On DoD

Latest Episodes:

Why the fighting force is 'ever shrinking' despite robust Defense budgets Jul 31, 2021

Show notes

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.

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RIP Commercial Virtual Remote, the tool that forced DoD to behave like an IT enterprise Jun 19, 2021

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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.

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13 ways the Defense Department needs to tighten its oversight of other transaction agreements May 13, 2021

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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.

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Army’s top R&D command charts a course for post-pandemic telework Mar 31, 2021

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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.

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A plain language version of what DoD's latest financial audit found Mar 24, 2021

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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.

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What DoD's new Adaptive Acquisition Framework really means Mar 16, 2021

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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.

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New financing could start to improve Army housing as soon as this summer Feb 11, 2021

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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.

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The Defense Production Act and how the Biden administration might use it Jan 28, 2021

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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.

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Big changes coming to how the Navy and Marine Corps buy cloud computing services Jan 07, 2021

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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.

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How the Navy is using data analytics, AI to boost aviation readiness Dec 16, 2020

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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.

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