On Dod

On this episode of On DoD, a bit of a logistics focus. First, we talk with Tim Walton, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, about DoD's somewhat surprising decision to close down its Red Hill fuel storage facility near Honolulu. We'll also talk with Al Thompson, the CEO of HomeSafe Alliance. That's the company U.S. Transportation Command finally selected to reform the military's household goods moving system. HomeSafe has a green light to get to work on the multibillion dollar contract, now that the Government Accountability Office has dismissed each of the bid protests that challenged it.

On this episode, an extended discussion with Danielle Metz, the deputy DoD chief information officer for information enterprise. Metz explains how Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle will actually compete for work under the up to $9 billion contract, in an approach that's novel for government procurement. Federal News Network reported on the key details of this interview in mid-December, when the coversation was first recorded. This episode of On DoD contains the full interview.

It’s fair to say there are a lot of institutions across government that are still figuring out what the future of work will look like. In this episode, we revisit one of the Army organizations that’s much further along than most when it comes to answering some of those questions. John Willison, the deputy to the commanding general at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command makes a second appearance on On DoD. Last April, he talked with us about what was then just a concept paper for the future of work at DEVCOM. This time, he joins us to talk about what the command has done to turn that paper into reality, including by giving supervisors “maximum flexibility” to decide when and where their employees work.

On this week's show, we talk to Al Thompson, the CEO of Homesafe Alliance, the joint venture U.S. Transportation Command just picked for a $6.2 billion contract to overhaul the military's household goods moving system. Later, Jared talks with Maj. Gen. Rob Collins, the Army's program executive officer for command, control and communications-tactical, Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, the director of the Network Cross-Functional Team at Army Futures Command, amd Joe Welch, the director of the Army C5ISR center about the Army's new Unified Network Plan.

On this edition of On DoD: a deep dive on other transactionagreements.   According to the Federal Procurement Data System DoD’s useof OTAs has skyrocketed from 342 agreements worth $1.4 billion in 2016 to 3,200agreements worth more than $16 billion in 2020. Despite that growth, the rulesgoverning OTAs – what few rules there are – aren’t universally understood eveninside the department’s own acquisition bureaucracy.   To help demystify OTAs, we’re joined by Hallie Balkin, oneof DoD’s leading experts on OTAs. She is a government procurement attorney whocurrently works at Defense Acquisition University, where she’s the learningdirector for other transactions. Balkin is also involved in an effort with theOffice of the Secretary of Defense to update and reissue DoD’s OtherTransactions Guide.  

On this edition of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with two newly-sworn-in DoD technology leaders about their priorities: -- Heidi Shyu, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering -- Jay Bonci, the Air Force Chief Technology Officer

The Defense acquisition workforce has faced challenges at other times in its history, but as of 2021, it’s living in interesting times. Contracting officers, program managers and other acquisition professionals are navigating their way through some big changes. Just to name a few: a major recent rewrite of the DoD 5000.02 series of policy instructions, a massive rise in interest in other transaction agreements and other nontraditional procurement vehicles, a new “pathway” designed for software acquisition, and new ways to budget for those software procurements. On this special edition of On DoD, we’re joined by three of the key leaders who are helping to prepare the workforce for these new challenges, and who are also finding new instructional and collaboration mechanisms to provide acquisition professionals with the tools they need to meet their missions. Our guests are James Woolsey, the president of Defense Acquisition University, Frank Kelley, DAU’s vice president, and Michelle Currier, professor of con

Rear Admiral Pete Stamatopoulos, the commander of Naval Supply Systems Command joins us to talk about Naval Sustainment System-Supply -- NAVSUP's effort to provide Navy leadership with a holistic and businesslike approach to the Navy's supply and maintenance decisions. Over the past year since it's been up and running, it's saved an estimated $500 million.

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 in the other direction.

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 federated model in which the military services and Defense agencies will move into a federated Microsoft 365 cloud environment.

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 spending on OTAs each year, or what it’s getting for its investments. Those are among the findings of a new audit by the DoD Inspector General’s office. Assistant Inspector General Theresa Hull, who led the audit, is Jared Serbu’s guest on this week’s edition of On DoD.

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.

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.

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.

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 financial analyst.

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 Maucione about the DPA and how the new administration might use it. Our guests are Jerry McGinn, a former top official in DoD’s Office of Manufacturing and Industrial Base Policy, and Andrew Hunter, a former director of the Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell.

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 Army has a brand new strategy for how it’ll operate and modernize its installations between now and 2035. Alex Beehler, the assistant secretary of the Army for energy, installations and environment joins us to lay out the details.

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 industry, data analytics and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. On this week’s show, Jared Serbu talks to two of the people working to refine the Navy’s processes and apply emerging technologies to the aircraft readiness challenge. Robert Smith leads the reliability control board data analytics team at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Patuxent River, Maryland, and Jason Thomas is the team’s principal analyst – he focuses on AI, modeling and simulation, and conditions-based maintenance.

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 engineer and co-author of the report.

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 chairman of the IWRP Executive Steering Group, and Don Sallee is the NIWC-Atlantic Acquisition Services Manager. Later in the program, Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro (Ret.) joins us to talk about recent leaderships shakeups at the top of DoD's civilian leadership structure and how they might impact the presidential transition process.