On Dod

This episode features two discussions from the 2024 Sea Air Space conference, starting with a focus on sustainment and logistics. Over the past several years, the Navy has been using a sweeping process improvement effort to wring almost a billion dollars in savings out of its supply chains under a project called Naval Sustainment System-Supply. Now, under a 2.0 version of NSS-Supply, the focus is changing – to boosting the readiness of the Navy’s ship and aircraft fleets. For more on how it’s all going, Jared Serbu talked with Commander Kirk Engler, the director of NSS-Supply at Naval Supply Systems Command, and Melissa Olson, the project’s deputy director. Later on the show, we’ll have some highlights from a panel Jared moderated at this year’s Sea Air Space conference on digital transformation with senior leaders from the Coast Guard, Navy and Marine Corps.

Federal News Network has covered the difficulties federal employees and military members have seen when it comes to getting access to health care in Japan. On this edition of the show, we’re going to talk about that – but not just about that. We’re also going to talk about military spouse unemployment. In the case of Japan, and Okinawa specifically, the two things are very related. A new report by a volunteer group of experts called Hire Oki Spouses found there are actually plenty of spouses in Okinawa with health care expertise who could be working as nurses, for example, to solve the provider shortage there. They’re just not being hired. On the show this time, we’re joined by two of the co-authors of the report who’ve both lived in Okinawa recently and seen a lot of these issues firsthand: Elayne Saejung is an Air Force spouse and public health researcher Kelly Pretorius, is Ph.D. health care researcher and licensed nurse practitioner

It’s been a decade of major change for the Military Health System in general, and the Defense Health Agency in particular. From its beginning as primarily a shared services provider, DHA has grown to become the sole operator of all of the military’s hospitals and clinics, the overseer of the TRICARE health plans and a central player in most other aspects of Defense health care. On this episode of On DoD, Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, DHA’s director, talks with Jared about the agency’s new strategic plan – including her intent to move DHA from a long period of transition to the “execution phase.”

On this edition of On DoD, Jared talks with two leaders from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) who are experimenting with technologies like 5G and proliferated low-earth orbit satellites. We'll talk about the massive increase in bandwidth those technologies allow and the improvements they might enable -- both for quality of life issues when sailors are underway, and for mission requirements. Our guests: -- Rob Wolborsky, NAVWAR's chief engineer -- Ron Wolfe, the Navy's technical warrant holder for mobility 

On this edition of On DoD: Up until a year ago, the Office of the Secretary of Defense was a bit of an outlier when it came to IT management and governance. Despite having 19,000 employees, there was no single person in charge of making sure those workers had a decent user experience, and no one in charge of delivering common IT services. That changed last October, when Danielle Metz became the OSD chief information officer. She joins Jared Serbu to talk about what’s happened and what’s ahead, including the impending rollout of Microsoft 365 at the classified level. Later in the hour, Federal News Network’s Jason Miller talks with Leo Garciga, the Army’s new CIO. We’ll hear details about his plans to institutionalize and simplify cloud computing across the Army, and a big push to get the service to start moving toward DoD’s new JWCC cloud contract. 

Up until this summer, it wasn’t uncommon for Navy IT users, even at the most senior ranks in the Pentagon, to plan part of their mornings around the 10 minutes it took for their computers to boot. But as part of a concerted effort to improve user experience, the service has shown it’s possible to cut those maddening daily waits to only about 30 seconds. On this episode of On DoD, Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy's acting chief technology officer talks with Jared about what the Navy's learned from its digital experience pilots so far, and how quickly they might be able to scale throughout the fleet.

The Pentagon’s decades-old planning and budgeting process doesn’t have a lot of fans – least of all the people who work within it every day. The American Society of Military Comptrollers has been surveying the DoD financial management workforce for their views about the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process as part of a task force on PPBE reform. Among other things, ASMC found 71 percent of the workforce thinks PPBE keeps the department from quickly responding to its mission needs, and strong majorities say the information technology tools they use to plan hundreds of billions of dollars in spending each year are woefully inadequate. On this episode of On DoD, we get an update from ASMC on the broader PPBE reform conversation -- including some new insights from the practitioners ASMC surveyed. Our guests are: Rich Brady, the CEO of the American Society of Military Comptrollers Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt (Ret.), former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for contracting and member of t

The Pentagon has a new plan to improve technology services inside the actual Pentagon – or big parts of it anyway. The first-ever enterprise IT implementation plan for the Office of the Secretary of Defense promises to take a user-centric approach to improving IT services for the 17 major offices that make up OSD. Danielle Metz, the OSD chief information officer talks about the specifics in a wide-ranging discussion with Federal News Network’s Jared Serbu.

Holly Joers, the program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems talks with Federal News Network's Jared Serbu and Jason Miller about DoD's ongoing deployment of a new electronic heath record, how the new EHR will work with other federal agencies, and the centrality of data in PEO-DHMS's future mission.

The expert commission Congress has tasked with proposing overhauls to DoD's planning and budgeting processes is still a year away from delivering its final report. But the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform has already gathered a huge amount of information. In its first progress report, the commission says it’s held 27 formal meetings, interviewed 280 people and organizations, and launched research studies on more than a dozen topics. For an update on the commission’s work, Jared Serbu talked with the panel's chair and vice chair: Bob Hale, a former DoD comptroller and chief financial officer, and Ellen Lord, a former DoD undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment.

The Air Force believes it's made significant progress toward improving the cybersecurity of its weapons systems -- both brand new ones, and systems that have been fielded for decades.  On this episode of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with two leaders from the Air Force's Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapons Systems (CROWS) about how the Air Force is working to bake cybersecurity into new platforms, and bolt it onto the ones that have been in the inventory for decades.

A new study by George Mason University's Center for Government Contracting chronicles the ways in which the Defense budgeting process has become increasingly inflexible over the last seven decades, how it's shackled technological innovation in DoD, and what to do about it.  On this episode, co-authors Jerry McGinn and Eric Lofgren talk with Jared Serbu about findings and recommendations from their report: Execution Flexibility and Bridging the Valley of Death

No one particularly likes the way the Defense Department andCongress handle the DoD budgeting process. It’s rigid, inflexible, and veryslow. But the PPBE process, as it’s called, has been encoded into the DNA ofthe Defense bureaucracy for more than 60 years, and turning the ship around isgoing to be very tough.   That’s why there are at least two panels of experts who’llbe working on the problem over the next year or more: one chartered by Congress, andone organized by the American Society of Military Comptrollers. On this week’sshow, Jared Serbu talks with several participants in the latter group:  -- Michael Conlin, former DoD chief data officer and chairmanof the ASMC PPBE Reform Task Force   -- George Kovatch, former DoD deputy comptroller and ASMC taskforce member  -- Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt (ret.), former deputy assistantsecretary of the Air Force for contracting, and member of the ASMC task force  -- Rich Brady, a retired Marine Corps colonel and the CEO ofASMC  

 We start this week’s show with an exclusive interview withGabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the Army, about several new initiativesthe Army’s launching to incorporate small, innovative businesses into its technology ecosystem.  Later in the program, Kenneth McNeill, the National Guard’schief information officer, talks us about a big expansion of the Army’s pilot tolet soldiers use their personal devices to access Army networks.   

When the Navy Department set about the process of simplifying its journey to modern software development, officials decided it didn't make much sense to reinvent the wheel. So instead of building a software factory and development pipeline from scratch, they borrowed heavily from the Air Force's Platform One initiative and tailored it to the Navy's needs where necessary.  On this week's edition of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with Manuel Gauto, the chief engineer for Black Pearl, and Bob Stevens, a vice president at Gitlab, the company that provides the development platform Black Pearl runs on.

Maintenance periods for the Navy’s ships and submarines are taking longer than they should. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but one that the Navy’s only recently discovered is that most of the supplies shipyard employees need to do the work aren’t on hand at the time the work’s supposed to start. On average, less than a third of the material needed for a given maintenance availability is even identified before the work starts.  The Navy’s trying to fix that as part of a broader logistics improvement program called Naval Sustainment System Supply (NSS-S). On this week's show, Rear Adm. Peter Stamatopoulos, the commander of Naval Supply Systems Command talks with Jared for an update on NSS-S -- including how it's tackling shipyard material availability. 

The Defense Department and its components are now into their fifth year of having their financial statements independently scrutinized by independent auditors. In the first few years, there were some very promising signs that DoD was on the path to eventually earning a clean opinion, as every other federal agency has already done.  But the DoD inspector general says it’s getting more difficult to find clear signs of widespread financial improvement.  On this week's show, Marcus Gullett, the deputy assistant inspector general for audit, financial management and reporting, joins Jared to talk about the fiscal 2021 audit results, and what the OIG things DoD needs to do to get its financial improvement program back on track. 

Just like innumerable other government agencies, the Air Force runs on paper-based forms that have to be filled out manually, and each one takes time. How much? That was a difficult question to answer until the Virginia Air National Guard’s 192nd Wing saw a chance to do things differently. ' Chief Master Sergeant Joe Young, who’s been leading the testing process, talks with Jared Serbu about the initiative, called HR Smart Weapon.

The internet is a forum for harassment that women in the military can't escape. They are being bombarded by toxic comments, vile memes and even stalking. Yet, the Pentagon has few answers for a problem that is hurting mental health and retention.In this extended special report, Federal News Network's Scott Maucione and Amelia Brust explore the problem in detail, and ask what the military services can and should be doing to address it.

Jason Weiss was appointed back in January 2021 as DoD’s first-ever Chief Software Officer. Weiss has decided he’s ready to move back to the private sector. In this episode, he tells Jared Serbu about his takeaways from his tour of duty, including some of the ways DoD’s started to experiment with new funding models for software, how software factories have started to permeate the department, and how he wishes he'd had more authority to direct change. Later in the episode, Department of the Navy CIO Aaron Weis and Jennifer Edgin, the Marine Corps’ Assistant Deputy Commandant for Information talk with Jared about IT modernization in the Navy and Marine Corps.