PODCAST · technology
On DoD
by Federal News Network | Hubbard Radio
Federal News Network's deputy editor, Jared Serbu, speaks one-on-one and in depth with the people responsible for managing the inner workings of the federal government's largest department, and those who know it best.
Episodes
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Improving the employee onboarding process across the Office of the Secretary of Defense
We spend a lot of time talking and about the federal hiring process and how long it takes. What gets less attention is the onboarding process: all the steps that have to happen once the hiring process is over to get new employees in a position to actually do their jobs. Previous studies have…
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Where we stand on DoD's long path toward a clean financial audit
It would be a bad idea for anyone to predict the exact year in which the Defense Department will relieve itself of its status as the only federal department unable to pass a financial audit. But the oversight body closest to the process seems to think there are glimmers of light at the end of...
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Navy's sustainment system refocuses on real-world readiness
This episode features two discussions from the 2024 Sea Air Space conference, starting with a focus on sustainment and logistics. Over the past several years, the Navy has been using a sweeping process improvement effort to wring almost a billion dollars in savings out of its supply chains under…
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In Japan, half of military spouse health workers unemployed amid 'shortage' of providers
Federal News Network has covered the difficulties federal employees and military members have seen when it comes to getting access to health care in Japan. On this edition of the show, we’re going to talk about that – but not just about that. We’re also going to talk about military spouse...
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Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland on the Defense Health Agency's new strategic plan
It’s been a decade of major change for the Military Health System in general, and the Defense Health Agency in particular. From its beginning as primarily a shared services provider, DHA has grown to become the sole operator of all of the military’s hospitals and clinics, the overseer of the...
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Commercial technologies are about to completely redefine IT capabilities in the Navy's afloat community
On this edition of On DoD, Jared talks with two leaders from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) who are experimenting with technologies like 5G and proliferated low-earth orbit satellites. We'll talk about the massive increase in bandwidth those technologies allow and the...
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Secret-level version of Microsoft 365 rolls out to top Pentagon offices as new OSD CIO marks its one-year anniversary
On this edition of On DoD: Up until a year ago, the Office of the Secretary of Defense was a bit of an outlier when it came to IT management and governance. Despite having 19,000 employees, there was no single person in charge of making sure those workers had a decent user experience, and no one…
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Navy says it's achieved big UX improvements amid DoD effort to 'fix our computers'
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...
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DoD financial management workforce gives low marks to decades-old PPBE system
The Pentagon’s decades-old planning and budgeting process doesn’t have a lot of fans – least of all the people who work within it every day. The American Society of Military Comptrollers has been surveying the DoD financial management workforce for their views about the planning, programming,...
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Pentagon has a new plan for 'customer-led' IT service delivery
The Pentagon has a new plan to improve technology services inside the actual Pentagon – or big parts of it anyway. The first-ever enterprise IT implementation plan for the Office of the Secretary of Defense promises to take a user-centric approach to improving IT services for the 17 major offices...
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An update on DoD's deployment of MHS Genesis
Holly Joers, the program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems talks with Federal News Network's Jared Serbu and Jason Miller about DoD's ongoing deployment of a new electronic heath record, how the new EHR will work with other federal agencies, and the centrality of data in...
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A progress report from the commission tasked with overhauling DoD's 60-year-old budgeting process
The expert commission Congress has tasked with proposing overhauls to DoD's planning and budgeting processes is still a year away from delivering its final report. But the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform has already gathered a huge amount of information. In…
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Air Force finds ways to bake cybersecurity into weapons systems, and bolt it on where necessary
The Air Force believes it's made significant progress toward improving the cybersecurity of its weapons systems -- both brand new ones, and systems that have been fielded for decades. On this episode of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with two leaders from the Air Force's Cyber Resiliency Office for...
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How DoD's own budget process keeps the military on the wrong side of the 'valley of death'
A new study by George Mason University's Center for Government Contracting chronicles the ways in which the Defense budgeting process has become increasingly inflexible over the last seven decades, how it's shackled technological innovation in DoD, and what to do about it. On this episode,...
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Getting to work on fixes to the Pentagon's broken budgeting system
No one particularly likes the way the Defense Department andCongress handle the DoD budgeting process. It’s rigid, inflexible, and veryslow. But the PPBE process, as it’s called, has been encoded into the DNA ofthe Defense bureaucracy for more than 60 years, and turning the ship around isgoing to...
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New initiatives to bring small businesses into the Army technology ecosystem, and a big acceleration of BYOD
We start this week’s show with an exclusive interview withGabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the Army, about several new initiativesthe Army’s launching to incorporate small, innovative businesses into its technology ecosystem. Later in the program, Kenneth McNeill, the National Guard’schief...
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To institutionalize DevSecOps, Navy's Black Pearl aims to 'commoditize the boring stuff'
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...
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One reason Navy ship maintenance is taking too long: workers stuck waiting for supplies
Maintenance periods for the Navy’s ships and submarines are taking longer than they should. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but one that the Navy’s only recently discovered is that most of the supplies shipyard employees need to do the work aren’t on hand at the time the work’s supposed…
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Five years into DoD financial audits, progress has stalled
The Defense Department and its components are now into their fifth year of having their financial statements independently 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…
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Va. National Guard's 'Smart Weapon' aims to stop wasting airmen's time on paperwork
Just like innumerable other government agencies, the Air Force runs on paper-based 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. '…
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Federal News Network Special Report | Nowhere safe to hide: What online harassment is doing to service members and the military
The internet is a forum for harassment that women in the military can't escape. They are being bombarded by toxic comments, vile memes and even stalking. Yet, the Pentagon has few answers for a problem that is hurting mental health and retention.In this extended special report, Federal News...
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How the Pentagon's first chief software officer sees the state of software management in DoD
Jason Weiss was appointed back in January 2021 as DoD’s first-ever Chief Software Officer. Weiss has decided he’s ready to move back to the private sector. In this episode, he tells Jared Serbu about his takeaways from his tour of duty, including some of the ways DoD’s started to experiment with...
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The logistics of fuel storage in INDOPACOM and the military's moving contract
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...
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DoD's Danielle Metz on how the multibillion dollar JWCC cloud contract will actually work
On this episode, an extended discussion with Danielle Metz, the deputy DoD chief information officer for information enterprise. Metz explains how Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle will actually compete for work under the up to $9 billion contract, in an approach that's novel for government...
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Army's DEVCOM takes 'future of work' from concept to reality
It’s fair to say there are a lot of institutions across government that are still figuring out what the future of work will look like. In this episode, we revisit one of the Army organizations that’s much further along than most when it comes to answering some of those questions. John Willison…
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DoD's new moving contract and the Army's new unified network plan
On this week's show, we talk to Al Thompson, the CEO of Homesafe Alliance, the joint venture U.S. Transportation Command just picked for a $6.2 billion contract to overhaul the military's household goods moving system. Later, Jared talks with Maj. Gen. Rob Collins, the Army's program executive...
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Demystifying Other Transaction Agreements
On this edition of On DoD: a deep dive on other transactionagreements. According to the Federal Procurement Data System DoD’s useof OTAs has skyrocketed from 342 agreements worth $1.4 billion in 2016 to 3,200agreements worth more than $16 billion in 2020. Despite that growth, the rulesgoverning...
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Top priorities for two of the Pentagon's newest senior technology executives
On this edition of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with two newly-sworn-in DoD technology leaders about their priorities: -- Heidi Shyu, the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering -- Jay Bonci, the Air Force Chief Technology Officer See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and...
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DAU leadership's take on the future of Defense acquisition
The Defense acquisition workforce has faced challenges at other times in its history, but as of 2021, it’s living in interesting times. Contracting officers, program managers and other acquisition professionals are navigating their way through some big changes. Just to name a few: a major recent...
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New approach to Navy readiness gives leaders ways to measure bang for bucks
Rear Admiral Pete Stamatopoulos, the commander of Naval Supply Systems Command joins us to talk about Naval Sustainment System-Supply -- NAVSUP's effort to provide Navy leadership with a holistic and businesslike approach to the Navy's supply and maintenance decisions. Over the past year since…
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Why the fighting force is 'ever shrinking' despite robust Defense budgets
On this edition of On DoD, Jared Serbu speaks with Maj. Gen. (ret.) Arnold Punaro, who's just released a new book, The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force. Punaro, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee who's advised Defense secretaries of both parties on reform issues, argues...
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RIP Commercial Virtual Remote, the tool that forced DoD to behave like an IT enterprise
On this week's show, Danielle Metz, the deputy DoD chief information officer for information enterprise talks with Jared Serbu about the shutdown of Commercial Virtual Remote. CVR, the service DoD created to let employees work from home at the beginning of the pandemic, was a first-ever example…
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13 ways the Defense Department needs to tighten its oversight of other transaction agreements
If you’re curious about exactly where DoD is spending its money on other transaction agreements (OTAs), you won’t find satisfying answers in any public spending databases. When the military services award OTAs through third party consortiums, as they often do, the actual records of which...
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Army’s top R&D command charts a course for post-pandemic telework
On this week's show, John Willison, the top civilian leader at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command joins Jared Serbu to discuss how DEVCOM is thinking about telework in a post-pandemic environment. In a recent survey, 40 percent of the command's workforce said they want to keep working...
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A plain language version of what DoD's latest financial audit found
The Defense Department is now onto its fourth year of full-scale financial audits. At first glance, the results from the first three years aren’t encouraging: DoD has more auditor-identified financial problems now than it did a year ago. But there are some signs of forward momentum if you know...
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What DoD's new Adaptive Acquisition Framework really means
In this edition of On DoD, the Defense Acquisition University's Mike Coolican joins Jared Serbu to explain the fundamentals of DoD's new Adaptive Acquisition Framework, and why this rewrite of the 5000 series is different from past efforts. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and...
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New financing could start to improve Army housing as soon as this summer
Under a new agreement with LendLease, a large military housing operator, $1.1 billion in debt-financed housing improvements are expected to start as soon as May across six large Army bases. To explain how the deal will work, two guests from the Army's housing partnerships office join Jared Serbu....
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The Defense Production Act and how the Biden administration might use it
The Defense Production Act is a special presidential authority we heard about quite a bit toward the beginning of the pandemic as the Trump administration used it to procure personal protective equipment, vaccine-related supplies and other materials. But President Biden has promised to take…
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Big changes coming to how the Navy and Marine Corps buy cloud computing services
The Navy Department is making some big changes to how it buys and uses commercial cloud computing services. Within the next few months, all the Navy and Marine Corps’ cloud purchases will be funneled through a single “marketplace,” and program managers will no longer be allowed to use their own...
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How the Navy is using data analytics, AI to boost aviation readiness
Like the other military services, the Navy has been working in recent years to improve the readiness of its aviation fleets – especially since cuts under the Budget control Act almost a decade ago dealt a serious blow to readiness. Bigger maintenance budgets over the last few years have helped…
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Pentagon can't fix software acquisition until it gains a better understanding of its own workforce
A new Pentagon working group is trying to bring more rigor to DoD’s management of its software acquisition workforce. But the department faces a major hurdle: it knows almost nothing about the workforce as it stands today – not even how many people are in it. The RAND Corporation recently…
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Navy came late to the OTA game, but spending on IT, cyber now 'exploding'
In August, the Navy announced it was increasing the ceiling value for its Information Warfare Research Project OTA to $500 million. That’s after IWRP exhausted its initial 100 million dollar ceiling in just a little over a year and a half. To talk about how that happened and some of the…
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DoD's Space Development Agency shows how fast the FAR can be
The Pentagon's acquisition system often gets a bad rap -- often deservedly so. But DoD's fledgling Space Development Agency is offering the latest example in why the Federal Acquisition Regulation doesn't have to be synonymous with slowness. SDA just awarded a major multi-million dollar systems...
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Army cutting costs by sharing services with local communities
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...
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Gearing up for great power competition also helped the Air Force prepare for COVID-19
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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at...
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How the Army is rethinking its financial managment systems (it's not just an IT problem)
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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy...
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Unresolved IG recommendations piling up at DoD
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...
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Pentagon CMO claims billions more in savings as Congress seeks to eliminate the position
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…
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Pentagon IG offers advice for effective contracting during pandemic
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…
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Navy aims to unify its IT networks with NGEN-R contract
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…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Federal News Network's deputy editor, Jared Serbu, speaks one-on-one and in depth with the people responsible for managing the inner workings of the federal government's largest department, and those who know it best.
HOSTED BY
Federal News Network | Hubbard Radio
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does On DoD have?
On DoD currently has 105 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is On DoD about?
Federal News Network's deputy editor, Jared Serbu, speaks one-on-one and in depth with the people responsible for managing the inner workings of the federal government's largest department, and those who know it best.
How often does On DoD release new episodes?
On DoD publishes regularly with 105 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to On DoD?
You can listen to On DoD on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts On DoD?
On DoD is created and hosted by Federal News Network | Hubbard Radio.
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