On DoD

Latest Episodes:

In DoD, a new approach to testing weapons systems for cybersecurity May 14, 2018

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In this week's edition of On DoD, Robert Behler, the Defense Department's new Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, talks with Jared Serbu about new procedures the department is using to test the cybersecurity of its systems. The processes include a new push to track DoD's IT supply chain, and an increased emphasis on how resilient its weapons systems will be to the cyber attacks they'll inevitably face.

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A conversation with the personnel chiefs of each of the sea services Apr 19, 2018

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A special edition of On DoD: This week's program is an abridged version of a panel discussion at the annual Sea Air Space conference with the personnel chiefs of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, moderated by Jared Serbu.

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How the Army plans to compress its IT acquisition process into under a month Apr 04, 2018

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Some members of Congress and some corners of the Defense Department have become enamored of the idea of using other transaction authorities instead of traditional contracts as the way to force the DoD acquisition system to move as quickly as its appetite for technology. But OTAs, in and of themselves, are not the magic bullet for speedier acquisitions. That, at least, is the Army’s take when it comes to acquiring new tools to defend its networks. On this week's show, Scott Helmore, the Army's product manager for defensive cyberspace operations talks with us about the various other pieces of the acquisition bureaucracy puzzle the Army had to get right before it could settle on a speedier process for acquiring new cyber tools, one that it believes will successfully operate in cycles of 30 days or less.

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DoD Inspector General Glenn Fine; Army uses IT to make its headquarters orgs more efficient Mar 21, 2018

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Glenn Fine, the Defense Department’s principal deputy inspector general joins us in the first half of this week's show to talk about the audit of DoD’s consolidated financial statements, and some of the internal changes his own office has made to earn it a new award as the "most improved" place to work among DoD sub-agencies. We also talk with officials from the Army's Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems about a new electronic tool that's making the process of moving paper and tasks around the Pentagon dramatically more efficient.

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How DoD is using Code.mil to kickstart open source software for Defense Mar 14, 2018

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Under this year’s Defense authorization bill, the Defense Department has until June to start moving much of its custom-developed software source code to a central repository and begin managing and licensing it via open source methods. The mandate might prove daunting for an organization in which open source practices are relatively scarce, especially considering that, until recently, there was no established open source playbook for the federal government. That’s begun to change, however, with the Office of Management and Budget’s Code.gov, and its DoD corollary, Code.mil, run by the Defense Digital Service (DDS). Jordan Kasper and Ari Chivukula, two engineers on the Code.mil team join Jared Serbu to talk about open source software in DoD and Code.mil's February "relaunch."

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Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett, Navy CIO on cloud computing and "Compile-to-Combat in 24 hours" Feb 28, 2018

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Rear. Adm. Danelle Barrett, the Navy’s chief information officer is our guest for the full hour this week.

She and Jared Serbu spend the bulk of the hour discussing some major changes her office has just directed to reorient the way the Navy buys commercial cloud computing services.

Also, a new pilot program the Navy’s launching this spring: “Compile-to-Combat in 24 Hours.” As the name implies, the idea is to deliver new software capabilities to ships in less than a day, rather than the 18 months it takes to deploy new systems right now.

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Amid wave of Army data center closures, ALTESS is "staging area" for apps not ready to move to cloud Feb 14, 2018

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It’s now been a little over a year since the secretary of the Army issued a highly-prescriptive directive telling its commands and installations exactly which IT systems needed to move from which data centers, which data centers had to be closed, and when. But it became clear pretty quickly that a lot of those applications just weren’t ready to move. In many cases, their design was too antiquated to run in a modern cloud computing environment. One solution to that problem has been ALTESS, something of a hybrid between a traditional data center and a cloud environment operated by the Army in Radford, Virginia. Jared Serbu discusses more On DoD from Federal News Radio.

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Air Force's new Installation and Mission Support Center marks full operational capability; IBM brings AI into Army logistics Sep 27, 2017

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On this week's show: The new command the Air Force announced three years ago to centralize its installation management and other support functions reaches its full operating capability. Maj. Gen. Brad Spacy, the commander of Installation and Mission Support Center joins us to talk about what the center's done to make the Air Force more efficient and effective.Also, Kevin Aven from IBM joins us with details on a $135 million contract the firm just won to support the Army's Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA). Watson, the company's artificial intelligence platform, will play a key role.

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Army sets out on two-year effort to standardize IT in combat formations Sep 13, 2017

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On this week's show, three guests from the Army's program management office for Mission Command join us to discuss an ambitious, two-year effort to upgrade the hardware and software used by some 400 Army units to a common baseline. Joining us are Col. Troy Crosby, the project manager for Mission Command, David Meickle, a Product Support Manager with PM Mission Command, and Niraj Kadakia, Deputy Product Manager for PM Mission Command's Strategic Mission Command.

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Cybersecurity: Elevating CYBERCOM, and DoD's latest bug bounty Aug 23, 2017

Show notes

On this weeks show, we discuss three cyber topics: President Trumps long-awaited decision on the future of U.S. Cyber Command, the results of Hack the Air Force, DoD's latest bug bounty, and a federal lawsuit which claims a DoD-operated website is putting servicemember and veterans personal data at risk.

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