On DoD

The Army is finding new ways to partner with the communities around its bases. Thanks to a 2015 law that lets the military services sign service agreements with local governments without the pain of traditional federal contracts, the Army has now signed dozens of Intergovernmental Service Agreements for everything from snow removal to animal control. The latest of those agreements happened just last month at Fort Stewart Georgia. Later in the program, we discuss how the Navy is using digital twins and digital threads to change the way it supports its ships. Ashley Holloway, the chief architect for the NAVSEA's Model Based Product Support program joins us for that discussion.

On this week's program, Maj. Gen. Cameron Holt, the deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for contracting joins Jared Serbu to discuss a wide range of lessons the acquisition community learned from COVID-19.

On this week's program, Jonathan Moak, the Army's top financial management official, and Greg Garcia, its top IT official, join Jared Serbu to discuss a new initiative to modernize the Army's approach to financial management.

Troy Meyer, DoD's principal deputy inspector general for audit joins Jared Serbu to discuss why open recommendations are headed in the wrong direction (there are now 170 that are five years old or older, compared to 80 last year). Later, we get an update on the Air Force's experiments with Enterprise IT as a Service from Maj. Gen. Kevin Kennedy, the assistant deputy Air Force CIO for digital transformation.

Lisa Hershman, DoD's chief management officer, joins Jared Serbu to discuss the role and mission of the CMO. The office only existed since 2018, but has achieved billions of dollars in savings through long-term business reforms, Hershman says. Congress is leaning toward eliminating the CMO position altogether, but Hershman says lawmakers need to give the department more time to fully prove the value of a senior official dedicated to business transformation.

With billions of dollars in CARES Act funding yet to be spent and several billion more potentially in the appropriations pipeline, it’s far too early to tell how effectively the Defense Department is spending its share of the disaster funding. But according to the Pentagon’s inspector general, DoD – and its auditors – have more than enough experience with prior emergencies to know what to do, and what not to do, to make sure money is spent well even when contracts have to be executed quickly. On this week's program, Theresa Hull, the assistant inspector general for acquisition issues joins Jared Serbu to discuss a new special report that tries to outline what the OIG considers best practices for contracting under time pressure.

On this week's show, Capt. Ben McNeal, the program manager for Naval Enterprise Networks talks with Jared Serbu about how the Navy hopes to use its latest NGEN contract to consolidate its networks (there are still 140 of them). Later, Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro (Ret.) talks about the Defense Business Board's latest study on how to restructure the Pentagon's organizational chart to drive meaningful business reform.

From modeling airflows aboard medical evacuation aircraft to simulating vaccine candidates, the Defense Department's supercomputing resources are being brought to bear on various aspects of the government's pandemic response. Dr. Will McMahon and Dr. Kevin Newmeyer from the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program join Jared Serbu to share some examples. Later, we talk with Dr. Piyush Mehrotra, the chief of the Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA about how his agency is contributing to the government's supercomputing consortium for COVID-19.

Last week, the Defense Department released its latest in a series of requests for prototype proposals (RPPs) to help pave the way for incorporating 5G technologies into military networks. Depending on how the project pans out, it could lead to significant improvements in how 5G networks operate in the commercial sector too. Sal D’Itri, the chairman of the spectrum consortium joins Jared Serbu to discuss the new RPP, focused on dynamic spectrum sharing, and the previous three 5G solicitations DoD has already published.

Because of the coronavirus crisis, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences is conferring medical degrees early so those new clinicians can get to work right away. 150 M.D.s and 33 advance practice nurses got their degrees on Wednesday. Dr. Art Kellerman, the dean of USU's Hebert School of Medicine at USU joins us to talk about how the early graduation was accomplished. Also: a look at how the federal oversight community is going to be involved in the more than $2 trillion pandemic relief bill Congress just passed. And we'll discuss exactly what authorities federal agencies have under the president’s recent invocation of the Defense Production Act.