On this edition of On DoD, Jared Serbu speaks with Maj. Gen. (ret.) Arnold Punaro, who's just released a new book, The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force. Punaro, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee who's advised Defense secretaries of both parties on reform issues, argues there are three main categories of cost growth that have steadily decreased the military's tooth-to-tail ratio over the last several decades, and offers several ideas for how to begin to move the balance ...
Jul 31, 2021•45 min
On this week's show, Danielle Metz, the deputy DoD chief information officer for information enterprise talks with Jared Serbu about the shutdown of Commercial Virtual Remote. CVR, the service DoD created to let employees work from home at the beginning of the pandemic, was a first-ever example of the entire DoD converging around a centrally-provided IT service, at least at this scale: 2.3 million users. After a few extensions, CVR reached its sunset date on June 15, to be replaced by a federate...
Jun 19, 2021•42 min
If you’re curious about exactly where DoD is spending its money on other transaction agreements (OTAs), you won’t find satisfying answers in any public spending databases. When the military services award OTAs through third party consortiums, as they often do, the actual records of which contractors are receiving the awards are stored on spreadsheets in contracting offices across the country. Because of that, not even the Pentagon itself has a clear picture of the billions of dollars it’s spendi...
May 13, 2021•41 min
On this week's show, John Willison, the top civilian leader at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command joins Jared Serbu to discuss how DEVCOM is thinking about telework in a post-pandemic environment. In a recent survey, 40 percent of the command's workforce said they want to keep working remotely 100 percent of the time, and DEVCOM thinks there are a lot of good reasons to help accommodate those wishes. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https...
Mar 31, 2021•42 min
The Defense Department is now onto its fourth year of full-scale financial audits. At first glance, the results from the first three years aren’t encouraging: DoD has more auditor-identified financial problems now than it did a year ago. But there are some signs of forward momentum if you know where to look. Our guest, Carmen Malone, the Deputy Assistant DoD Inspector General for Audit, discusses some of those with Jared Serbu on this week’s show. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy ...
Mar 24, 2021•42 min
In this edition of On DoD, the Defense Acquisition University's Mike Coolican joins Jared Serbu to explain the fundamentals of DoD's new Adaptive Acquisition Framework, and why this rewrite of the 5000 series is different from past efforts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Mar 16, 2021•41 min
Under a new agreement with LendLease, a large military housing operator, $1.1 billion in debt-financed housing improvements are expected to start as soon as May across six large Army bases. To explain how the deal will work, two guests from the Army's housing partnerships office join Jared Serbu. Scott Chamberlain is the chief of capital ventures in the office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Housing and Partnerships, and Jason Kallivokas is the office’s lead fina...
Feb 11, 2021•43 min
The Defense Production Act is a special presidential authority we heard about quite a bit toward the beginning of the pandemic as the Trump administration used it to procure personal protective equipment, vaccine-related supplies and other materials. But President Biden has promised to take things a bit further – using the DPA to ramp up vaccine production and speed up the distribution process. On today’s show, two former Defense acquistion officials talk with Federal News Network's Scott Maucio...
Jan 28, 2021•32 min
The Navy Department is making some big changes to how it buys and uses commercial cloud computing services. Within the next few months, all the Navy and Marine Corps’ cloud purchases will be funneled through a single “marketplace,” and program managers will no longer be allowed to use their own contracts to buy cloud. Jared talks with two guests from the Navy's program executive office for digital and enterprise services, which will play a pivotal role in implementing the changes. Later, the Arm...
Jan 07, 2021•43 min
Like the other military services, the Navy has been working in recent years to improve the readiness of its aviation fleets – especially since cuts under the Budget control Act almost a decade ago dealt a serious blow to readiness. Bigger maintenance budgets over the last few years have helped, but money isn’t everything. The Navy is trying to innovate its way out of the readiness problem too, and with some success, thanks to a combination of processes borrowed from the commercial airline indust...
Dec 16, 2020•37 min
A new Pentagon working group is trying to bring more rigor to DoD’s management of its software acquisition workforce. But the department faces a major hurdle: it knows almost nothing about the workforce as it stands today – not even how many people are in it. The RAND Corporation recently published recommendations on how DoD can identify the workforce, and also how to build a standard competency framework for software professionals. Our guest this week is Bonnie Triezenberg, a RAND senior engine...
Dec 04, 2020•44 min
In August, the Navy announced it was increasing the ceiling value for its Information Warfare Research Project OTA to $500 million. That’s after IWRP exhausted its initial 100 million dollar ceiling in just a little over a year and a half. To talk about how that happened and some of the technology that’s come out of IWRP since the OTA was first signed in 2018, Jared talks with two guests with us from Naval Information Warfare Center-Atlantic: Kevin Charlow, the Deputy Executive Director and chai...
Nov 19, 2020•45 min
The Pentagon's acquisition system often gets a bad rap -- often deservedly so. But DoD's fledgling Space Development Agency is offering the latest example in why the Federal Acquisition Regulation doesn't have to be synonymous with slowness. SDA just awarded a major multi-million dollar systems integration contract in the span of three and a half months as part of its effort to build the new National Defense Space Architecture. On this week's show, Ryan Frigm, SDA's deputy director, joins Jared ...
Nov 03, 2020•41 min
The Army is finding new ways to partner with the communities around its bases. Thanks to a 2015 law that lets the military services sign service agreements with local governments without the pain of traditional federal contracts, the Army has now signed dozens of Intergovernmental Service Agreements for everything from snow removal to animal control. The latest of those agreements happened just last month at Fort Stewart Georgia. Later in the program, we discuss how the Navy is using digital twi...
Oct 08, 2020•44 min
On this week's program, Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt, the deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for contracting joins Jared Serbu to discuss a wide range of lessons the acquisition community learned from COVID-19. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Sep 23, 2020•43 min
On this week's program, Jonathan Moak, the Army's top financial management official, and Greg Garcia, its top IT official, join Jared Serbu to discuss a new initiative to modernize the Army's approach to financial management. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
Sep 09, 2020•18 min
Troy Meyer, DoD's principal deputy inspector general for audit joins Jared Serbu to discuss why open recommendations are headed in the wrong direction (there are now 170 that are five years old or older, compared to 80 last year). Later, we get an update on the Air Force's experiments with Enterprise IT as a Service from Maj. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, the assistant deputy Air Force CIO for digital transformation. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://...
Aug 12, 2020•43 min
Lisa Hershman, DoD's chief management officer, joins Jared Serbu to discuss the role and mission of the CMO. The office only existed since 2018, but has achieved billions of dollars in savings through long-term business reforms, Hershman says. Congress is leaning toward eliminating the CMO position altogether, but Hershman says lawmakers need to give the department more time to fully prove the value of a senior official dedicated to business transformation. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.co...
Jul 09, 2020•49 min
With billions of dollars in CARES Act funding yet to be spent and several billion more potentially in the appropriations pipeline, it’s far too early to tell how effectively the Defense Department is spending its share of the disaster funding. But according to the Pentagon’s inspector general, DoD – and its auditors – have more than enough experience with prior emergencies to know what to do, and what not to do, to make sure money is spent well even when contracts have to be executed quickly. On...
Jun 17, 2020•44 min
On this week's show, Capt. Ben McNeal, the program manager for Naval Enterprise Networks talks with Jared Serbu about how the Navy hopes to use its latest NGEN contract to consolidate its networks (there are still 140 of them). Later, Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro (Ret.) talks about the Defense Business Board's latest study on how to restructure the Pentagon's organizational chart to drive meaningful business reform. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at http...
May 21, 2020•41 min
From modeling airflows aboard medical evacuation aircraft to simulating vaccine candidates, the Defense Department's supercomputing resources are being brought to bear on various aspects of the government's pandemic response. Dr. Will McMahon and Dr. Kevin Newmeyer from the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program join Jared Serbu to share some examples. Later, we talk with Dr. Piyush Mehrotra, the chief of the Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA about how his agency is contribu...
Apr 22, 2020•47 min
Last week, the Defense Department released its latest in a series of requests for prototype proposals (RPPs) to help pave the way for incorporating 5G technologies into military networks. Depending on how the project pans out, it could lead to significant improvements in how 5G networks operate in the commercial sector too. Sal D’Itri, the chairman of the spectrum consortium joins Jared Serbu to discuss the new RPP, focused on dynamic spectrum sharing, and the previous three 5G solicitations DoD...
Apr 08, 2020•43 min
Because of the coronavirus crisis, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences is conferring medical degrees early so those new clinicians can get to work right away. 150 M.D.s and 33 advance practice nurses got their degrees on Wednesday. Dr. Art Kellerman, the dean of USU's Hebert School of Medicine at USU joins us to talk about how the early graduation was accomplished. Also: a look at how the federal oversight community is going to be involved in the more than $2 trillion pandem...
Apr 01, 2020•42 min
The Navy is jumping on the bandwagon of federal agencies who are reforming their IT security processes to speed new capabilites through the approval process in as little as a day. That’s a far cry from the 13-18 months it currently takes new capabilities to make their way through the Navy’s implementation of the Risk Management Framework. Capt. Susan BryerJoyner joins Jared Serbu to talk about the forthcoming changes under a program called Rapid Assess and Incorporate Software Engineering in a D...
Mar 11, 2020•46 min
A little over three years ago, when the forerunner to what’s now called the Defense Innovation Unit was still in its infancy, one of the first projects the Pentagon asked its new Silicon Valley outpost to tackle was the emerging problem of threats from small drones. That’s partly because several well-funded startups had already started to emerge to help companies and other non-Defense customers, like stadium and critical infrastructure operators, deal with the problem of countering unmanned aeri...
Mar 06, 2020•40 min
A little over three years ago, when the forerunner to what’s now called the Defense Innovation Unit was still in its infancy, one of the first projects the Pentagon asked its new Silicon Valley outpost to tackle was the emerging problem of threats from small drones. That’s partly because several well-funded startups had already started to emerge to help companies and other non-Defense customers, like stadium and critical infrastructure operators, deal with the problem of countering unmanned aeri...
Mar 04, 2020•39 min
After its first two years of full-scale financial audits, the Defense Department is starting to get some of its first concrete indications of how much work likes ahead of it before it can finally earn a clean audit opinion. And according to DoD’s inspector general, there are clear signs of progress – though they’re not necessarily to be found in the number of audit findings the department has been able to fix. On this week's show, Carmen Malone, the Deputy Assistant Inspector General for Audit j...
Feb 12, 2020•39 min
For almost a decade now, Congress has been pressing the Defense department to modernize and consolidate the IT systems it uses to write contracts. This is a pivotal year in accomplishing that: The Army is beginning to roll out its new Army Contract Writing System, and the Navy is expected to follow shortly thereafter with one that's based on the same commercial product. On this week’s show, we talk with Cherie Smith, the Army’s program executive officer for enterprise information systems, and St...
Feb 05, 2020•49 min
It’s been five years since the Defense Department adopted the Risk Management Framework to assess the cybersecurity of its IT systems. It was a rough ride at first, but DoD organizations have started to work the bugs out. The Army has just launched a three-phase RMF reform effort called Project Sentinel. Nancy Kreidler, the director of cybersecurity and information assurance in the Army CIO’s office talked with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu about what the Army’s changing, and why. See Priva...
Jan 22, 2020•45 min
The Defense Department Inspector General has released its annual list of the top ten management challenges facing the Pentagon. Most of the items in the 2020 edition are familiar: shoring up financial management, countering challenges from China, Russia, and global terrorist networks, and defending DoD networks from cyber threats. But there are two new entries this year: One deals with taking care of servicemembers and families. The other points toward the Pentagon’s need to securing and better ...
Dec 04, 2019•46 min
