Department of Veterans Affairs for suicide prevention outreach in fiscal year 2018, the agency only spent $1.5 million by the end of the fiscal year, leaving $4.7 million unused.

Suicide among veterans is disproportionately higher than the rest of the U.S. population, especially among veterans younger than 35. And in light of the VA leadership touting suicide prevention a top priority, this information begs the question, why?

The suicide prevention budget was meant to cover outreach via social media posts, public service announcements, billboards, and radio, bus, Facebook and print advertisements, which all declined in 2017 and 2018, as did the effort on suicide prevention month.

“VA has stated that preventing veteran suicide is its top clinical priority, yet [the Veterans Health Administration’s] lack of leadership attention to its suicide prevention media outreach campaign in recent years has resulted in less outreach to veterans,” the GAO report states.

The GAO investigation came at the request of Rep. Tim Walz (D-MN), the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. He said that the findings conveyed “a deeply troubling level of incompetence” by President Donald Trump’s administration.

“At a time when 20 veterans a day still die by suicide, VA should be doing everything in its power to inform the public about the resources available to veterans in crisis,” Walz said in a statement. “Unfortunately, VA has failed to do that, despite claiming the elimination of veteran suicide as its highest clinical priority.”

The VA blamed leadership vacancies for the downturn, with the former national director for suicide prevention, Caitlin Thompson, resigning in July 2017, and not being replace until the new director, Keita Franklin, was appointed in April, 2018.

“Officials reported not having leadership available for a period of time to make decisions about the suicide prevention media outreach campaign,” the report states. “GAO found that [VA] did not assign key leadership responsibilities or establish clear lines of reporting, and as a result, its ability to oversee the outreach campaign was hindered. Consequently, [the VA] may not be maximizing its reach with suicide prevention media content to veterans, especially those who are at-risk.”

“This year, I’m making sure that we are spending the funding 100 percent,” said Dr. Steven Lieberman, who is in charge of the Veterans Health Administration. “I’m reviewing the budget monthly and making sure we have obligated all the dollars. We have to get it right.”

By Debbie Gregory.

The Department of Defense (DoD) kicked off the new year by awarding a number of eight-figure contracts on behalf of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

On January 2nd, the DoD awarded Risk Mitigation Consulting Inc. a $95,000,000 maximum amount, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for mission assurance assessments of installation/facilities infrastructure and facility-related control systems for the Department of the Navy. The work includes, but is not limited to, the collection and evaluation of data concerning the criticality of facilities, utilities, industrial control systems, and supporting infrastructure based on mission impacts, probable threats and hazards, and degrees of vulnerability to determine the overall risk posture of the asset. The company is based in Destin, Florida.

On the same day, the DoD also awarded Raytheon Co. a contract for $81,224,627 for modification P00007 to a previously awarded fixed-price-incentive=firm-target contract (N00019-17-C-0042). This modification provides for the procurement of 228 configuration components required for completion of Configuration D Retrofit Component engineering change proposals for the F/A-18E/F and EA-18G aircraft for the Navy and the government of Australia. The company is based in El Segundo, California.

Additionally, January 2nd saw Lockheed Martin, Rotary and Mission Systems, Moorestown, New Jersey, awarded a $28,882,337 cost-plus-incentive-fee modification to previously awarded contract N00024-16-C-5102 for AEGIS Baseline 9 Integration and Delivery, TI-08 CG Upgrade, AEGIS Baseline 9 Capability Development, Capability Improvements, Baseline 9 Sea Based Non-Cooperative Target Recognition Development and Radar Engineering.

The Army contracts included O’Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt Armoring Co. LLC, of Fairfield, Ohio, awarded a $60,736,752 firm-fixed-price contract to procure Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles protection kits and Endeavor Robotics Inc., Chelmsford, Massachusetts, was awarded a $32,400,000 firm-fixed-price contract for reset, sustainment, maintenance, and recap parts for Robot Logistics Support Center technicians to support the overall sustainment actions of the entire Endeavor family of small, medium, and large robots.

The only contract awarded on behalf of the Air Force was a $22,500,000 ceiling indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts for the formation of a collaborative working group of various industry partners to work as single extended entity to develop, evolve, update via pre-planned product improvement initiatives, as well as manage and provide configuration control of the open mission systems and universal command and control interface standards, collectively referred to as the Open Architecture Standards. This contract is a joint venture between BAE Systems Information and Electronics Systems Integration; The Boeing Co., Defense, Space & Security; General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.; Goodrich Corp., UTC Aerospace Systems, ISR Systems; Harris Corp., Electronic Systems, Integrated Electronic Warfare Systems; Lockheed Martin Corp., Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co.; Northrop Grumman Systems Corp., Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, ; and Raytheon Co.