The Defense Health Agency has been in an almost constant state of change since it first reached initial operating capability 10 years ago. Over that time, what started as a fairly limited mission to offer shared services to military medical organizations has grown to encompass almost every aspect of the Military Health System — from management of DoD’s electronic health record and its TRICARE health plans to medical logistics and the day-to-day operation of every military treatment facility in the world.

But Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, who became DHA’s director in January, sees her tenure as marking the end of what’s ended up being a very long transition period. From here on out, she said, the focus needs to be on execution.

“The last piece was moving the military treatment facilities, medical research and development and public health — that all happened in the last three to five years,” she said during an extended interview for Federal News Network’s 2024 Open Season Exchange.

“My predecessors and the department leadership were very focused on getting that done — moving the dollars, moving the resources,” Crosland said. “It means I as the director can now give clarity on what the mission set is, now that DHA has all of that under it. That was a big part of what our new strategy was meant to do. Now that we’re here, what are we going to do with all of this responsibility?”

Planning for future military health care needs

That strategic plan, published in late August, outlines how DHA plans to evolve military health care in the coming years — with a major focus on “stabilizing” the system and establishing more integration between the more than 700 hospitals and clinics DHA now operates around the world and the billions of dollars it spends each year to purchase private sector care via its TRICARE networks.

The overall objective, Crosland said, is to be able to visualize the military treatment facilities (MTFs) and the TRICARE networks together as a single, coherent system.

“We need to consciously make decisions on where that care is delivered and how best to organize that care, whether it’s inside of a military treatment facility or in the network, and how to pay for that care,” Crosland said. “In some cases, the best care for this system is inside a military troop treatment facility. In some cases, the best availability for that care is in the network. And talking at the managed care support contract level — which we do regularly — it’s a conscious decision on how much care we try to keep inside of our system versus how much care we purchase.”

But those “direct care” versus “purchased care” decisions are going to vary a lot based on factors like geography and the different types of populations DHA serves. Health care issues and availability vary widely between, say, Washington, D.C., and the Indo-Pacific region. And within those geographic areas, there are varying considerations for how to deliver care to active duty service members, retirees, family members and in some cases federal civilian employees.

To try to better manage those variables, in October, Crosland reorganized DHA into nine geographic Defense Health Networks, each led by a general or flag officer. The new networks replace 23 markets that previously reported to the DHA director — a number she said was unmanageable at the headquarters level.

“That allows us to do a couple of things more effectively. It allows me as director to see the system — it was very difficult to see and know what’s going on across that much of a span of reporting,” she said. “It also allows me to interface with the military services we directly support a little more efficiently, and certainly more effectively. Those flag officers and general officers also wear uniforms, so that’s an interface that allows me a little more ability to communicate at the right level to get the entire system moving in the same direction. It really didn’t get rid of anything. It rearranged things in a more cogent way for me to lead. And for the military treatment facilities in the field, they now have a much cleaner route to come to us and amplify what their challenges are.”

Focused on avoiding DoD health care crisis scenarios

Crosland said that lack of DHA senior leadership’s ability to “see” the overall system was a significant contributor to the health care access crisis DoD civilian employees in Japan faced a year ago.

In that instance, faced with a shortage of clinicians, a market leader decided to implement a more restrictive policy that made it almost impossible for civilians to get care, and even in some cases prescription refills at the MTFs where they’d typically been seen. Technically, DoD civilians had always been treated at MTFs on a space available or “Space-A” basis, but the space for civilians evaporated rapidly late last year because of the policy change.

Officials in Washington didn’t understand the implications of that decision until the Pentagon’s top personnel official held town hall sessions in Japan last December and heard directly from packed audiences of civilians who said they’d abruptly lost any meaningful access to health care.

“We pushed a policy that effectively made them getting access more complicated and more difficult,” Crosland said. “Since then, we’ve gone back and sat down with those military treatment facilities and worked through the challenges they’re having in meeting their demands. We’ve unencumbered them to support the Space-A population on the the same footing they’d previously supported them. We said, ‘We really do have some capacity, let’s maximize our capacity for all beneficiaries.’”

Crosland said the new network structure should be fully stood up and staffed by the end of fiscal 2024.

“We will have those staffs in place so that those networks are fully able to support the MTFs and interface with the managed care support contractors. By then, our headquarters will be organized so that information can flow down and come up and we can make good decisions across the entire direct system. That’s what I mean when I talk about stabilization,” she said. “The agency has gone from moving things over to actually running those things. That includes medical research, good governance, public health — being able to support mission sets like Red Hill or getting COVID vaccines out to the MTFs. We need to run the system in a consistent way such that we’re accountable for our job. That’s what stabilization is for me.”

Addressing Defense health care staffing demands

The new strategy also has implications for how DHA thinks about wartime medicine. The military health system has always thought in terms of being able to produce both a “medically ready” force of rank-and-file service members and a “ready medical force” of uniformed doctors and nurses who can care for battlefield casualties.

That’s not changing, but it’s more complicated now: Previously, the military services were responsible both for recruiting and training their medical personnel and for running the MTFs they worked in. Under the new structure, DHA runs the hospitals and clinics, but it has no direct control over how many uniformed clinicians will be recruited and billeted to staff them each year. That’s still up to the Army, Navy and Air Force, which reluctantly relinquished control of those facilities during the congressionally-mandated transition.

In recent weeks, Crosland said, DHA and senior medical leaders from each of the services established a new venue to sit down regularly and iron out those complications.

“Step one is to make sure everybody understands DHA runs the military treatment facilities on behalf of the military departments and DoD. We don’t run these facilities just for DHA, we run them as as part of the Military Health System,” she said. “We all sat around a table, and I took the locations that are our priority for our business plan to keep the system stable and upright. I and my team sat down with the Army, Navy and Air Force, and they showed us what they’re already putting against that mission set. And then we literally said, ‘OK, what else can you do to help with some of our shortfalls in these locations?’ We’ll take that forward to the senior leaders in the department in another forum in a couple of weeks, show them what we came up with, and then offer an opportunity to get more feedback and find out whether we need to go back and try harder.”

To discover more insights and advice shared during the 2024 Open Season Exchange, visit the event page.

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When it comes to what the Navy can and can’t do while its ships are at sea, one of the biggest considerations is network bandwidth: Right now, everything from operational planning to administrative processes are premised on the fact that vessels are constrained by very narrow data pipes while they’re underway.

But technologists at the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) foresee a not-too-distant future in which bandwidth is almost a non-issue, and the IT experience on a ship doesn’t look too different from what sailors get on shore-based networks.

The biggest potential game-changers, officials say, are technologies like 5G and proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite constellations that have already been widely deployed commercially. If the Navy can successfully adopt them at scale, it would be the biggest leap ahead in network connectivity since the service first installed its earliest wideband satellite terminals on its ships in 1991.

“What we’re looking at with 5G and P-LEO is the same level of transformation, but much more profound and a much greater exponential curve,” Rob Wolborsky, NAVWAR’s chief engineer said during an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “The capability that is in orbit today is multiple orders of magnitude more bandwidth that we can deliver to the fleet and the warfighter today, and it is a catalyst for a significant amount of activity and transformation.”

In “blue water” environments far from shore, most of the potential for better connectivity to DoD’s networks and the public Internet lies in P-LEO constellations. Although Starlink is the best-known, other commercial providers are developing their own large fleets with global coverage, and the Space Development Agency is contracting for a DoD-specific “transport layer” for global communications. The difference in throughput is huge: Right now, military SATCOM capabilities provide perhaps one or two megabits of bandwidth to each ship — a tiny fraction of what most residential Internet customers get at home. P-LEO networks can deliver hundreds of megabits at a time to each ship.

When it comes to 5G, the Navy sees huge potential in using the technology to establish low-latency high-bandwidth communications between ships in relatively close proximity to one another, and also to improve local networking within a particular ship without having to conduct a costly and time consuming overhaul of its wired network infrastructure.

“Today, latency can be an issue with regards to communication from one vessel to another and from ship to shore … 5G has the ability to deliver data faster to and from, let’s say, two planes — you can deliver data faster, and essentially the ultimate benefit is that intel can be collected and delivered faster,” said Ron Wolfe, NAVWAR’s technical warrant holder for mobility. “The biggest benefit for the research we’re doing is to mitigate latency, and future capabilities will be added because of that. So there’s technology we’ve wanted to add to our systems for several decades that we couldn’t really do because latency became an issue. 5G lets us mitigate that.”

But 5G also has a place in connecting ships to the outside world, Wolborsky said.

“When a ship is in port or going into port, 5G is multiple orders of magnitude more throughput than what they get today — typically through physical pierside umbilical connections,” he said. “The physical connections are fragile and break and cost a lot of money, and you have to have a team of people to be able to connect these things. If you can come into port and seamlessly connect to the shore infrastructure with significantly more bandwidth and throughput, it’s another benefit to the platforms. We’re doing quite a bit of experimentation and work right now on the ships with 5G as a pier surrogate, and it’s actually demonstrating significant benefit to the fleet.”

The high-bandwidth P-LEO connections aren’t far off either. Wolborsky said Starlink has already been deployed on some vessels, and NAVWAR has developed an open architecture framework to let the Navy more easily adopt offerings from other commercial satellite providers as those come online.

“We’re moving as fast as we physically can to make this happen for the fleet, and it’s ahead of things like the traditional DoD requirements and acquisition process — we’re not necessarily operating within the confines of that,” he said. “But we’re also moving faster and more aggressively coordinating with the fleet and sharing the cost in advance of all of this becoming some big program of record. I’m providing the engineering discipline and rigor to make sure that it’s being delivered properly, it’s being properly secured, that we’re assessing electromagnetic interference and all the things that you need to do to get this on the ships as fast as we can.”

One reason the Navy thinks it can move faster with 5G and P-LEO than with traditional shipboard programs of record is that the hardware involved is physically much smaller, and already proven in the commercial market.

Wolborsky stressed the Navy doesn’t intend for commercial communications technologies to fully replace existing military SATCOM links — the intention is to give commanders as many options as possible. But as a practical matter, the commercial options are a whole lot easier to install and upgrade than what the Navy has become accustomed to.

These P-LEO systems come with apertures that are not much bigger than a pizza box. You can put them almost anywhere on the ship in a weekend or less, and our original Starlink antennas were actually attached using magnets, he said. “That’s compared to a two-ton, eight-foot antenna that takes an extraordinary amount of money and time and energy to install on the ship … in the older paradigm we’d have to find an availability when the ship was tied up for six months to a year, and then we’d have to go do a whole bunch of very costly and time consuming work.”

And once every ship in the fleet has several hundred megabytes of bandwidth available at all times, officials believe the rest of the assumptions the Navy has always made about IT system design will change dramatically.

“We in the Navy have lived in a [limited bandwidth] mindset in the digital world for the past 30 years. We’ve always thought, ‘Well, we can’t build an application that uses too much bandwidth.’ We’re opening the aperture now,” he said. “We’re letting all the community owners and building architectural analyses to let them know what they can do, how they can open the aperture. Ready Relevant Learning can be distributed to a ship on deployment in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. We can actually use this capability to allow the specialist at Bethesda to help a ship’s doctor perform surgeries and other things that they could never have done without having somebody there to help them think about it. What we can do is almost infinite, and we’re communicating as aggressively as we can across the entire Navy that people should start to think about the afloat domain in the same terms as what they can do at terrestrial sites.”

The post Navy charts massive transformation in shipboard IT as commercial 5G, satellite links join the fleet first appeared on Federal News Network.

Thousands of users across the Defense Department’s “fourth estate” will get their first chance to use modern collaboration tools on classified IT networks over the next several weeks as DoD continues its push to deploy Office 365 across the military departments, Defense agencies and field activities.

The Defense Information Systems Agency has been piloting the new service — called DOD365-Secret — since January. But officials are now fully deploying it for users across the 17 components of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), mainly in the Pentagon itself and in the nearby Mark Center in Alexandria, Virginia.

It’s a major shift, not only in that it’s one of DoD’s first large-scale forays into cloud computing at the secret level, but also because it will have the effect of consolidating an aging patchwork of tools senior leaders and their support staff have been using to discuss classified information for years, said Danielle Metz, OSD’s chief information officer.

“Over the past 10 to 15 years, those who live on our classified environment to do their mission have had to really figure out how to stitch together some collaboration capabilities using really old-school chat services that aren’t very effective and aren’t well used across the board,” she said during an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “Effectively what this does is it brings everybody together — we’re all on Teams and getting the same collaborative experience where we’re able to do chat, we’re able to do video, we’re able to collaborate on documents all at the same time, we’re able to store it in a cloud-based environment. None of that exists right now on the classified side, but we are at the precipice of having all of this at our fingertips.”

The implementation of DoD365-Secret across those 17 components will be one of the first major accomplishments for Metz’s new office, which marks its first anniversary this month. Prior to that, each of the OSD sub-offices — known as “principal staff assistants” — operated somewhat independently when it came to IT governance and planning. Because of that, the networks they use are still fragmented and complex. Cloud helps solve part of that problem.

“A cloud-based approach allows us to look and feel and act as if we’re on the same environment, because we are — we’re in the cloud,” Metz said. “The networks are still going to be what the networks are, and there are some modernization activities associated with bringing those up to a better standardized and consistent digital experience. But I think we’re showcasing the importance of being able to all be on in the same environment to be able to work more jointly together to collaborate. It reduces the need for the workforce to figure out how to do it themselves — that’s what I don’t want them to do. I want them to use their creativity to actually do their job. Our job is to ensure that they have the right capabilities and tools to do their job better.”

Aside from modernizing and simplifying those networks, other near-term goals for Metz’s new office include updating end-user devices and laying the groundwork for other significant moves to the cloud. In the early days, the focus is on treating the collection of OSD offices as a single IT enterprise and building out common IT services.

“One of the things that we were able to do is to build that governance structure, create an identity, so that we can have a community of practice,” she said. “We’ve also identified a number of PSAs that are the pockets of excellence: forging ahead, failing fast, and pushing the envelope. They’ve been able to figure out what their business processes are to get to the technical makeup of moving to cloud adoption.”

Over the long-term, Metz said OSD will rely heavily on DoD’s new Joint Warfighting Cloud Computing (JWCC) contract — but those task orders will likely be organized along functional lines, once the office is ready to lean in to supporting mission-specific IT needs. For now, the objective is to map out OSD’s cloud requirements and build the support services to help them migrate.

“We want to be able to do something similar to what the Army did with their Enterprise Cloud Management Agency: create a corporate playbook for OSD,” she said. “What I don’t want is for each individual PSA to fail on their own and do it in a vacuum. We want to be able to least standardize what we think the business processes are, to help inform the technical processes to determine which systems and workloads need to be moved to a targeted cloud environment … The other side of the coin that we’ve struggled with for OSD is that we don’t have an authorizing official (AO) for cloud, which makes it extremely difficult to do anything. And so we’re working on testing out and piloting AO as a service. That and some other basic elements need to be in place and available to OSD in order for us to even start moving the needle for cloud adoption.”

The post Secret-level version of Microsoft 365 rolls out to top Pentagon offices this month first appeared on Federal News Network.

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.

The dramatic improvements are part of a broader push across the Defense Department to improve user experience — spurred in part by a viral social media post that implored Defense officials to “fix our computers” — a Defense Business Board study that found 80% of employees are deeply dissatisfied with government IT, and direction from the deputy Defense secretary to start solving the problem.

Although the Navy’s efforts are still only in pilot stages that began with relatively small populations of users inside the Pentagon, officials believe they’ve learned enough about the root causes to start making bigger changes that will improve the average sailor or civilian’s experience at bases around the world within the year.

“What we did at the Pentagon early on was we started a playbook so that we could crowdsource this to other bases who were volunteering, and who were leaning forward,” Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s acting chief technology officer, said during an extended interview about the UX improvement effort on Federal News Network’s On DoD. “The volunteer queue has grown — in some cases they’ve started proactively, and in some cases they’re begging … a couple of the folks in the pilot have said, ‘Please, let’s scale this and not end it. If I have to switch back from this IT experience to what I had before, they would have to take this computer out of my clutching hands.’”

Fanelli said the UX improvements the Navy hopes to make in the coming months and years will have to be multi-pronged — the department knew at the outset that there wouldn’t be a single answer to its users’ frustrations, given the worldwide diversity in how those employees connect to networks and other local conditions.

But one thing the pilots have proven out is that, at least in most cases, fixing the computers isn’t about the hardware capabilities of the laptops and desktops themselves. The challenges have a lot more to do with bandwidth at individual worksites, and with software bloat on those endpoints — a years-long accretion of things like duplicative security and management tools that bog down otherwise-capable computers.

“Hardware refreshes have helped, but in more cases, the issue is the sprawl of software without necessarily one owner on top of all of it,” Fanelli said. “So we worked on a new operating system baseline. We had three different groups — two outside of the Department the Navy and one inside of the Navy — and we shark tanked whose image of the operating system was highest-performance. On the winner, we’re regularly seeing over 18x improvement on boot times. And we now get emails from E-3s and admirals alike saying, ‘Wow, this is much, much better.’ And that’s something that we want to scale to everyone as soon as possible.”

Some of the network-related challenges will take longer, particularly on bases that still use decades-old copper infrastructure and technologies like time-division multiplexing in the “last mile” between fast fiber networks and office spaces.

“For new construction, it’s a no-brainer to use newer technologies. We’ve piloted and we’ve gotten smarter on how to apply them on military bases in the last six months,” Fanelli said. “And for sites that are maybe seven years old, we’re pretty confident that you can remediate that through configuration as opposed to rewiring. But the 20-years-old-plus site rewiring [will have to be] part of a normal cycle. This is the Golden Gate Bridge of upgrades — you’re always doing some upgrade everywhere. But that normal cycle and figuring out how to do that differently, and cheaper, has been one that we’ve learned on … I wouldn’t say that the goal is to overhaul all transport by any means. It’s hooking up to the right solution for the right problem.”

One thing that’s helping the Navy figure out the right solution to the right problems is a drastic increase in proactive monitoring on individual IT endpoints.

For example, those figures about improvements in boot time aren’t just anecdotal or guesswork. They’re based on real-world metrics the service is gathering from performance measurement tools that are now installed on a sample of desktops and laptops at every base. The Navy can now gather data on what the user experience is like on 27,000 individual endpoints — up from just 200 at the start of the pilots.

“That takes us to a sample of about 6%, and it tells us how desktops at each site, each echelon, each systems command are performing,” Fanelli said. “It moves us out of being reactive, where we only have enough information to troubleshoot problems. Now we know who’s going to call before they call, and in some cases, we’ve solved the problem before they knew to call the help desk. Those are the real success stories that we’re after. We want as many people as possible to not have to think about their IT on a daily basis.”

Apart from the sheer number of UX-focused pilots the Navy has been conducting — there have been more than 20 this year — another reason the Navy’s been able to find fixes relatively quickly is that it’s been building on work already done in other parts of DoD.

The Air Force, in particular, helped the Navy start “on second base,” Fanelli said.

In a Medium post on Tuesday, Colt Whittall, the Air Force’s chief experience officer, noted that his service has also been aggressively monitoring end-device performance, and has seen similar results by proactively solving problems, surveying users, replacing outdated hardware and taking several other steps focused on UX improvement.

“In 2020 and 2021, dissatisfied users outnumbered satisfied users. In 2023 that’s reversed. Satisfied users outnumber dissatisfied users about two to one,” he wrote. “That is extraordinary progress for that period of time. Activity Response Time of Outlook, a key metric we follow, has improved significantly on the vast majority of bases, often by 50% or more.”

And Fanelli emphasized the effort to “fix our computers” is very much a joint effort, including via regular meetings and conversations with DoD’s chief digital and artificial intelligence office — where, by the way, the author of one of those viral social posts now works.

“The difference has been the number of folks who are hungry for change coming to the table, being willing to lean forward, working hard when no one’s looking, and we’re receiving outcomes in spades as a result of that,” he said. “If there are hungry people who want to continue to engage in this fight, we’re looking for civil servants who want to make things happen. We’re looking for vendors and partners with a bias towards action, and we’re going to go hard until our warfighters are happy.”

The post Navy says it’s achieved big UX improvements amid DoD effort to ‘fix our computers’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Defense Department is nearing the finish line in deploying its new, multibillion dollar electronic health record around the world. But the program executive office DoD stood up a decade ago to manage the project isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. After all, as the saying goes, software is never done.

MHS Genesis, DoD’s Cerner-based EHR, is now live at 75% of DoD’s clinics and hospitals, with 160,000 users and 6.1 million beneficiaries in the system so far. The department is on track to finish the project, including the addition of its overseas military treatment facilities (MTFs), by next March, according to DoD’s 2024 budget submission.

“As we’ve gone through this transition, we’re not just replacing a legacy system; it brings new capabilities to bear,” Holly Joers, the program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems told Federal News Network in a wide-ranging conversation about DoD’s progress toward implementing Genesis. “We’re really excited about creating a lifetime record under the single common federal EHR, and that will enable patient-centered care. It will be a record about the patient, not where care is delivered — from when someone accesses into the military, all the way through service with Veterans Affairs. We’ll be able to gain new insights about population health, the medical readiness of the force, and really ensuring that we’re taking care of our service members and their families.”

The road was extremely rocky at first, as tends to be the case with gargantuan IT projects. After DoD deployed Genesis to its first sites in the Pacific Northwest in 2017, the department’s director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) deemed the project “neither operationally effective nor operationally suitable.” VA is seeing some of the same challenges as it stands up its own new EHR, also based on Cerner’s commercial offering.

Joers said DoD’s experience has been that the deployment process works much, much better once it’s moved beyond the first few sites. After that, a lot of lessons have been learned, and the institution can start to converge around change management and IT deployment practices that make sense for the whole enterprise.

“I can’t comment specifically on VA, but when I look at where they are now, I’m taken back to where DoD was in the 2017-2018 timeframe,” she said. “There were challenges with the network, and so we made rules about what infrastructure had to be in place before a go-live, and how long it needed to be stable before we went live. We looked at our governance and management process to hear different inputs. When you’re only dealing with four sites, everyone wants to make it work for what their workflow was before. So you really have to have the fortitude to look at making an enterprise standard, knowing that it might not match what they’re currently doing today. And we had to go through those growing pains.”

The final mile of DoD’s EHR implementation journey mostly involves its overseas facilities. The department has always planned to save those MTFs for the end of the process — not necessarily because the on-the-ground work is all that different, but because the logistics involving things like network connectivity back to the data centers that house Genesis data are more complex.

“We also have to look at their integration with operational units. Those things that are normal operations in terms of serving the population at a particular base, versus support of operational units that are out there,” Joers said. “And that just creates a dynamic between the teams to make sure that we are dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s to protect information from an operational perspective and a cyber perspective.”

But in some ways, the most interesting parts about what DoD is going to be able to do with MHS Genesis don’t have all that much do to with replacing aging IT systems with another one that’s more modern.

“Software doesn’t really enter sustainment. We use that word, but it’s really operations. And at the end of the day, it’s about how we’re using the data and keeping the system from accruing technical debt,” she said. “The PEO is here to provide digital solutions for patient-centered care. I’m in service to the Defense Health Agency, the combatant commands, the Joint Staff, and our team exists to be able to provide those modern solutions. And I don’t imagine the requirements will die down as healthcare continues to evolve.”

And as an example of how the new EHR’s benefits aren’t entirely limited to having a shiny new EHR, the PEO has started to work on ways to integrate anonymized data from Genesis with other “secondary” data sources – including, for instance, Census data – to make it easier to answer bigger public health questions that might be asked in the future, either inside or outside the military’s health system.

For example: it would be extremely useful to know, on a near real-time basis, what a local community’s total hospital bed capacity and staffing levels are, and how the military’s health system could help — or vice versa — in the event of a local emergency.

“How do we look at whether we need to have a mass casualty center when there’s a crisis, and what would that look like? What is the capacity in the surrounding environment? In terms of the private sector, if we were needed to offload care, all of that information is so critical,” she said. “It’s things like registries, and being able to incorporate things like the longitudinal exposure record that is being worked on in support of the PACT Act. How do we bring that into the clinical space and keep track of population health? We need to keep working on things like health surveillance and biosurveillance.”

And when it comes to those OCONUS sites that are last in line to implement Genesis, Joers thinks data is also key to the overall project.

In the past, she said, the military’s approach to IT in the operational medicine space has been tightly focused on creating applications that can deliver particular types of information for very narrow purposes.

“We’re just flipping that on its head to a data-centric paradigm,” she said. “When we talk to our folks who need this capability, we need to talk about what data they need to view. What do they need to capture? What do they need to transmit in order to make decisions? That could be at the point of injury, like a care decision: How are they going to keep this person alive until they can get them to a larger medical facility? Or things like situational awareness, command and control, and how they’re tracking patient movement. How are we looking at blood supply and bed capacity in a theater? How do we connect all of that information so that folks out in the combatant commands have an accurate sight picture of what they’re dealing with? Those are the kinds of things that get me excited.”

The post Despite initial challenges, DoD on track to finish deployment of new EHR by next year first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of the Air Force thinks it’s made significant progress over the last several years in upping its game in the still-nascent field of weapons system cybersecurity — enough so that it’s ready to start expanding the approach it’s been using to the Space Force.

The Air Force first stood up its Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapons Systems (CROWS) in 2017, responding to then-increasing realizations that weapons platforms are vulnerable to cyber threats, but require different security approaches than traditional IT systems.

One of the main approaches the Air Force has taken over the past three-to-four years has been to embed teams of experts within its acquisition offices to help program managers build cyber considerations into their procurement and sustainment plans — both for new systems, and ones that have been in the field for decades.

Those cyber focus teams, as the Air Force calls them, now exist at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Hill Air Force Base in Utah, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma and Robins Air Force Base in Georgia.

“On our new systems, we have a clean sheet — we have the ability to design from the ground up,” Joe Bradley, the director of the CROWS program said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “So we’re working with program managers, logisticians, testing and evaluation folks, systems engineers, and even our finance folks, because they have a vested interest. I can develop this really elaborate solution, but if it’s not financially feasible, then I’ve wasted time and money. So you require the entirety of the acquisition workforce to build it right from the onset… cyber is not just an engineering thing. It is the entire spectrum.”

In the case of fielded systems, CROWS has also been finding ways to “bolt-on” additional cyber resiliency to weapons platforms that were designed years or decades before cyber threats were a serious consideration.

“There is a cyber health assessment that CROWS facilitates through our cyber focus teams, which touches on a handful of different aspects like program protection plans, what kind of artifacts and documentation is provided from an authority-to-operate perspective, what pieces of that goes into the risk management framework, and how the evolution of threat is driving an understanding of how we respond,” said Lt. Col. Zach Lehmann, the CROWS materiel leader. “That information is both provided through annual reporting, and then also provided to program executive officers as well as their directors of engineering to say, ‘How can we hone our understanding of those acquisition practices to apply resources that improve those products over time?’”

Across the broader Defense Department, figuring out how to weave cyber considerations into the acquisition process, including specific contract language, has been a significant challenge. The Government Accountability Office reported in 2021 that most of the military services didn’t have guidance in place that addresses how to contract for cybersecurity requirements in weapons system acquisitions.

The Air Force, GAO noted, was the one exception. Since 2019, via the CROWS office, it has been publishing what it calls the Weapon System Program Protection and Systems Security Engineering Guidebook. The latest edition — a 5.0 version — is due for public release soon.

“In the tradespace that touched cyber, there was, I’d say, over 10,000 pages of policy and guidance in the different functional stovepipes where some direction was getting out to some pieces of the workforce,” Lehmann said. “The guidebook takes a broad view and asks, ‘How do we boil this down to sound system security engineering best practices? How do we streamline all that guidance where there is duplication or contradictions? How do we create a single document that can help backstop any blind spots? How do we bring together those functional perspectives to walk through the acquisition timeline, and where do we apply these best practices?”

But the guidebook is also targeted toward the Air Force’s vendor base, Lehmann said.

“It’s all about managing expectations. We can point to, say, a standard key performance parameter that talks to system survivability, and that parameter is something that gets pushed into requirements. But how those words get derived into contractual outcomes is up to the different program offices, and that can be interpreted in different ways,” he said. “This is about how we manage how a design gets reviewed and approved through the acquisition process and how we help streamline that for both the government acquirers and our industry partners, because we’re walking that acquisition timeline hand-in-hand.”

Most of the details of how CROWS will be extended into Space Force programs still need to be ironed out. Bradley said his office held initial discussions with Space Force officials in January, and the approach to space systems is likely to be similar to what the Air Force has already been doing: using multidisciplinary teams to help program offices make sure large, complex systems can improve their cyber resiliency over time.

“We’re working with the space community right now to identify what specific job series and categories and grades they want to work in their portfolios,” he said. “We’re discussing the template we’ve used that’s been historically proven to work within the non-space portfolios. So we’re in the infancy, but we’re starting to fill that construct out based on the work that we’ve done with the non-space folks.”

The post Air Force finds ways to bake cybersecurity into weapons systems, and bolt it on where necessary first appeared on Federal News Network.

In fiscal year 1956, the Army didn’t ask Congress for a single dollar in its procurement budget. It didn’t need to. Back then, DoD’s budget accounts were apportioned in incredibly broad lump sums, and the dollars didn’t expire. So the Army could simply use $5 billion in unspent funds left over from the Korean War for all of its equipping needs that year.

Fast-forward 65 years, and each military service’s budget is made up of hundreds of different line items, each narrowed down into the range of tens of millions of dollars. Each “program element” is planned at least two years in advance, the funds vanish if they’re not used as scheduled, and only about 1% of the budget can be reprioritized during the year it’s actually being expended.

Somewhere between those extremes is a budgeting system that’s rational for the 21^st Century. That’s the gist of a new study by George Mason University’s Center for Government Contracting. The authors chronicle, in detail, the Defense budget’s gradual slide toward ever more rigidity, and posit that budget inflexibility is one of the main reasons it’s so difficult to get new technologies across the “valley of death” and into military use.

“The department is embracing things like other transaction authorities and commercial solutions openings to develop all kinds of prototypes. But there’s a big frustration that these companies develop these prototypes, and DoD customers want them, but there’s no program of record to put them in,” said Jerry McGinn, the GMU center’s executive director said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “That’s the whole budgeting problem. That’s the valley of death that’s really bedeviling a lot of the department today.”

There’s no program of record to put them in because in most cases, it’s very, very difficult, to budget for production-scale spending on new systems two years before they’re even prototyped — or in the case of existing systems, to know which of DoD’s 1,800 budget lines is the best home for a breakthrough technology before anyone knows about the breakthrough.

Up until the 1970s, the military services were able to deal with some of that uncertainty by reprogramming funds during the year they were being spent. In that era, about 8% of the Defense budget could be reallocated to meet new priorities during the year of execution. But via a combination of a loss of trust between DoD and Congress and DoD’s own regulatory changes, that’s since declined to about 1%, said Eric Lofgren, a Center for Government Contracting senior fellow.

“And Congress actually reduced the reprogramming thresholds for procurement and operations and maintenance accounts in the last few years down to $10 million, so that was a significant shift in the wrong direction,” he said. “And it’s not necessarily clear that there’s the appetite to raise those thresholds a lot.”

Congress could also help solve the problem by loosening restraints on “use it or lose it” funding. As of now, operation and maintenance dollars expire within one year, R&D funds expire in two years, and procurement funding expires after three years (five years, in the case of ships). But the authors concluded lawmakers aren’t likely to change those rules anytime soon either, again, because of a breakdown in trust between DoD and its overseers.

On the bright side, the report offers a couple of other suggestions that researchers think are both politically practical and wouldn’t require significant changes in law or DoD regulations.

One is an expansion and rethinking of “innovation funds.” The department already has several accounts with that nomenclature, but all-told, they amount to only a few hundred million dollars per year, and they’re much more focused on experimenting with new technologies than on fielding the ones that work.

Instead, the authors think DoD could focus its innovation funds on warfighting exercises that are clearly focused on operationalizing new technologies. In that construct, the ones that prove successful during “sprints” would move onto a rapid procurement phase funded by a single pool of innovation funding that crosses traditional color-of-money boundaries.

“We proposed trying a pilot or two, where you have a fund on the level of about $100 million in one of the services or multiple services, and link it through experimentation into a specific program executive office that would then be able to execute or transition those efforts,” McGinn said. “So there, you’ve got the funding, and you’ve got the catcher’s mitt for the technology to transition and meet the need.”

Another option that could go a long way toward solving the problem: Collapse the “program elements” that currently go into DoD’s 30,000-page annual budget submission into a smaller, more rational number of funding lines.

The number of individual line items in the Defense budget has grown tenfold since the 1960s, Lofgren said, to the point where the median line item in DoD’s R&D budget is $30 million — a rounding error in the department’s topline.

“You can’t move between those line items. You’re kind of like a train on a railroad track, and you can’t really pivot between things or handle problems as they come,” Lofgren said. “There’s a plethora of these very small, very narrow, tightly-defined program elements, and they basically have the contractor or the requirement specified on it. So it shackles the program managers from making choices like, ‘I’m going to trade off cost for schedule,’ or ‘I will go for the 80% solution and move money somewhere else that needs help.’ They can’t make those choices.”

In isolation, a consolidation of all those program elements could have the effect of reducing transparency and oversight of DoD’s spending.

But Lofgren said that problem’s solvable too: The department could give Congress more real-time insight into its own data systems, like the department’s Advana platform, rather than asking it to approve the exquisitely-tailored funding lines it forecasted it would need two years before the spending occurs.

“That provides you insight and oversight as to where the department is going, as opposed to forcing all that detail to fix a forward plan and locking the department into that detailed plan according to weapon system,” he said. “The notion is that you can get lower-level insight into what’s actually happening without constraining the department’s forward plans. So we might be able to reduce those 30,000 pages of documentation and streamline it if you can also double-click into [a portfolio of systems] and see the actuals. Then, Congress can still stop something if they don’t like it, and the program managers will respond. You don’t have to express it in legislation, but they will respond and try to act in good faith, I think, when you have that transparency.”

The post How DoD’s own budget process keeps the military on the wrong side of the ‘valley of death’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Pentagon’s prime contractors already have a lot of reasons to partner with small businesses who’ve been working on technologies that solve military problems. But under a new Army program, they’ll have another big one: their bids will get an explicit advantage in future procurements if they partner with those companies.

The new initiative, called Project Vista, is one of several ideas the Army plans to test over the next several years to help the small companies it’s already invested in get across the infamous “valley of death.”

Officials planned to detail them during the annual AUSA conference in Washington this week. Gabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the Army, previewed the initiatives and the thinking behind them in an exclusive interview with Federal News Network.

As to Project Vista specifically, the basic thinking is that the Army needs better ways to ensure the specific technologies it’s helped fund via its Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs actually make their way into fully-developed weapons systems.

“We felt that the Army needed to do something in addition to help bridge that valley of death, because often, we’ve talked about it only in the context of direct contract awards to small business,” he said. “But that neglects the fact that many of the opportunities available to small businesses are to team with integrators that can marshal together the innovation and the technology that our small businesses provide into a capability that can be used by our warfighter.”

Vista will start as a relatively small pilot program, most likely with some of Army’s smaller dollar-value weapons systems — ACAT 3 and ACAT 4, in DoD acquisition parlance. But the basic idea is that competitors whose proposals include the small business partnerships the Army’s looking for will get higher technical ratings during the source selection process.

Camarillo said no changes are needed to legislation or DoD acquisition regulations in order to implement the program: procurement officials will just need to make clear ahead of time that they’re going to assign higher technical ratings to bidders whose proposals include specific technologies that have already piqued the government’s interest as part of the SIBR, STTR, and other outreach programs.

“We’ll be very upfront to everybody in industry about how we might give source selection credit. We do that today on other things, like where companies can provide additional information on how we can reduce sustainment costs, or proposals that identify critical supply chain issues,” he said. “This just adds another category: for the right program, in the right context, we can incentivize the use of these small businesses. It might help some of these innovative companies bridge the valley of death a little bit better.”

Relatedly, the Army plans to create a separate pot of money to fund SBIR and STTR programs that target the more precise technical questions it’s trying to solve over the next decade or two. That management reserve, under the banner of a new program called “Catalyst,” will include ways for the Army to provide direct investment for technologies that have “fallen through the cracks,” Camarillo said.

“We want to provide some kind of publication that will give participants a little bit more clarity about what critical enabling technologies we’re looking for investment in and what challenges we’re looking to solve,” he said. “Many of them are not a surprise as you look at our modernization priorities today, but I think we’ll certainly have an opportunity to drill that down.”

Meanwhile, to help senior Army officials and individual program managers get a better grip on what already exists in the innovation ecosystem the government’s already helping to fund, the service plans to stand up a new R&D “marketplace.”

“There are some repositories of expertise elsewhere, but none that capture what we’ve already funded within the Army,” Camarillo said. “We want to promulgate that information as wide as possible to our program managers and our PEOs to enable kind of that partnership with industry, in particular with the integrators.”

Separately, the Army is planning another initiative to help its acquisition workforce figure out how much intellectual property the government needs to own from each of the technologies it funds and procures.

That issue has bedeviled Defense procurements for years as the military struggled to find the balance between having the IP rights it needs to maintain its systems over time, without demanding so much ownership that private firms lose interest in bidding on contracts

Camarillo said the Army now plans to stand up its own “IP cell” of experts within the Army’s headquarters. Their main task will be to serve as a resource to procurement officials across the service’s program management offices and program executive offices, and advise them on how to structure agreements with industry.

The idea isn’t exactly new: Congress ordered the Defense Department to create a similar “IP Cadre” to serve as an expert group of IP consultants for all military procurements. But the Government Accountability Office reported late last year that DoD had only funded five positions in the new office, all of which were designated as temporary.

Camarillo said the Army is creating its own cell partly because it wants its group of experts to be able to align their advice to the service-specific IP policy the Army published in 2018, which calls for highly-tailored and more “nuanced” procurement approaches.

“There are ways to have tailored approaches to IP that are appropriate for each individual developmental program, and that are specifically important to each set of technologies that are being developed,” he said. “So the idea here is to not rely on a small cell across the department, but to develop our own cadre of expertise. And that will help us in a number of ways. First and foremost, as we are looking at more focused use of our existing small business innovation research programs, how can it inform some of those efforts and strategies moving forward? But then, as we tailor program acquisition strategies, we will benefit from having IP expertise in house that will help us to develop those tailored approaches very early on, so that we’re asking for the right amount of IP from industry, not more than what we need.”

The post Army launches several new initiatives to incorporate small firms’ technologies into its systems first appeared on Federal News Network.

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.

A transcript of the interview is below:

Jared Serbu: Manuel, let’s start with you, since Black Pearl is a relatively new organization. Give us a little background on where you came from as an organization, what you’ve been up to, what some of your prime objectives are for the sea services.

Manuel Gauto: Yeah, of course. So we originated out of the CTO shop of the Department of the Navy. And what kind of happened was, with this DevSecOps revolution that was going through DoD, we had a couple upstart DevSecOps initiatives in the Navy, prior to them really being called software factories. And what happened was, we had a couple of false starts where the Navy would invest a ton of money into standing up one of these DevSecOps environments. And they would get to the point where they had some basic functionality, and then kind of got to a ‘now what?’ moment. And at that point, they’d expended resources and weren’t really putting them towards the modernization objective that’s kind of the heart of the whole thing — accelerating delivery and all of that. So the thesis behind Black Pearl is, how do we commoditize that first step, provide the infrastructure and the tooling, so that someone that has an actual mission can skip ahead to, ‘Okay, what does DevSecOps mean to my mission? How does it improve the capability that I’m delivering? And how do I ultimately help the warfighter?’

Jared Serbu: Yeah, and it seems like there’s a couple interesting things going on here, right? Not only are you, across the Department of the Navy, telling folks, ‘Hey, don’t build your own DevSecOps stack, we can do all of that process for you — let’s not reinvent the wheel. Black Pearl itself didn’t do that. You borrowed heavily from Air Force Platform One as I understand it. Can you talk about how much you grafted on to Air Force Platform One, how much is really Navy unique here, and why you chose them as a partner?

Manuel Gauto: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, the Air Force has been honestly trailblazing with the DevSecOps stuff, with Kessel Run, and all those really famous software factories. So when it comes to Platform One, the original idea was actually to just reuse everything they had as-is, including some of their common environments. But the struggle we ran into, which has never happened in DoD history before, is we ran into compliance problems — compliance and accreditation issues. So what we ended up having to do is take a lot of the Platform One technology, and kind of backfill that paperwork to get it accredited, which required us to kind of redeploy and control certain parts of it. And we also deviated from Platform One a little bit in that, when we go to a customer, we want to be able to say, ‘Hey, we guarantee from soup to nuts every piece, and we’ll offer this as a managed service to you all, and you just do not have to worry about any of this.’ Which means that from a technical perspective, we had to do a little more in terms of security and kind of taking a little bit of choice away, ultimately, to be able to make those guarantees. But we still collaborate with them. We push code to them, they push code to us. So it’s still pretty collaborative.

Jared Serbu: And I think a lot of that assurance, or that guarantee comes from the fact that the underlying platform is accredited up to I think [impact level] five, which is run by you folks at GitLab, right, Bob? Can you talk to us a little bit about what this experience working with the Air Force and the Navy has been like, and how different bringing your product offering to a military setting has been, compared to what it’s like with your commercial customers?

Bob Stevens: Well, one of the things is they tend to drive us a little more to produce functionality or features faster, which is a good thing in the end, because that benefits not only the customer, but also the company. But just as an example, shifting security to the left, which is part of our platform, was really born out of the conversations that we’re having with the Air Force and Platform One. So you’re doing security by design, rather than bolting it on at the end. So that’s just an example of working with the government that helps drive the company to be able to produce things a lot faster. Another is speed to mission. There’s lots of facts and figures out there from from Platform One, but the bottom line is that they were able to reduce the amount of development time from months to weeks or days, which is super important when you’ve got a mission as important as our DoD does.

Jared Serbu: Manuel, pick up that thread, if you would. What sorts of other guarantees can Black Pearl make to Navy customers, stuff that they don’t have to worry about on their own?

Manuel Gauto: I think fundamentally, the thing we’ve had the most success with is saying, ‘we understand you. We understand where you’re coming from.’ We deploy to different places in the Navy. There’s always interbranch politics, right? So I think our biggest thing is, hey, we know your mission. We know where you’re trying to go. And we can also talk to the same people that are causing you compliance headaches and speak their language to them to enable you guys to actually deliver and not have to sell DevSecOps anymore. We can kind of do that for them, so they can focus on actually doing their jobs, and we’ll just serve that enablement capacity for them.

Jared Serbu: Don’t necessarily need to name names here, but where have the biggest compliance headaches tended to be so far? And I’m not talking about individuals here, I’m talking about the process. Where have the biggest process problems tended to be?

Manuel Gauto: Yeah, so I think that fundamentally, the technology is ahead of the process. So we’ve had difficulties even just translating some of the ideas that a tool like GitLab provides the community, and how do you capture that and present that to someone that ultimately needs to make a risk decision in a way where they’re comfortable with it? And like just serving as that intermediary, and pushing policy forward is where we run into it.

Jared Serbu: And how about on the compliance side that you mentioned? What were some of those early compliance problems that you mentioned running into, and what have you been able to do to overcome those?

Manuel Gauto: It’s paperwork. It’s always paperwork, right? It has to be in the right format with the right boxes checked, and you have to have the right backing material. Platform One did a lot of great work from a technical perspective. So the technology was there, the security was there, we just needed to kind of take that and present it in a way that was acceptable by the Navy community, within the Navy process. It was always less about security, and more about like, ‘Hey, we gotta check that box.’ Which, as we’ve seen, the Navy is trying to move away from that. Aaron Weis has talked about how it’s more about cyber readiness, rather than cyber compliance. But I mean, tactically, there’s still boxes to check, there’s still work to be done. And it offers some value. But that’s mostly what we ran into is making sure we had the thing to check the box.

Jared Serbu: Let’s talk about what you’ve actually been able to do here so far. I know it’s still relatively early days. But talk about the size of your customer base, within the DON, what sorts of things you’ve been able to ship so far. How much has this scaled so far?

Manuel Gauto: So I think we’re officially in the high hundreds of users. We’ve had a couple cool customers come on board thus far. So we’ve been working with the Minotaur team and the F-18 teams, and they’re kind of working on mission planning, real-time intel sharing in the field. And some of the stuff that we’ve really been able to do is take real production code bases, put them in a place that everybody can get to, that everybody can collaborate around, and actually start living and breathing those agile DevSecOps ideas. And to be honest, from a shipment perspective, a lot of the Navy programs aren’t even there yet. They’re still at the stage of saying, ‘What is this agile thing?’ or realizing that you can’t just call a one hour long meeting, a stand-up, and say that’s DevSecOps. So we’re finally at a place now where I think we have the tools in place to enable the Navy to really discover what the potential is for this more modern software development approach.

Jared Serbu: You said there’s not many there yet. Are there any that you can point to that are kind of early success stories?

Manuel Gauto: Yeah, so I think the Forge [software factory] in particular and the Aegis team. They started working with Platform One originally and are now moving to work with Black Pearl. And they’re working on refactoring  the crown jewel of the Navy’s weapon system, right: the Aegis Weapon System. So they’ve delivered some cloud based apps for some of their back of the house stuff. We’ve worked with them to kind of start putting together the prototypes that they’re pushing on to an actual ship in terms of runtime platform. They haven’t quite gotten to the point of completely refactoring a multibillion dollar weapon system, but they’re definitely getting wins there in terms of delivering apps to the cloud and starting to get stuff — real software — real modern software, on a ship.

Jared Serbu: And Bob, I want to get you back in here too. The DoD, as a matter of policy, has basically said they want everything Manuel’s talking about to be the way things are done for software development across the department, and not the exception. Based on what you’ve seen in the DoD space. Is it going to be difficult to scale these tools so that that can become a reality? What are some of the challenges you see in kind of recognizing that vision and making this the de-facto way things are?

Bob Stevens: Yeah. Manuel actually said it without saying it. It’s the culture change that has to occur — it’s a new way to think about doing development. It’s super beneficial, pretty much across the board. Manuel talked about the visibility that the team has; the collaboration that can occur, right? The F-18 pilot can participate in the development of a tool that’s being built for them, and understand exactly what’s being built all along the way. So by the time the product comes out, they’re bought into it because they’ve had a piece of it. That requires a cultural shift, first of all, for the developer to trust that pilot to actually provide them with input, but also collaboration between the security team and the development team. Security folks want development to go slower, right, so that it’s the most secure product. Developers want to go faster, and of course, the end user wants it yesterday. So it’s all a cultural shift that needs to occur. I think that’s the biggest barrier.

Jared Serbu: Manuel, same question, really. I mean, you’re small, totally understandable at this point, but what challenges do you see other than the cultural ones that Bob just talked about in terms of scaling Black Pearl up?

Manuel Gauto: I want to piggyback off something Bob said really quickly. So I think that one of the unique things that Black Pearl has, that honestly feels like a challenge to me sometimes, is that we are a very real thing that tests all of these ideas, right? Everybody talks about cyber readiness. Everybody talks about modernizing software development, what does it mean when end users can give feedback? And that all sounds great, but there’s a lot of details, right? That cultural change, you hit the inertia of of a very old, very set in its way institution. Black Pearl provides the very real thing that’s trying to push for that. And we feel it every day —the pushback from the different stakeholders and everything. And in terms of scalability, in the long, long term, I think it all boils down to talent and resource management. The DoD has very, very difficult problems and the resources that are at our disposal within the DoD in terms of talent can really hold us back. One of the things that we’re trying to figure out with Black Pearl is how do we take the resources we have and offer them in a more sustainable way to the enterprise, so that when people really get stuck on an A level problem, we have the A level resources they need to fix that problem. And that’s one of the things that keeps me up at night. Who comes after Manuel? Who comes after my team? This thing is going to get bigger than me. We really need those people in the department.

Jared Serbu: The talent piece is interesting. Can either of you talk about kind of the civilian, contractor, military mix in these projects and how that’s all working? I know there’s not unlimited talent on the outside, either, but how easy is it to bring in people who do have more experience with the DevSecOps way of things and pull them in to offer some expertise?

Bob Stevens: One of the things that the pandemic did was drive people to remote work, right? And as a result of that, the software factories have been able to attract talent in places they’ve never been able to before. Some of these factories are being built in places that are desirable for people to live, and the fact that they can do this all-remote work, and collaborate, and be more productive than they have been in the past, I think has really opened up the opportunity for the DoD. I mean, if you’d told me three years ago the Air Force [Platform One team] was gonna go all remote, I’d be like, ‘You’re crazy, that’s never gonna happen.’ Today, not only have they done it, but they they’re continuing to do it. And I think they plan to do it long into the future, because I think they’ve recognized the benefits of being able to get talent anywhere in the United States, versus just basically around the bases. That’s just not the case anymore. So I think that that has really, really helped DoD become better at at the development game.

Jared Serbu: Manuel, you want to elaborate on the talent piece at all?

Manuel Gauto: So one of the big changes I’m seeing is — for example, I’m a contractor. I don’t think I would work directly for the government. I don’t think I would be a government GS schedule employee, just considering how things are in the market right now. So I think one thing that has changed for the better is that the government is being much more collaborative with the contracting community, the industrial base, and willing to empower them to make decisions and run the platform. So I don’t get pushback from some government person when I make a technical decision. They’ll ask questions, but I’ve never been told completely like a flat out, ‘No, you can’t do that. I like this better, you have to use this.’ And I think that’s the right step forward. Outside those key positions, thankfully the remote thing makes it much easier because we can access a talent pool we didn’t have before. But we do need to figure how we incentivize people to come work for the government, even on the contractor side. And how do we encourage them to stay? Because we have really cool problems to solve. So I feel like we have a really good product to sell in terms of attracting talent.

Jared Serbu: It’s, I gotta say, surprising to me that you’re a contractor. It’s not what I would have assumed. Any observations from either of you about increasing openness among DoD leadership to allow that sort of thing? That feels really new to me that that’s even a possibility.

Manuel Gauto: I think it is, and I think this is one of the things that Black Pearl has done well. So we actually were started [as part of] the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program. We had a PIF with us to kind of first start breaking down the doors. And that’s one of the big wins from his time is he went to leadership and said, ‘These are the guys you want, they’re going to make it happen, and you need to work with them to make this happen.’ And ever since then, we’ve worked really closely with Navy leadership all the way up to the SES levels, the C suit. And Mr. Weis, and [DON CTO Jane] Rathbun have all been super-open to hear ideas. They listened to us and we speak to them directly about where we think these things should go. And they’re more than willing to say, ‘This is  how I feel about it, this what I think should change.’ And I think more broadly, they let us speak to the community about how we think things should be done, and they’re willing to let us kind of evangelize our own ideas as well.

Bob Stevens: It’s about partnership. And I think that the true partnership is being embraced by the government. I think they’ve recognized for a long time, that they need industry to be able to do what they do. But — and maybe this is a result of the pandemic, I don’t know — now, it’s like, we need industry more now than ever. And there’s a ton of expertise that we can get working with contractors, and empowering the contractors is really what Manuel was saying. The contractors are empowered now to make decisions on behalf of the network, because they’ve earned that trust. And I think that that’s just going to continue to grow and be more crucial to the success of the DoD.

Jared Serbu: Changing gears a little bit here. Manuel, what’s your basic sales pitch to the to the rest of the naval community as to why they should use Black Pearl instead of doing everything they want to do within their own program management office?

Manuel Gauto: So I think fundamentally, it’s that we commoditize the boring stuff that comes with DevSecOps to enable the mission owners to do the important, cool stuff that comes with DevSecOps. We make sure the lights stay on so that the people in the office can do their jobs. I think that’s fundamentally what we’re selling.

Jared Serbu: And how do you overcome the trust piece? Because they don’t control anything that you do, and generally, people in this space want to have control. So the reaction sometimes has got to be well, what if Black Pearl goes down? What if one day I can’t rely on it anymore?

Manuel Gauto: So I think there’s a couple of pieces there, right? We’re also building off the shoulders of giants. We’re building off that Platform One pedigree. People love seeing the paperwork that we’ve done, we have our EMASS package, they can go in there and look at all the compliance stuff. We are using the same best of breed technologies, like the GitLabs of the world that they’re familiar with. And then honestly, it also comes down to the fact that this is not my first rodeo in the Navy. I was personally involved with a lot of the software factories that sprung up, I was there with the precursor to the Forge, I was helping out the ACS folks over on the west coast. Leadership has also put out like, ‘Hey, this is something where we’re behind.’ They’re seeing the trust between us and leadership. And there is still some of that, ‘I don’t control it, I’m scared, what if it goes down? But the last piece will say is it’s still better than what we have today. The government doesn’t have control, in a lot of situations, over their source code. Their integration environments are locked away in some lab, controlled by some prime contractor. And now the alternative of presenting them with a common environment you can log into today — it’s controlled by the government, it’s government managed — like, that’s a completely different pattern.

Jared Serbu: And how does the pricing structure work? Do you feel like you’ve got something in place at this point where you’ve got a funding stream that’s sufficient to keep the platform running and innovating, but at the same time isn’t cost prohibitive for the people you’re trying to attract?

Manuel Gauto: Yeah. So when I think of the the big things that we tried to do right from the beginning — lessons learned from the other software factories — we needed to be financially and programmatically viable. So we’ve priced ourselves in a way where we we did that a couple of ways. We kept the team lean, so our costs are low. And because of that we’re able to keep the prices fairly reasonable when it comes to what we offer to our users. So our general pricing structure is like any commercial software-as-a-service solution; we charge per-head, per-month. So they can plug in a number into a calculator and they get a number out. The costs are predictable and linear. And in terms of viability, we’re good. We could operate as-is indefinitely.

Jared Serbu: And do you offer anything in terms of a cloud environment to actually run the end product? Or are you just focused on the development platform at this point?

Manuel Gauto: That is a great question. So the technology is in place, the environment is actually up, it actually runs our website. We’re just doing the same exercise we did the development side: we have to go back to the accreditation officials and make them comfortable that we’re doing this the right way. And that’s what we’re going through right now.

Jared Serbu: It seems like that sweetens the pot, too. I mean, you’re coming to customers with even more of a full package that says we’re gonna do even more for you.

Manuel Gauto: Exactly. And we’re trying to grow with the customer base, because we’re having people that are getting to that point where they’re ready to start deploying right now. And we want to be there ready for them when they get to that point to be like, ‘Absolutely, we’ll put you right there, and then you can get to it wherever you want.’

Jared Serbu: Last thing, Manuel. Where do you want to go in the next 2, 3, 5 years? How big can Black Pearl get? What are your big obstacles toward becoming the preeminent development center for the entire department of the Navy?

Manuel Gauto: This is where I get in trouble. So I want Black Pearl to enable development for all software in the DON. I don’t want to control development, I don’t want to control deployment, I just want to take that problem away from everyone in the Department of the Navy, and let them focus on doing their jobs — getting software out to the fleet and making sure that they can do their jobs, that our sailors stay safe and that we’re making this nation safer.

The post To institutionalize DevSecOps, Navy’s Black Pearl aims to ‘commoditize the boring stuff’ first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Navy is taking several steps to shorten the time it takes to get its vessels in and out of maintenance at its shipyards, including with a huge, multiyear and multibillion dollar program to modernize the yards’ outdated infrastructure.

But as officials dug into the problem of maintenance delays and broader logistics issues, they found at least one other massive contributor that’s arguably easier to fix: getting the parts the Navy’s tradesmen need to do their work at the jobsite at the time the projects begin. Fixing that problem alone could go a long way toward making sure ships’ maintenance availabilities are finished on time.

That’s one of the more potent discoveries the Navy has made as part of a much broader project called Naval Sustainment System-Supply (NSS-S), led by Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP), and in the case of the shipyards, supported by Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).

Rear Adm. Peter Stamatopoulos, NAVSUP’s commander, said the project’s data analytics showed that, on average, only about 30% of the parts needed to complete a submarine or surface ship’s planned maintenance were available when the vessel entered the yard. And those late-arriving supplies, in turn, are responsible for about 30% of the total delays in ships’ scheduled maintenance periods.

“What happens is that the rest of the material requirements are discovered as that availability is moving along. Some of it is never identified upfront in the planning process, and some of it occurs when they open and inspect a planned job, but what we’ve found is that oftentimes, in that growth work, we should have the parts on hand and ready to go before the work is actually started,” he said during a wide-ranging interview about NSS-S for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “It’s part of the dysfunction that has developed over the course of time — we haven’t been able to be as predictive as we need to be in our requirements determination to support those jobs. But we’re getting after that.”

In the year-and-a-half NAVSUP has been working on NSS-S, the parts availability rate has improved noticeably, to 37%. The objective by the end of the five-year project is 100%, though Stamatopolous acknowledged that’s a stretch goal.

Another discovery Navy officials made as part of NSS-S: the low availability rates have flown under the radar until recently, in part, because local supply departments at each Navy shipyard have tried to solve the missing parts problems by themselves, ordering what they need on their own.

“So requirements were finding their way around the supply system, and not going through a central point,” Stamatopolous said. “And when we don’t go through a central point, we don’t have the demand visibility we need so that we can be more predictive with the material that we should have on hand, either in the shipyard ready to go, or in our wholesale supply system in NAVSUP and the Defense Logistics Agency.”

Going forward, the idea is to minimize the number of instances in which the Navy’s four public shipyards need to order items from vendors separately. NAVSUP is trying to centralize more of those orders through its own supply system to take advantage of the broader Navy’s buying power, apply category management principles, and give its vendors more predictability so that each of its shipyards aren’t, in effect, competing against each other with urgent requests for the same items that could, ideally, have been bought ahead of time and stocked in Navy or DLA warehouses.

Although the shipyard element has been a major focus of the NSS-S initiative, it’s only one of many. Stamatopolous said the bigger project — which ranges from improving NAVSUP’s industry relationships to getting a better handle on cash management in its working capital fund — has achieved about $600 million in verified savings thus far.

And many of the “pillars” of the project are interrelated.

For example, if the Navy can do a better job of forecasting the parts it’ll need for maintenance availability and minimize the amount of local purchasing, NAVSUP is likely to do a much better job of forecasting its demand to vendors.

“One of the things that I continuously hear from them is they would like to have a more stable demand signal,” Stamatopolous said. “We also need to make sure that we have the right mix of organic repair and commercial repair, because we have to preserve and protect both [capabilities], and the best way that we can do that for the commercial base is to give them a solid, stable demand. We have to be sensitive to their needs for cash.”

Meanwhile, the Navy is also starting pilot programs that try not only to minimize the number of cases in which local elements of the Navy’s sustainment system is competing for the same parts, but also the number of instances in which the acquisition portions of the Navy bureaucracy are competing against the sustainment portions for the exact same items.

“What we’re doing in NSS-Supply is bringing both of those disciplines into the room,” Stamatopolous said. “We’re creating RFPs for not only the new procurement of parts, but also the sustainment, and bringing it together. That’s the first time that that’s happened in at least 20 years, and what it allows us to do is bring the full buying power of both the acquisition community and NAVSUP into the same room. We’re negotiating upfront sustainment before we talk about how many numbers of airplanes or components that we’re going to be purchasing. It’s a whole different approach to how we do contracting and acquisition. And it’s exciting.”

The post Navy’s data-driven approach to sustainment finds huge room for improvement in ship maintenance first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Defense Department and its components are now into their fifth consecutive year of having their financial statements 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 in the assessment of the department’s inspector general — the office with overall responsibility for auditing the financial statements — it’s getting more difficult to find clear signs of widespread financial improvement. To be sure, Defense components are still finding and fixing a lot of individual problems. But as of 2021, there was little to suggest the department was making significant headway against the systemic problems that are holding it back from a clean audit.

That’s at least one of the biggest takeaways from the latest edition of a plain-language summary the OIG publishes each year to summarize the billion dollar-per-year audit effort.

Marcus Gullett, the deputy assistant inspector general for audit, financial management and reporting, said the scale of the DoD audit effort is massive, and in the OIG’s view, still a completely worthwhile endeavor, but that DoD leadership needs to do more to ensure those efforts bear fruit.

“We’re talking about over $900 billion in appropriations. Fifty-four percent of total government assets are in the DoD, and this involves over 1,200 auditors across 26 standalone audits. So it’s worth commending the efforts that the audit teams and the components put in year in and year out,” he said in a wide-ranging interview discussing the results on Federal News Network’s On DoD. “But 17 of those 26 standalone audits have disclaimers of opinion, which basically just means that there’s not enough audit evidence available to conclude that the financial statements are fairly presented. So the theme for FY 2021, frankly, is that the progress has stalled.”

While the audit is a vast enterprise and DoD has had some successes, the overall statistics do tend to suggest the department is treading water.

This year’s financial statements showed the military departments and Defense agencies managed to solve 808 distinct problems — called notices of findings and recommendations (NFRs), in audit parlance. But auditors reissued another 2,678 NFRs that had already been identified in past years’ audits, and added another 690 to the pile this year.

Another way of looking at the problem is to measure DoD’s number material weaknesses: broad categories of problems that are so serious that they could lead to meaningful misstatements about, for example, the department’s spending in a particular area, the valuation of its assets, or the inventory it has on hand.

In 2021, there were 28 of them, two more than the previous year, and 25 were repeats from the 2020 audit. In 2020, there were 17 DoD components that hadn’t yet earned an individual clean opinion. The number was still the same as of 2021.

“One way to think about this is that when we issue NFRs, management agrees with us. We have over 90% concurrence rates, and they’re developing corrective action plans,” Gullett said. “There’s a cadence there of being willing to address a specific issue.”

The harder part seems to be getting DoD financial management leaders to see the forest for the trees — and take serious steps to resolve the much harder underlying challenges that many of those NFRs point toward.

“We’ve been pretty consistent in messaging over the last few years that this effort needs to lead to developing sustainable business processes,” he said. “What we might see, for example, is in the IT realm. One particular system may have an access control issue, so the auditor issues an NFR. And next year, the component addresses the issue in System A. But then, the auditor comes back and says, ‘Okay, the issue is fixed in System A, but System B has the same exact access control issue this year.’ So that’s the type of enterprisewide thinking we need to see before the components are able to move toward addressing the material weaknesses that flow from all of those NFRs.”

But the OIG thinks there’s reason for optimism on that front. During the first few years of audits, many of the politically-appointed leadership positions critical to that enterprisewide view were vacant or led by acting officials. That’s no longer the case. DoD’s top two financial management positions are now held by Senate-confirmed officials. The Army and Air Force also have Senate-confirmed leaders in their respective comptroller/CFO seats.

In the early days of the audit effort, DoD ordered each of its components to draw up credible “roadmaps” for how that component could achieve a clean opinion. Now that those positions are filled, there’s a good opportunity for the Pentagon to not just hold the components to their plans, but for DoD as a whole to draw up one of its own.

“The roadmaps are oftentimes inconsistent across components. They also have sort of vague measures of success,” Gullett said. “So one of the things we’re focused on in developing measurable goals is taking a top down approach from the DoD comptroller level: sort of pushing down their expectations for these roadmaps.”

And asked whether DoD’s “stalled” progress means it’s time to reassess the overall audit effort, Gullett said the answer is clearly no.

After all, most of the 800 NFRs the department managed to close over the past year really were financial management weaknesses that should have been solved anyway, even if the audit weren’t the driving factor behind them. And the more DoD can do to communicate the operational impact of fixing its finances, the better.

“Each year the auditors identify something tangible, it kind of highlights [that’s] important,” Gullett said. “This past year, the Navy highlighted that its inventory records showed [less than what it had]. At another Defense Logistics Agency site, DLA wasn’t measuring certain metals accurately. We have example after example, and the risk here is that if you don’t know what you have and where you have it, your ability to accomplish your mission can be hampered. I’d also point to contingencies. Ukraine, or COVID-19, or Afghanistan. Those things happen, if DoD doesn’t have the controls in place to pivot to support these contingencies, that’s going to have a bigger impact on the overall operating budget. So this is an opportunity to really hone in developing those sustainable solutions with clear goals, holding the components accountable, and kickstarting the audit progress again.”

The post Four years into DoD financial audits, IG says progress has stalled first appeared on Federal News Network.

For several years now, the Air Force, at its most senior levels, has recognized its policies and procedures have a strong tendency to force airmen to misspend their time on ancillary tasks instead of the ones they signed up for.

The service has had some success at reducing distractions like excessive computer-based training and performance evaluations, but it’s done less in the arena of bureaucratic administrivia. Things like paperwork.

Just like many other government agencies, the Air Force’s internal processes live and breathe via 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.

“The information we were filling out on these forms was very repetitive: ‘Who’s your supervisor? What’s your social security number?’ And everything that they need to know on all these forms is already known about us. There’s technology out there that should be pre-populating this information,” said Chief Master Sgt. Joseph Young, who helped launch just such a technology solution while he served as the 192nd Operations Group’s senior enlisted leader. Young now serves as the senior enlisted leader for wing inspections, and has stayed involved in the process.

Early results from what the wing calls “HR Smart Weapon” are extremely promising. Its back-of-the-envelope math, based on a fair amount of real-world testing, suggests the Air Force could save about 156,000 person-hours per year if the approach they’re experimenting with was deployed across the whole service. And that’s for just one form.

The initial idea grew out of an Air Force initiative that tries to find “airmen-led” ideas that might cut costs, improve readiness, or give airmen back some of the time they waste on non-value-added tasks. Assisted by AFWERX, the service’s main innovation arm, the program allocates tens of millions of dollars each year to what the Air Force calls squadron innovation funds.

Young said the paperwork streamlining idea first came up during a training event in Las Vegas for how to spend those funds effectively. There, airmen were asked to pitch ideas, and the time suck surrounding manual form filling quickly emerged as the biggest pain point for the 192nd’s attendees.

“Even though they’re digital forms, it’s still paperwork,” he said during an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “We have a particularly difficult time with the onboarding process. It can take upwards of three months from the time a person shows up for them to get their initial paycheck, in particular, for people who are coming from different organizations that are already in the military. No particular office is the problem. It’s the paperwork and the disparate databases that are involved, and they don’t necessarily talk quickly to one another. So we were trying to solve that problem.”

AFWERX suggested using a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) solicitation to ask vendors for help, and after whiteboarding the problem with several of them, the wing settled on Tackle AI, an Illinois-based firm that focuses its work on exactly this issue but had never done government work before.

“They specialize in extracting data from unstructured documents, so they could take all of our legacy forms, ingest them into their AI algorithm, and then create profiles for each individual,” Young said. “So the next time somebody would bring up a form, this profile information is automatically populated. And whenever the database didn’t know something about you from the ingest process, it would ask the user for that information. And once a user provided that information, you wouldn’t need to provide it again in the future.”

But it took a fair amount of back-and-forth between the 192nd’s testing team and TackleAI’s engineers to get the concept working for the Air Force’s needs. That’s partly because the wing wanted the technology solution to not just help fill out the forms, but also track their progress through each office who needed to view, approve, and send them up the paperwork chain.

They pulled that off too, Young said, and it was important that they did. After all, the inefficiency of the current, paper-centric system isn’t just a pain for the airman who first fills out a given form. Supervisors and various other approving officials need to see and sign off on them, and right now, that’s mostly done via PDFs attached to emails.

“Email is a terrible place to track things. Things get lost all the time, you have to sort through what’s important and what’s not, and it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks, especially when you’re trying to route and coordinate things. HR Smart Weapon makes it easy by showing you, ‘Hey, it’s got to go to these five offices, and this is the person who approved it at the previous office,” Young said. “So it helps you not only save time, but you can do analytics and see clearly whether a certain office is getting backlogged. Then, the commander can make decisions to shift resources to plus-up that office with additional personnel so they can be more efficient, or we can look into other ways of continually improving that process.”

The wing’s initial tests, or what it called a “bake-off” between the current, manual paperwork process, and the AI-assisted one, appeared to show concrete time savings: 35 minutes versus 20 minutes per form, on average.

And the forms were more accurate, which is key too. A simple typo in a manually-entered field can cause the whole form to get kicked back to the last person who approved it. Those kinds of errors happened 12% of the time under the manual process, but 0% of the time with HR Smart Weapon.

Granted, the tests were extremely small scale. Only five forms were tested for each method, and it’s extremely likely the broader Air Force would want to see much more testing before scaling it up. HR Smart Weapon would also need to make its way through various other approval gauntlets, like earning an authority to operate on DoD networks, no small feat.

Young said his team understands all that. It’s just a proof-of-concept for now, but one that’s worth the Air Force’s attention. And he acknowledged that even if the approach gets approved for operational use, there are going to be cultural adaptations needed too, partly around the question of whether commanders will be willing to trust algorithms to fill in boxes that used be completed by highly-trained human beings, no matter how mundane those box-filling exercises really are.

“I fully expect people to be hesitant, he said. “Even myself, it’s going to take me a little bit longer initially, because I’ll want to double check everything before I hit ‘submit.’ But if we have a level of confidence that this does what it says it does, and it’s accurate, I mean the sky’s the limit. As soon as we add more forms to it, we’re going to have that level of trust that it is filling out accurate and current information. That will help reduce time and give it back to our airmen and our commanders to do what matters most, and that’s to be in front of your airmen and not be encumbered with all of this paperwork. We can get after the mission by doing less paperwork.”

The post One National Guard unit’s idea to improve efficiency: spend less time filling out forms first appeared on Federal News Network.

Editor’s note: This article contains explicit language and references to sexual situations and abuse.

“It is simply too early in the goddamn morning for unsolicited dick pics.”

That tweet, sent around 8 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2021, was an impassioned stance from a woman working for the military who had reached her limit with online harassers, shortly after a Marine allegedly sent her a picture of his genitals without her consent. 

The tweet started a maelstrom of discussion about online harassment of and by military service members. Women service members quickly began talking about their experiences with cyberharassment from fellow troops. The picture is just a snippet of what many people in the military community, especially women service members, face every day when they pick up their phones or get on their computers. 

Social media and text messaging are now a way of life for people in the military — they use the services to keep in contact with friends, for recruiting, to do their jobs, to find like-minded people or just to show their mom what they did today. Those platforms are also wrought with sexual harassment, bullying, hazing and intimidation directed at troops and perpetrated by them.  

Sexual advances, crude jabs, attacks and even doxxing — a practice where a person’s personal information is leaked publicly on the internet — bombard service members, especially women, daily on the internet. 

The Defense Department and the military services promise to reinforce a positive command “free of misconduct or the appearance of condoning misconduct,” as one letter regarding social media signed by the top Army officials in 2017 explains. But in reality, as seen through Federal News Network’s years-long investigation, service members see a disconnected leadership bloc that only pays lip service to caring about internet intimidation. 

Meanwhile, troops are feeling the weight of attacks from peers, veterans and civilians through direct messages, texts, calls, video chats, public posts and internet forums. Equally, service members are harassing their peers, often without consequences, through those platforms, troops, veterans and advocacy organizations tell Federal News Network. Those attacks have an effect on recruitment, retention and the mental health of troops, according to studies funded by DoD, and private organizations following the issue.

However, the Pentagon does not have any active data on cyberharassment or who is doing it.

“A pattern of denigration”

Tammy Smith, who formerly served as the Army’s top military personnel official, said the online harassment women service members face is nearly endless.

“You are subject to a pattern of denigration of what it means to be a woman in the military, and a constant pattern of people who come in there specifically to put down or talk poorly about women in the military and minorities in the military,” she said. 

The Pentagon refused multiple requests to talk on-the-record with Federal News Network about online sexual harassment. Federal News Network then sent written questions to DoD and three more emails requesting information over a course of weeks, but the department did not respond. 

While the Biden administration recently signed an executive order making sexual harassment explicitly punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice  in the military, currently the Pentagon and military services keep very little data on online harassment such as how often it’s happening, in what ways, what ranks and services harass the most or even how many online forums there are sharing offensive material. Analysts familiar with the issue told Federal News Network that the military has minimal insight into who is committing online harassment and rarely goes after offenders of the military services’ social media policies.

What it took to sniff out the Marine who allegedly sent the picture of his penis and get his command’s attention was at least 30 women, the second highest military official in the Minnesota National Guard, along with contact from the Marine’s former command.

A painful bond between women

After the woman tweeted about the unsolicited picture, and named the Marine who sent it, other women — civilians, veterans, active duty military and even ROTC cadets — came forward with their own stories about the Marine.

Federal News Network tried multiple times through Twitter and Linkedin to contact the Marine for comment and received no response. 

“We decided to form this group chat,” said Sarah, one of the women in the chat. Federal News Network has changed her name to protect her identity due to the nature of online harassment. “We had, at one point, about 30 different women in this group chat, plus at least 10 others who had commented and expressed that he had either made them uncomfortable, that he had flirted with them or he had, in some way, tried to insert himself into their lives.”

The Marine Corps confirmed that the Marine in question  is under investigation and could not comment further due to privacy rights afforded to uniformed members. The Marine Corps refused an interview to talk generally about online harassment, but did send a statement.

“Harassment of any kind has no place in the Marine Corps. Incidents of harassment weaken trust within the ranks, erode unit cohesion, jeopardize combat readiness and mission accomplishment, and will not be tolerated, condoned, or ignored,” Capt. Ryan Bruce, a Marine Corps spokesman said.

The Marine, who went by the now defunct Twitter handle @usemcee, would frequently groom women by offering to be a mentor to them on military matters — giving tips, mental health support and other guidance, according to people who were in contact with him online. 

“It started with him presenting himself as a mentor and experienced staff sergeant, noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corps willing to offer advice, willing to listen to them and hear what was going on and give them a helping hand as they needed it,” Sarah said. “And then for every single one of these women, he then turns it into flirtation and making sexually aggressive comments toward them. The 18-, 19- and 20-year-old junior service women who are college ROTC cadets, those were the ones that were most concerning to me; to find out that he had pursued sexual relationships with them.”

@usemcee would offer to get “blackout drunk” with them, Sarah said. The woman who tweeted about the explicit picture also tweeted about his tendency to ask women to get overly intoxicated with him.

The cost of stepping forward

“Y’all have no idea how hard this was for me. It took me two days to finally post it, bc i hate confrontation,” the woman who received the picture tweeted. “I hate having to explain to men in their mid-30s that their predatory behavior isn’t okay, so.”

It’s especially hard when resources seem to be absent from the discussion around online harassment. While @usemcee’s command reached out to the women, they still needed to file a report, and that can be a scary and daunting task for women concerned about their status in the military.

There’s a stigma for women who come forward with sexual harassment and assault reports, Sarah said.

 “There were still several women who said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t report this to my command because they already don’t like me, and they’re going to treat me like I’m creating a problem,’” Sarah said. “These younger, junior ranking women don’t have power in these situations. They don’t have the power to even get justice for themselves. The Department of Defense doesn’t seem to have a good answer for it.”

A RAND Corporation study published last year found that only 27% of sexual assault victims reported their assault. A total of 31% of men and 28% of women assaulted said they experienced retaliation even if they didn’t report what happened to them. For those who do report, 52% say they experienced retaliation. There are no retaliation numbers for harassment, let alone for online harassment. RAND said that DoD’s recordkeeping of retaliation for assault is dubious, and the numbers are likely higher than what is reported.

DoD has put a heavy emphasis on sexual assault and harassment in the past years. However, numbers remain high. A survey of active duty service members conducted by the Defense Department in 2018 — the last known count of harassments — found that about 119,000 individuals in the military experienced sexual harassment in the previous year. That is roughly 1 in every 10 active duty service members.

Despite the emphasis, congressional hearings, new policies and leadership’s promise to crack down, only one general out of the hundreds in the military attempted to step in to address an issue that was blowing up the Twittersphere known as #miltwitter, where leaders, service members, veterans and policy wonks frequently banter.

A day in the life online

On Jan. 1, Maj. Gen. Jo Clyborne, the assistant adjutant general of the Minnesota National Guard, tweeted about the @usemcee incident, “If you know the identity of the NCO who was DMing inappropriate pictures please DM me that individual’s information and unit if known.”

Clyborne told Federal News Network she was just doing her job in reaching out.

“I can’t say I’ve received any classes or training on social media harassment from the military, but you know what ‘right’ looks like, and you know what ‘wrong’ looks like,” she said. “I don’t worry about what other leaders do. I worry about doing what I’m supposed to do in order to lead the formations that I lead with my actions and reactions. At that time, I felt that was the best course of action. My job isn’t to go digging into the facts or to investigate. I’m a couple of levels removed from that. But we teach our junior people from the very day they enter our military, that if you see something, to say something.”

Clyborne is familiar with what wrong looks like; even in her high-ranking position she is harassed online.

Clyborne maintains three jobs: She runs a law firm; she’s the assistant adjutant general of Minnesota; and she’s the deputy commanding general of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence at Ft. Gordon, Georgia.

Recently, Clyborne had her nails done as part of an event she attended as a lawyer — something she rarely does — and sent out a tweet about how she was sad she had to take off the polish before she can get into uniform the next day because the color was not up to code.

Why the Army thinks a French Manicure is an “obnoxious” color compared to the civilian world which views it as an understated yet professional look is beyond me. But I have to be in uniform tomorrow, so here we are. It looked nice while it lasted. pic.twitter.com/GOxjDHbROR

— Maj. Gen. Jo Clyborne (@joclyborne) October 15, 2021

“I was absolutely drug through the mud for that tweet,” she said.

One commenter wrote, “At least 51% of the population believes Major General Jo Clyborne is an atrocity to the entire USA, with or without nail polish.”

Another wrote, “I bet your cookies are delicious!!!! How are your vacuuming skills?”

But Clyborne also knows that what she gets is light compared to the threats and harassment more junior service members, especially women, get every day and sometimes with nearly every post they put online.

“I don’t hear our male leaders having similar experiences,” she said. “They do get threats; they do get obvious comments that are inappropriate. But usually not to the extent that our female leaders do.”

A troubling trend

Federal News Network watched social media over a course of two years to see how women service members are treated by frequently checking #miltwitter, browsing forums maintained by service members for service members, sorting through comments on Facebook groups and monitoring TikToks service members created. Federal News Network also worked with military sexual trauma groups to review documented examples of online harassment and interviewed multiple service members about their experiences.

“If you’re a woman in any regard and you post in uniform, other service members will comment that you are a walking Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention case,” said Emily, an active duty service member who has more than 220,000 followers on TikTok. “There are statements about women only being in the service only to orally satisfy the male soldiers.”

After watching social media, speaking to victims and listening to experts, Federal News Network learned that the experience women service members have online can often be hostile. They are harassed daily about being pregnant, not being pregnant, being too pretty, not being pretty enough. They are talked down to, called sweetie. Women service members are explicitly threatened with rape, with murder and with torture. They are told to stay in the kitchen, to make sandwiches. They are called barrack bunnies. Their home addresses are posted online and people drive by their house. Forums and groups are created to share naked pictures, sexist memes and to gang up on women.

The service member who tweeted about receiving a lewd picture on Dec. 30, 2021, got a harassing comment on the very post where she called out the behavior. The commenter wrote, “You sure you don’t want some foreskin with your coffee? Lmao.”

“When it comes to degrading women online, it’s incredibly common,” said Don Christensen, president of Protect our Defenders and former chief prosecutor for the Air Force. “Any woman who identifies herself as either currently serving or as a veteran is opening themselves up to a barrage of harassment, things like — women shouldn’t be in the military, you’re not a real soldier, you haven’t deployed or if you have deployed then you haven’t seen combat. If you were to talk to women who have accounts that have a lot of followers, they would verify that that is an all too common problem with them being subjected to misogynistic attacks.”

Erin Kirk-Cuomo, co-founder of Not In My Marine Corps, former Marine and photographer to the commandant of the Marine Corps, said online harassment and retaliation are simply a fact of being a woman in the military.

“When I say 99.9% of women service members, or people who identify as women, have been sexually harassed online or inappropriately sexually contacted online by superior officers or enlisted members, that’s not an exaggeration,” she said. “Almost every single woman has had to go through this.”

And when they call it out, service members often do not come to their aid.

“Throughout that whole week of the @usemcee incident you still continued to see active duty members, men, coming to this guy’s defense saying ‘Oh, you’re just blowing this situation out of proportion. This is ridiculous. This is why women in the military have a bad name. This is why they don’t want women serving in the military. This is why you’re all drama.’” Kirk-Cuomo said. “Basically gaslighting every single one of those women and trying to make them feel that they were overreacting to their personal experiences of sexual harassment.”

The effects of harassment run deep

When it comes to the effects of online attacks, harassment in general can be devastating to those on the receiving end.

Another RAND study from 2021 found that women service members in environments with high sexual harassment had a 1.5 times higher risk of being sexual assaulted; it was 1.8 times higher for men who were harassed.

Terry Schell, lead author of the report, said it was already established that sexual harassment and assault in the military were closely linked, but that the study was the first to factor in environment as well.

The Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military said in its report to DoD that subcultures of misogyny thrive online.

According to an extensive compilation of multiple studies by the National Institutes of Health, cyber harassment has traumatic consequences for mental health, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and panic attacks.

“For a lot of people it could definitely be what sends them off the edge,” Emily said. “Some people don’t even make it to the end of their end of service date. They just freaking kill themselves because it gets that bad. Women join the Army to be an asset to the country. They intend to be someone that contributes greatly, but being treated as someone who’s dispensable and not valuable at all.”

Finding tragedy in the midst of military harassment isn’t hard. One of the most high-profile cases is that of Spc. Vanessa Guillén. The military dismissed multiple reports of Guillén’s harasser before she went missing. At 20-years-old, she was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by a fellow service member, Spc. Aaron Robinson. Her body was moved off base, dismembered, burned and then buried at three different sites.

What DoD is doing, and what it isn’t

“Why wasn’t I talking about this?” former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller asked himself in front of the press at the Pentagon in March 2017. “I don’t have a Facebook page, OK? I don’t do social media, all right? And that’s maybe my mistake.”

Neller said that after it was discovered that more than 30,000 active duty and retired members of the Armed Forces were sharing nude photos of female service members online without their consent.

It was a wakeup call for the military, and the services rushed to put out social media policies that promised they were taking a tough stance on online harassment.

But, despite all the evidence that online harassment is still alive and well, DoD doesn’t have much to show for its policies when it comes to documenting the issue.

Data on online harassment, investigations, prosecutions and reprimands is not available. After being given more than a month to answer questions about online harassment and being asked to provide any data on it, the Pentagon has not answered Federal News Network’s request.

Still, according to the aforementioned sources’ testimony and evidence Federal News Network reviewed, online harassment is witnessed by commanders, service members, civilians and vets every day.

Kirk-Cuomo and Christensen confirmed that numbers on online sexual harassment in the military likely don’t exist. While DoD is capable of tracking nearly every object in orbit around the earth the size of a softball or larger, it is unable or unwilling to catalog cases of online harassment.  

In 2017, the personnel chiefs of each military service took questions for the record from lawmakers on how many people had been punished for violating social media policies. Each service answered by saying social media is an emergent issue and there is no centralized system of records or database that captures all allegations of misconduct of this nature, nor is there any system that captures the full range of judicial, non-judicial and administrative actions that may have been exercised by individual commanders, commanding officers and officers in charge. The Marine Corps did provide the number of troops under investigation for sharing photos at the time: at least 116.

There is no evidence of any updates or further attempts by DoD to improve its recordkeeping on the issue. The closest is a voluntary, self-reported survey of service members in which 30% of women who said they were sexually harassed noted that they had been specifically sexually harassed online. That excludes other types of harassment.

The independent commission on military sexual assault noted that cyber harassment is prone to underreporting because individuals do not trust that the system will meaningfully address their case.

“I don’t think DoD wants to keep statistics because it’s going make them look bad,” Kirk-Cuomo said. “There’s really no statistics on this. It’s been really hard to track, especially online. If you’ve lived it, you know that everybody goes through it.”

Not In My Marine Corps is forwarded links every day to whisper networks sharing nude photos without consent, just like in the Marines United case, plus instances of doxxing, physical threats, racist taunts and everything in between.

“I haven’t seen anything that indicates to me that any of the investigative agencies are proactively looking on the internet to try to find these things,” Christensen said.

Confusion at top levels

Part of the issue is that DoD and the military services’ guides just aren’t up to date with the constantly changing dynamics and trends of social media.

“There’s no real solid, clear definitions or policies around what service members should or shouldn’t, or can and can’t do with regards to online activity,” Kyleanne Hunter, a member of DoD’s independent review commission on sexual assault in the military. “The focus of social media training and online activity training is really focused on sharing classified information, don’t share things that are sensitive or classified, don’t get people in trouble.”

Before the executive order on sexual harassment in the military from President Joe Biden in January, harassment was lumped in with other charges like behavior unbecoming of an officer or failure to follow an order. Only unlawful distribution of photos had its own category. That makes it hard for data on harassment or online harassment to track.

Kirk-Cuomo, of Not in My Marine Corps, said if someone were to request records of all the general charges harassment might be prosecuted under, then they would have to sift through a landfill of other behaviors like DUIs and vaccine refusals. The article is legally broad and encompasses everything from cruel and immoral actions to being dishonest.

The new executive order brings some hope to sifting through prosecutorial data. Sean Timmons, a managing partner at the law firm Tully Rinckey, who specializes in military law, said the order creates a specific charge for sexual harassment.

“It’s just basically semantics, in all honesty, because sexual harassment has been criminalized in the military for more than 30 years, they just didn’t specifically identify it as an enumerated offense,” Timmons said.

The change could broaden the scope of what the military is willing to prosecute. The Pentagon has more violations to put on paper when charging someone and that puts the defense in more of a bind. Timmons said the new classification could be one way to increase online harassment prosecutions.

The independent commission on sexual assault noted in their recommendations that DoD needs to collect data to measure the problem of online harassment and its related harms.

“DoD and the services lack the ability to track the prevalence of cyberharassment, online stalking and retaliation, and other technology-facilitated abuse, such as the non-consensual distribution of intimate digital images,” the commission wrote. “Without a systematic, targeted approach to collecting data on harassing and harmful behaviors in the cyber domain, DoD and the services will lack information critical to informing prevention measures.”

Accountability is scarce

Outside of collecting the data, the Pentagon has to actually prosecute these cases and most signs, at this point without solid data, show that it’s not happening often. Of course, DoD can only prosecute service members who are harassing other service members due to the scope of its authority.

The commission authors state in their report that, “While DoD and the services address the online environment in their harassment policies, accountability remains scarce.”

Actually finding the harassers is one of the most complex issues for DoD, according to Christensen. Perpetrators can create anonymous burner accounts that make it hard to figure out who is behind the avatar.

“Who is this person that is doing these things? How do we find out who this person is?” Christensen said. 

Before the 2022 defense authorization act, investigations were handed off from a command to whoever had time to do the work, leading to shoddy detective work, Christensen said. That is changing now with the new law creating a special investigations unit for sexual assault and harassment in the military. That law will move that work out of the chain of command, where an officer who specializes in assault and harassment and has no ties to the command and people being investigated will handle the case. 

DoD set a timeline for some of its sexual assault reforms laid out by Congress and the review commission on sexual assault. Many won’t be finished until 2027, a schedule that is under scrutiny by lawmakers like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)

However, investigators also need the cooperation of the command. If the command isn’t willing to look into details of who the poster might be — like identifying factors in messages — the offender would be able to stay under the guise of anonymity. 

Outside of that, Christensen said, if the harasser doesn’t make it clear who they are, “I don’t know how you would ever identify them short of subpoenaing Twitter to find out who the person is, which can be problematic.”

Kirk-Cuomo described DoD as an ostrich with its head in the sand when it comes to online harassment, and often leadership is still causing controversy on how it’s handled.

A TikTok story of culture divide

One particular incident gained traction on MilTok, the section of TikTok used by service members, when an Army specialist at Ft. Hood, who goes by @dont_mindg, posted a video of a soldier’s fatigue pants around his ankles stating that a woman was trying to climb the ranks.

Emily, the active duty service member who has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, posted a response to the video, calling out the soldier for harassing women.

@savannahglembin happened to me while I was active and to so many other women I know, I’m so sorry @_the_joel_ #military#militarywomen#army#marine#feminist#strongwomen ♬ original sound – Savannah Glembin

“I said ‘Hey, if you have a female soldier working under you how protected and mentored and safe is she going to feel in a work environment where her boss is posting stuff like this? Or expecting stuff like this out of his female soldiers?’” Emily said.

A soldier from a completely different base saw Emily’s TikTok critiquing the TikTok and complained to her command about her videos; Emily’s videos do not violate any military codes or TikTok terms. While many other soldiers thought Emily’s post was constructive and added to the discussion of harassment, her leadership took the complaint to heart. Emily’s command made her take down all of her videos with her in uniform and forbade her from posting further in uniform.

“She did the right thing in calling him out. She kept it tactful and professional,” one post on the Army Reddit with hundreds of comments said. “She was told to take all her videos in uniform down and to not post in it anymore. All because she did the right thing. Is this the Army we are part of? How we supposed to trust our leaders when they do BS like this? This is not okay. We need to do better.”

While this was happening, @dont_mindg had not been reprimanded or investigated; the Army later said it began an investigation immediately after learning about the video on Jan. 7.

Eventually, Emily’s command reversed its decision.

Hunter, the member of the independent review on sexual assault, said most leaders are out of touch with the internet culture of their subordinates.

“There’s quite frequently a large generational divide as to how the more junior members, both enlisted and officers, view the digital world and how most of the senior leaders do,” Hunter said.

Since the Marines United incident, leaders are making more of an effort to engage online, but they are still largely insulated from what junior officers are doing.

“There is a lack of understanding about the social media realm by senior leaders,” Smith, the former Army major general, said. “We didn’t grow up in social media; some of us adopted it later on. We don’t understand the experiences of young people who grew up with it. Social media was the place that they went, that was as familiar as going to ballet lessons or going to the playground.”

Congress asked former Marine Corps Commandant Neller in the wake of the Marines United scandal how to hold offenders accountable. He said he didn’t have a good answer.

The sexual assault commission noted that senior leaders’ limited digital literacy keeps them from fully understanding their junior members and the impact of online harassment.

What DoD needs to change

The expectation from the Pentagon is to uphold the positive command structure it promises to keep service members from preying on each other, Kirk-Cuomo said. 

“What really needs to happen is now that we have this specific UCMJ article on harassment, they need to utilize it, these people need to be held accountable,” she said. “If you want to act like this, you want to destroy our morals and our values that we stand for and the good order and discipline, then you don’t belong in the military. Goodbye.” 

The independent review commission outlined three recommendations that DoD should follow to begin clamping down on online harassment. One of those is exactly what Kirk-Cuomo said: actually holding people accountable and an easy way for victims to report the issues. 

To get there though, the commission says DoD needs a systematic approach to actually combating cyberharassment. That includes collecting data on the size of the problem and its harms. 

“DoD and the services lack the ability to track the prevalence of cyberharassment, online stalking, retaliation and other technology-facilitated abuse, such as the non-consensual distribution of intimate digital images,” the commissioners wrote in the report. “Without a systematic, targeted approach to collecting data on harassing and harmful behaviors in the cyber domain, DoD and the service will lack information critical to informing prevention measures.”

The commission said DoD should develop its own cyberharassment survey to distribute to troops. 

Finally, the commission said leaders need to be better educated. Kirk-Cuomo agreed that digital literacy is still an issue within leadership. 

“The leadership has to realize that this is an issue that is impacting the daily lives of their service members and not turn a blind eye to it,” she said.  

Many critical tweeters questioned why people like Maj. Gen. Clyborne got involved in an “online squabble.”

“That’s the problem, because that’s how the majority of the leadership thinks at the moment,” Kirk-Cuomo said. “There’s got to be some kind of training for leadership for general officers to be like, ‘Hey, you have this tool in your toolbox to go after online harassment. Now you use it, and you need to address it when you see it.’”

What this means for women in the military

The military needs women. They have been serving since Deborah Sampson joined the Army in 1781 and sustained a saber wound to the head and a musket ball to the thigh.

DoD has made it abundantly clear it wants more women and more diversity in its ranks. In February, the Pentagon released its Women, Peace and Security Framework and Implementation Plan — a way for the department to encourage meaningful participation, development and employment in the joint force for all ranks and occupations in the defense and security sectors.

Elizabeth Phu, DoD’s principal director of cyber policy, stated upon the release of the strategy that DoD needs the top talent and bringing in all aspects of gender and race are key to developing that workforce.

“When you ignore any segment of the population, you run the risk of not grabbing the best talent available for critical missions. And so, in some sectors, the progress is a lot slower than others, but I do see progress overall,” she said.

Multiple studies from the RAND Corporation studies commissioned by DoD show women contributed to the military’s readiness and are beneficial to the services.

On top of that, DoD is pulling from a shrinking pool of potential recruits — about 25% of 17- to 24-year-olds are eligible to serve — to do more complex and skilled jobs relating to near-peer competition, space, cyber, data, artificial intelligence and coding.

Navy personnel chief Vice Adm. John Nowell recently told Congress that in the past three years the propensity of those eligible to serve dropped from 13% to 10%.

“Women are 51% of the population,” Clyborne, the assistant adjutant general of the Minnesota National Guard said. “Why would you exclude 51% of the talent pool? We know also from studies that diverse teams do better, they are more creative, and they provide better problem solving. We have women in our formation who need to know that they can achieve the greatest levels of success.”

Current service members, leaders, policy experts, retired generals and academics all told Federal News Network that online harassment is a major deterrent to women serving in the military. 

“There’s a huge recruitment and retention issue regarding online harassment,” Hunter said. Hunter recently published research in the Marine Corps University Press’ Journal of Advanced Military Studies connecting online misogyny to a decrease in recruitment and retention of women in the military.

“The net result is women leaving the service due to feeling a lack of belonging and a lack of belief that their concerns will be adequately addressed,” the study found. Women were two to one more likely to say they were planning on leaving the military as soon as possible and cited online harassment as a primary reason.

Hunter described online harassment as death by a thousand cuts.

“DoD has invested an exorbitant amount of money in studies to figure out how to retain more women,” Kirk-Cuomo said.

However, at least one of the answers has been under the military’s nose the whole time.

“The vast majority of women I know who served in the military and gotten out. All of them say, they would never tell their daughter to join,” Sarah, one of the 30 women in the chat about @usemcee said. “Every single female service member I know has experienced online harassment. I cannot imagine that does anything positive in terms of retaining the best and brightest in the military. These wonderful, strong, intelligent, brave women don’t feel like they’re being treated as human beings by their peers.”

The post Nowhere safe to hide: What online harassment is doing to service members and the military first appeared on Federal News Network.

When the Defense Department created the new position of Chief Software Officer early last year, it was DoD’s first attempt to get a single official to ride herd over a vast enterprise that ranges from mainframes still running COBOL to DevSecOps pipelines to classified weapons systems, and everything in between.

For Jason Weiss, DoD’s first-ever CSO, there are at least a couple of big takeaways from having accepted that challenge: One is that there are a lot of pockets of the department where world-class software engineering is happening. Another is that what’s holding DoD back isn’t a lack of skill or dedication within its workforce, but rather, a lot of bureaucratic structures and habits that just aren’t compatible with modern software development.

Weiss, who will step down from his DoD job on Apr. 15 in order to return to the private sector, said he’s concluded there are two main factors that lead to successful software projects inside the department. Both have to do with leadership.

In cases where the military services have managed to implement modern software design practices, they’ve involved senior-ranking leaders who both “speak software,” and have the organizational savvy to maintain political support for what they’re up to.

“They understand the nuances of software and things like containerization and orchestration of containers, and they can bridge the gap between the engineer who’s actually doing the work as an individual contributor and the various oversight communities,” Weiss said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “The second part is how suave that particular leader might be understanding that they need to create a groundswell of support, and fundamentally recognize when it’s time to compromise on something and add a little bit of overhead that might slow the process down in the name of moving things forward.”

But there are far too many programs that never even approach the point of compromising over small changes that lead to small delays.

Instead, they’re locked into acquisition mindsets that were originally designed for large hardware procurements: a list of requirements that must be met, and different colors of money for each phase of a system’s development.

Both of those concepts are terrible for software, which, unlike physical products, can be changed and updated in days or weeks.

“We have trouble reducing things into bite-sized tasks,” Weiss said. “We want to look at a set of requirements and say that all of these requirements need to be met, and as an organization, we’re not capable of effectively prioritizing them and recognizing that just because something has been deprioritized doesn’t mean that it’s not still a valid requirement. It just means that the warfighter has said, ‘Hey, I need this first and foremost, and I need this other thing second.’”

Congress has given DoD some room to experiment with using a single color of money for software development efforts. But lawmakers have only approved eight programs for what’s called the Software and Digital Technology Pilot Program; they declined DoD’s request to add several more in the 2022 appropriations bill.

Across the rest of the department, budgeteers, program managers and program executive officers still need to find ways to wedge software development into a funding system that was meant for carriers and tanks, with separate accounts for R&D, procurement and sustainment phases.

“When we look at the historical scaffolding that was put in place around the way the DoD procures systems, it was by and large hardware-centric, because you only want to create a keel on a ship once,” Weiss said. “But with software, it’s more like, ‘Oh gosh, that algorithm isn’t exactly what I need, I need to pivot that.’ That can be done in a two-week sprint. And I think that is fundamental to eliminating the color of money issue around software. And that conclusion was further codified with the ‘software is never done’ study from the Defense Innovation Board. Software is never done, so it never actually goes into sustainment.”

One of Weiss’s main tasks during his tenure as DoD CSO was to help develop what was originally supposed to be an update to the department’s cloud strategy, but was eventually renamed with a new moniker: the DoD Software Modernization Strategy.

Officials have said the new name reflects a realization that it needs to use cloud as a means to an end, rather than migrating systems just for the sake of migrating systems.

The new strategy makes a big deal out of the software factories that have started to permeate DoD, now 30 and counting, and aims to eventually reduce the policy barriers that are preventing the agile methodologies they’re using from just being the norm across the department.

Weiss said the quality of work he’s seen from those factories is top-notch.

“The ones I communicate with on a regular basis put out some amazing code — it’s state of the art, and it’ll rival anybody out there,” he said. “But I think it’s also important to recognize that in all of those cases, the industrial base plays a key role. This isn’t just government coders writing government code.”

In most cases, with the software factories — at least so far — contributions have tended to come from a lot of small businesses, with traditional Defense contractors playing a only supporting or coordinating role. Weiss said DoD will need to be careful about tailoring its relationships with vendors in ways that acknowledge that’s likely to continue to be the case, while also keeping the large prime contractors involved.

“With Platform One, there is no obvious prime contractor supporting it — it’s a large number of smaller vendors. And when they are onboarded, they’re actually paired with programmers from other organizations so that there is redundancy around that ecosystem,” Weiss said. “What’s important is understanding that we’re still going to need the hardware and the investments the large primes have made in highly-specialized labs, which justify their rates that they submit to the government. We still need that capability. So it’s going to be important for DoD and the industrial base to come together to find that correct balance between them, because we need both. It has to be a both-and conversation, not an either-or conversation.”

Weiss said another conclusion from his tenure is that his successors are going to need to have more authority in DoD’s organizational structure if they hope to make modern software practices more widespread.

He said Congress should seriously consider making the position a Senate-confirmed job, considering the amount of work that needs to be done to reform DoD’s practices.

“When you look at the amount of coordination that has to occur for something like a directive-type memorandum — and the time spent on that for something that’s relatively trivial — having an ‘honorable’ title to be able to go straight to a different organization and agree at that level is going to be vital,” he said. “I had very little influence in organizations outside of the DoD CIO, which is where my billet sat. That’s important, because the CIO can only give software a fractional bit of attention. They’re responsible for spectrum, they’re responsible for desktop services, they’re responsible for budget certification. That’s just the nature of the job.”

The post Departing DoD software boss says success or failure boils down to leadership first appeared on Federal News Network.

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.

The post The logistics of fuel storage in INDOPACOM and the military’s moving contract first appeared on Federal News Network.