Steve Escaravage, an executive vice president within Booz Allen Hamilton’s global defense business, said the U.S. federal government and the Department of Defense should find new pathways that would enable industry to back defense missions as the country faces strategic competition. Escaravage, a 2024 Wash100 awardee, noted that the National Defense Strategy states that denial, resilience and cost imposition are the three areas that play a role in strengthening deterrence.

The Department of the Treasury's Internal Revenue Service has begun seeking information on a potential $512 million multiple-award blanket purchase agreement covering information technology portfolio management support services for the IRS' Enterprise Case Management system. A notice posted Wednesday on SAM.gov states that the BPA has an ordering period of five years and encompasses strategy and planning, enterprise services and operations, cybersecurity, user and network services and program management services.

Northrop Grumman and SpaceX are working together on a classified satellite constellation for a U.S. intelligence agency to gather high-resolution Earth imagery and help improve the U.S. government's ability to monitor military and intelligence targets, Reuters reported Thursday. According to the report, SpaceX secured a potential $1.8 billion contract from the National Reconnaissance Office in 2021 for the classified satellite project.

Mercury Systems has received a production contract from BlueHalo to deliver a signal processing technology for the latter's digital beaming platform being developed for the U.S. Space Force's Satellite Communication Augmentation Resource program. The company said Thursday it will produce a field-programmable gate array-based common signal acquisition and digital beamforming tool for BlueHalo's BADGER technology, a transportable ground-based communications system that uses re-configurable beamforming tiles for simplifying space operations.

A potential foreign military sale of Basler BT-67 aircraft to the government of Argentina has been approved by the U.S. Department of State. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency said Thursday that the FMS has an estimated cost of $143 million and includes the aircraft themselves, various parts, technical documentation, training equipment and logistics and program support, such as personnel training, technical and engineering services and transportation.

According to Amy Spruill, senior vice president and managing director of U.S. regulated industries at SAP, a key element that differentiates robotic process automation from its artificial intelligence-powered counterpart is the level of autonomy and task specificity. “RPA is more about configuration and simple rules and is applied to specific, preconfigured tasks. AI-enhanced RPA sits in the middle, blending the specific task orientation of RPA with the broader capabilities of AI,” Spruill added.

Applied Insight was awarded a contract to provide an undisclosed but existing intelligence community customer with artificial intelligence development over a five-year performance period. The cloud and technology services provider said Thursday contract work will primarily focus on AI/machine learning and its various aspects to support national security efforts.

A joint venture between Jacobs Solutions and Geosyntec Consultants has secured a spot on a potential five-year, $375 million indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to offer NASA environmental engineering, restoration and compliance services. Jacobs said Thursday the team will support NASA's centers, component facilities and other infrastructure assets by delivering technical consultation, contamination detection, sampling, human health and ecological risk assessments, remedial alternatives evaluation, remediation technologies implementation and environmental media management.

Jeremy Fleming, former director of the U.K. government's intelligence and security agency Government Communications Headquarters, has been appointed as a senior adviser at enterprise software-as-a-service company SandboxAQ. He brings to the role years of leadership experience and understanding of the cybersecurity landscape, the company said Thursday.

Organizations will have to augment their approaches to network traffic monitoring when they implement Transport Layer Security 1.3, according to Scott Aken, the CEO of software company Axellio. Aken explains in an opinion column published Tuesday on Security Magazine that TLS 1.3 "significantly enhances" data encryption but in so doing imposes limits on data stream decryption, making network security monitoring more difficult and potentially obscuring malware and traffic by threat actors.

Hank Jackson, formerly an executive technology adviser at Edgewater Federal Solutions since 2021, has been promoted to chief operating officer at the Frederick, Maryland-based company. In a statement Tuesday, company CEO Dave Yockman, said, “[Jackson’s] ability to manage contracts, develop and forge relationships with key stakeholders, and drive exponential business growth make him an excellent choice to lead our client services and talent acquisition teams.”

Maxar Intelligence CEO Dan Smoot recently said that he is prioritizing the rollout of the WorldView Legion satellite constellation, which was supposed to begin launching in 2021. Legion is the next-generation imaging platform of Maxar Technologies, the parent organization of Maxar Intelligence, a division that specializes in satellite imagery. The constellation will comprise six satellites in all, with the first two set for launch in the next few weeks.