80,000 Pounds of Bombs Dropped on Iraqi Island

Morning Coffee is a robust blend of links to news around the internet concerning the Naval Air Station Patuxent River economic community. The opinions expressed here do not reflect opinions of the Leader’s owners or staff.

The first F-35 Lightning IIs deployed to the Middle East joined F-15 Strike Eagles this week to dump 80,000 pounds of bombs on Qanus Island in Iraq. The US-led coalition countering ISIS in Iraq and Syria sought to prevent the Islamic State from using the island as a refuge, reports Air Force Times.

Shifting DoD money to the border wall may trigger an “all-out brawl” over a $695 billion defense spending bill that is needed to pass to avoid an Oct. 1 shutdown, reports Defense News. The bill includes $622.4 billion in base funding, $70.7 billion in wartime spending, and $1.7 billion for storm damaged military bases.

DoD has no plans to release 20% of its custom code as open source software, despite a mandate in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, reports FCW. The OMB released its open source policy in 2016 with the goal of the government having more sharable, reusable code and to curtail the practice of licensing the same proprietary code over and over again.

Fighting has picked up in several areas of northern Afghanistan, officials said Wednesday, days after the collapse of talks between the United States and the Taliban aimed at agreeing to the withdrawal of thousands of US troops, reports Reuters.

The Justice Department has charged two FEMA officials with fraud and bribery accusing them of helping a company receive $1.8 billion from restoration efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, reports The Washington Post. Charged were Ahsha Nateef Tribble, a FEMA deputy regional administrator who led power restoration in Puerto Rico, and Jovanda R. Patterson, a FEMA deputy chief of staff, who left her position in July 2018 to work for Cobra Energy.

DOJ seeks a court order, according to Military Times, to force Apple and Google to provide information on tens of thousands of users of a smart rifle scope with companion apps which may have reached the hands of Taliban fighters overseas.

Younger vets are more likely than previous generations to have problems adjusting to civilian life, reports Military Times. About 1 in 6 called  the transition very difficult, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. The survey also found  that one-third of veterans reported trouble paying their bills in the first few years after leaving the military, and about 40 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans believed their deployment had a negative effect on their mental health.

Some 775,477 US veterans and service members have deployed to Afghanistan since the 9/11 terrorist attacks 18 years ago, including 28,267 who have gone five or more times, reports The Washington Post. Some returning vets are wondering how America’s longest conflict might end. “Maybe this is how the Vietnam vets felt,” said Marine veteran Anthony “Rocco” DePrimo.

US Navy makes a major breakthrough in mine-hunting autonomous weaponry, reports Defense News. The system sends  an autonomous boat to sweep for mines with a sonar system, detect a mine-like object, classify it, and then deploys another system to destroy the mine.

Navy Times reports on why the entire SEAL Team 7 leadership team got canned.

C4ISRNET reports that the US is not focusing its developing AI systems on the three main types of attack: adversarial examples, trojans, and model conversion.

Navy wants to test private drinking wells near the Groton, CT, sub base, reports Navy Times, for potentially dangerous industrial compounds known as “forever chemicals” to determine if the chemicals are showing up at unsafe levels in private wells.

Military Times reports 90 Army, Army Reserve, and Army National Guard posts have PFAS in the drinking water. No one is taking in unsafe levels of the chemicals, according to the Pentagon, because filtered water at the bases complies with Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. Here is the list of the identified bases.

The Naval Academy is investigating report of noose hung on academy property on the 56th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for jobs and freedom, reports Navy Times.

If you’ve ever wanted to adopt a retired military working dog, now’s your chance, if you can qualify, reports Military Times.

Along with aircraft, warships, and personnel moved out of the path of Hurricane Dorian, the Navy also evacuated their specially trained bottlenose dolphins and sea lions from Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic in Kings Bay, GA, to shelter in the Florida panhandle’s Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, reports Navy Times. This was the third sea mammal hurricane evacuation to Panama City since 2016.

Contracts:

Golden Wolf Ewing Cole JV, Huntington, Maryland (W912DY-19-D-0020); HKS WSP JV, Dallas, Texas (W912DY-19-D-0021); and Rogers, Lovelock & Fritz Inc., Orlando, Florida (W912DY-19-D-0022), will compete for each order of the $9,900,000 firm-fixed-price contract for the procurement of specialized medical facilities architect-engineering services. Bids were solicited via the internet with 17 received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Sept. 10, 2021. US Army Corps of Engineers, Huntsville, Alabama, is the contracting activity.