The Navy plans to invest more than a billion dollars over ten years to revitalize an old facility: The 19th century Naval Surface Warfare Center at Indian Head, Maryland. It is where the Navy plans to re-do the infrastructure and machinery to produce munitions. For details, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with the center’s technical director, Ashley Johnson.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin
Give us the brief rundown on what happens now at Indian Head. I’ve actually been there. And it looks a little bit out of the way you might say.

Ashley Johnson
Yes, it’s out of the way. It’s been in Southern Maryland since 1890. But it is out of the way. Probably on purpose, to some extent, because of the nature of the business. But we have been at the forefront of what the Navy’s ability is to produce munitions and energetic materials for well over 100 years. And this evolution is really just the beginning of every modernization and sustainment activity for the capability that’s been in the Navy for over 100 years.

Tom Temin
Right now a lot of the work is testing of devices, for example, the chargers that release ordinance from the bottom of airplane wings, that kind of thing.

Ashley Johnson
It has a full spectrum munitions facility, it’s classified as the Navy’s only public arsenal. So we have activities that range from research and development through manufacturing, engineering, as well as tested evaluation, and even as far as it says demilitarization. So, when we say a full spectrum facility, we really do mean in a cradle to grave sense.

Tom Temin
And you also have a facility to make energetics, the stuff that makes pellets go in what looks like the world’s biggest bread mixer.

Ashley Johnson
Yeah, that’s true. Much of what’s used in the manufacture of energetic materials was borrowed from the baking industry. And that’s based on simplicity and the ability for us to control what is inherently pretty dangerous operation with simple equipment. But it’s obviously not quite that simple. But there’s a lot of similarities. And we have incorporated much of that equipment at very large scale, so that we can support production of not only, as you said, the propellants and the explosives or what I would call, more or less, intermediate materials. But we can make those materials and then put them into finished assemblies, like rocket motors, or warheads or other materials for combat capability.

Tom Temin
And tell us about the modernization then. The Navy apparently is committed to Indian Head. What’s going to happen over the next 10 years?

Ashley Johnson
Well it’s no surprise. So for those who are looking at the news, you’ve seen the pressures that have been applied throughout the world, particularly starting with Ukraine and potential adversaries. There is a renewed awareness of the need for conventional ammunition, and the consumption of that ammunition and munitions over a long conflict. So what we have realized is the United States is our munitions industrial base has shrunk over the last 15, 20-25 years, because of our focus in other areas. And as a result, the pressure that’s being put not only on commercial industry, but also on what we call the organic industrial base, or that which is owned by the government is at a premium, and Indian Head is significant in terms of its capacity. We are a very large part of what we call composite manufacturing, which is the modern way of manufacturing rocket motors and warheads and things of that nature. So the Navy, recognizing this, and the Secretary committing to this idea that it owns an arsenal, and it needs to use it in the context of this whole situation, has committed to a 10-year-program to essentially sustain and restore and to modernize the entire facility. Indian head has a site that’s worth replacement values, five to $6 billion. And it would be difficult to duplicate, even if you have that money. So investing in a facility like this is really much more efficient than trying to accomplish it some other way. So the Navy’s gonna invest first, to restore a lot of things that have been taken care of in a way that’s forced us to make decisions. So there’s some things that we should have been taken care of a little bit better than we have. And so we’re going to fix those things to unlock some latent capacity. And then we’re going to modernize equipment to get to more state of the art manufacturing methods, as well as just simply increasing capacity in the sense of multiplying three or four or 5x times the number of things that we can do. And this will get us down the road. As I said 10 years it will take to accomplish this. But we will start to get returns on that investment immediately. And then we will sort of reset the clock, if you will, for Indian head and into the future.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Ashley Johnson. He is the technical director of the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Indian Head, Maryland. And sounds like that you will be overseeing the construction of additional buildings or fixing up old ones, and also new equipment, new foundry gear and that kind of thing.

Ashley Johnson
Absolutely. It’s pretty much everything that you might imagine. Something very simple, even as simple as paving roads and facing electrical distribution systems or lighting or steam lines or fire protection systems which at first blush wouldn’t be the first things maybe you’d come to mind when you’re talking about state of the art munitions. But those are the things that you’re required right in order to run the factory. And then you know at the high end, as you said there’s very specific mixing presses, cutters, things that are directly related to the manufacturer of the material. And those need to be modernized and taken advantage of where we can depart from industrial age technology and moving into information age technology.

Tom Temin
I was gonna say even basic ordinance today has electronic components in it that might not have had in the World War II era. Tell us more about what that requires.

Ashley Johnson
Most of the advances, to be honest with you, over the last, say 30 or 40-50 years since major conflicts have been in what I would describe as the front end of a lot of these items for missile systems, guidance and control has been where a lot of advances have been made, and for good reason with regard to precision and accuracy. But a lot of what we still need, or still benefit from and need to improve is the items that are directly related to range, right to speed to what we call terminal effects or what the device does when it gets to its target. We also manage the signature or how well you can see the device as it’s doing its job as a function of energy and materials. So these are the parts that also have to be managed. And frankly, those have been left behind as opposed to some of the investments that have been made, as I said, in this guidance in control, or are more front end electronics of the business. So it’s a business of making sure that we don’t put too much emphasis on one aspect of ammunition, it’s all got to get better.

Tom Temin
And what about the manpower to do this production, it sounds like pretty skilled work. And you only got about 25, 2600 people down there. What about the human capital side of it?

Ashley Johnson
It’s a challenge for not only us, but also the entire industry. There’s a huge swing in these things. As you look over the years. In the United States there used to be 12 tactical rocket motor manufacturers at one point. Now there are only two, that’s commercial. And so the number of individuals that were associated with this in the commercial space, as well as the government space. And I do mean from laborers, to technicians, to engineers to advanced degree folks, the whole numbers down. So as an industry, both commercial and government, it’s a challenge for us to find folks that have any experience in this area, we’re taking on folks that are knowledgeable skilled, they have degrees, they have all that training. But it does require a significant amount of on the job training, as you might expect to handle something that says dangerous, is what it is that we handle. As I finally said, we don’t make toasters here. And that’s not an affront anybody that makes toasters, but the problem is it’s dangerous, and we can’t afford to make mistakes. Because it could be a significant risk to mission or risk to our force. And so we take that training very seriously. And it puts a premium on finding individuals that have the skills, but also on the time that it takes us to get them ready to do the job.

Tom Temin
The toasters are all made in China anyway, so who cares about them, but you’ll have to get more people, you have to increase the workforce, and therefore have a way of attracting them to Indian Head, Maryland, which is beautiful country, by the way. But it’s a little out of the way, relative to the Baltimore-Washington area.

Ashley Johnson
It’s funny you say that. It’s really an issue of first, of course, attraction. We don’t have a lot of problem, honestly, attracting people. The nature of our business is pretty exciting for lots of reasons. You can be a patriot, you can defend your country, you can be a civil servant. And people are excited about that one. So they learn what level of impact that they can have. I think the other is or the nature of our businesses exciting. Things that go wish and things that go bang and it’s an unusual, it’s an off the beaten path. Again, it excites people. The hardest part for us is really the time that it takes to get people to a high level of competence, as I started this on the job training and the patience that it requires to be there. And then also the retention which speaks to what you said, what is the area look around, people want nice things, people want a nice place to live, they want whatever their dunkin donuts or subways or whatever it is that they’re looking for close by. And so they look, and then they determine how long they want to stay. And these is really the issues that address how it is that we can maintain a workforce. And that’s why we work so hard to partner with local and state governments to make sure that we put our best foot forward. Because as we go to all that trouble of attracting and training talent, it’s pretty debilitating or disappointing when when people leave.

Tom Temin
And you have been at Indian Head now yourself for about 35 years fair to say, this must be kind of exciting from a personal standpoint.

Ashley Johnson
It is. Obviously you got some level of commitment to this. But it’s interesting, quite frankly, to see some of the parallels. They’re all story if you want a new idea, read an old book. I see a lot of similarities. I came here in 1987 nearing the end of the Cold War, and I was facing the adversary that was the Soviet Union. I see a lot of parallels. I’m not gonna make any predictions, but I see a lot of parallels to our situations now. And so it’s interesting to watch that happen. And it’s humbling and gratifying at the same time to be able to be a part of this renaissance in this resurgence in a facility that’s one of the oldest the Navy has. It’s got a rich and storied past of being able to deliver what the Navy needs and it’s getting ready to do it again.

The post How the Navy plans to modernize its one-and-only arsenal first appeared on Federal News Network.

From virtual desktops to email and collaboration, the Navy has been leaning heavily on cloud services to speed up its digital modernization efforts. But those efforts have come with a big question: Will any of this work aboard ships? It turns out the answer is yes.

In a pilot project, the Navy has shown it’s possible to consistently move several terabytes of data each day between the cloud and thousands of users onboard an aircraft carrier every single day, an advance officials say is a “game changer”

The project is called Flank Speed Edge, an extension of Flank Speed, the Navy’s broader cloud environment. The largest test case has been aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, which is currently underway in the Pacific, and represents the first major example of the Navy connecting a vessel at sea with cloud services in a way that’s on par with what sailors get on shore.

Leveraging P-LEO satellites

It’s mostly thanks to the advent of Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (P-LEO) satellite services — massive constellations of small satellites that form mesh networks via optical links with one another in space, and deliver high-bandwidth, low latency communications to users back on Earth.

Cmdr. Kevin White, the combat systems officer aboard the Lincoln, said the initial idea was to install a gigabit’s worth of satellite connectivity aboard the ship and see what the ship’s 5,000 sailors and Marines could do with it. It turns out, quite a lot.

“I’ve seen a tremendous value from from this afloat. All of the staff are using their Flank Speed capabilities to maintain continuity,” he told the Navy CIO’s recent IT conference in Norfolk, Virginia, during a live video demonstration from the Pacific Ocean. “They’re using their NMCI phones to call home over voice over IP, or to call the beach to say, ‘Hey, I need this part rushed to the ship.’ We’re using it across all of our departments and embarked commands for quality-of-work type areas. Everything from our training department — ensuring that all of our readiness in our training cycle is up to date — to our medical department, to our supply department, they’re all reaching out over websites and services to ensure that we have continuity of operations, and ensure that this ship is ready to go when the time comes that we have to turn these services off.”

One thing the Navy has learned from the Lincoln experience is that Flank Speed Edge doesn’t require a huge amount of manpower. It’s taken just three full-time sailors to operate and maintain the new satellite and Wi-Fi infrastructure aboard the carrier.

And in return, it’s also dramatically expanded the kinds of software upgrades and updates that can be performed on other systems on the ship, White said. Traditionally, that’s the kind of work that can only be done at a pier with a physical network connection.

“While we’re out at sea right now, with this P-LEO capability, a cloud connected node and all the right elements in place, we’re able to scale new capabilities as they become available and rapidly deploy them while they’re monitored from the shore side,” he said. “One of the big challenges we have is the cycle of Windows updates and the cycle of patches, and with that high-speed capability, we can have those update services enabled. Onboard, we have 2,000 staff folks, all of which are live at their home commands on Flank Speed. Imagine a future where we are able to migrate that data to an embarkable [laptop], and allow them to interoperate with that data when we have to turn off our connections.”

The approach does have its limitations. Besides the obvious need to sometimes shut down those high-speed data links for operational reasons — leaving the ship with only its onboard tactical cloud nodes — the P-LEO connections, so far, are only authorized for unclassified data.

But White said the on-board infrastructure is designed to be transport agnostic — so that it can use whatever connectivity mechanism is available — from traditional military SATCOM to commercial services like Starlink. It’s also designed to incorporate software defined networking, so that the network capacity available through those data links can be used however the Navy sees fit, and can be reallocated on the fly.

“Right now our logs are showing that we’re able to pass between 3 and 5 terabytes of data per day, which is absolutely massive. And what we’re able to do with software defined networks is scale exactly how that data is used,” he said. “Right now we’re demonstrating pushing applications like air wing maintenance apps that live in the cloud, and all of our pay and personnel apps. And that’s just scratching the surface.”

Other applications ashore

The Navy is using similar concepts in other places of the world that may not be as hard to connect as ships, but still have tended to have communications challenges.

The service’s 5th Fleet is serving as a pilot site for a shore-based implementation of Flank Speed Edge. At the command’s headquarters in Bahrain, staff have recently started using Flank Speed services, including Nautilus Virtual Desktop.

Lt. Cmdr. Tricia Nguyen, a staff member at Naval Computer and Telecommunications Station Bahrain said so far, the Flank Speed approach has turned out to be more seamless and resilient than the Navy’s traditional overseas networks.

“It is a vast improvement compared to the previous assets and legacy architecture,” she said. “The user interface is quick and responsive — applications are able to be opened natively instead of using browser-based workarounds. Simple things matter here: The file sync is seamless. I don’t have to log in multiple times like I used to; now I just boot up and my files are there. And back in March, there was a Teams service outage, which I understand was worldwide. However, here in Bahrain, we did not experience an outage at all. That was because of the architecture: We have a primary and secondary means of transport that are terrestrial based, and a tertiary that’s commercial satellite. We had an automatic failover and it was completely seamless and transparent to our end users. I didn’t even know about it until after the fact.”

Bob Stephenson, the chief information officer for U.S. Pacific Fleet, said some of what the Navy has learned through the pilots — especially their uses of secure WiFi — may also be applicable to communications on installations, such as his command’s headquarters at Pearl Harbor.

“We’ve been using the same technology in our buildings that we’ve used since the late 90s. As our staff changes and grows, it’s very difficult for us with a wired infrastructure to bring more people into the building, or rearrange the office,” he said. “So we’re doing a pilot now sponsored by PEO Digital where we’ve gone to wireless in the buildings. We still have to use fiber for our secret networks, and we’d like to change that, but this is going to give us an enormous capability to modernize our buildings like we’re modernizing our ships.”

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The Navy has a big appetite for modern technology, but also a lot of technology debt. One answer to that problem: a move to portfolio management. Officials think by focusing their acquisition management energy on portfolios, not individual products, they can embrace commercial technologies more quickly while also saying goodbye to expensive legacy systems.

The new approach is well underway within the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services (PEO Digital), one of the Navy Department’s main organizations for buying and building enterprise IT capabilities.

It’s a departure from the Defense Department’s usual way of thinking about acquisition. Rather than program managers focusing on programs, as they’re defined in the DoD budget, they’re now in charge of portfolios of capabilities. Starting in 2021, PEO Digital eliminated its traditional program management offices and reorganized itself into eight portfolios as part of a broader initiative called modern service delivery.

“Portfolios, to me, are a way to take the burden off from a traditional program and project management view,” Louis Koplin, the office’s acting program executive director told attendees at the Navy Department CIO’s annual IT conference in Norfolk, Virginia last week. “We want those to be cohesive portfolios and products, aligned towards an integrated mission outcome view. Sometimes we’re asked to provide all of the features, and we then discover that the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The portfolio view allows us to break that paradigm, and lets us shed some of that daily toil of project and program management that seems to actually impede our ability to deliver the outcomes.”

Officials say part of the goal is also to help those managers be less protective of any individual technology solution, and to adopt new ideas more quickly.

But now that the technology adoption aperture  is open a little wider, it’s also created a need for new filtering mechanisms — or “funnels” — to help the Navy understand its overall IT environment, which commercial technologies are good candidates for adoption, and when it’s time to divest legacy systems.

One way PEO Digital is doing that is through something called the Technology Business Management (TBM) framework.

“What’s great about that is it helps us find the right level of capability discussion for the right audience. If we’re going to talk to the budget folks or the congressional staffers on the hill, we can say we’ve got four major portfolio areas: digital workplace, cybersecurity, IT platforms and IT infrastructure,” Koplin said. “I can say, ‘Those are things that you care about, that I care about,’ and we can talk about where are we on the journey to improve those capability outcomes. We’re not going to talk necessarily about named products, but it gives us a way to do that. And if they say, ‘Well, what do you mean by digital workplace?’ I can say I have two product groups in there, client computing, and communication and collaboration. And this helps us consistently talk about capabilities. We’ve got things that are going to move in and out of the portfolio, and we know that by segmenting it in this way, we can consistently be prepared to do that and move the cattle through their respective chutes.”

A second big change is to start thinking about technologies in terms of four “horizons.”

Horizon 3 is made up of technologies that exist in commercial industry, and that the Navy is only starting to experiment with, through programs like Small Business Innovation Research. Horizon 2 is when the Navy has started to put more serious money into scaling a technology into pilot programs with a clear place in one of its portfolios. Horizon 1 is made up of products that are in full production mode with a focus on continuous upgrades, and Horizon 0 covers systems the Navy is ready to decommission.

And organizing technologies into that final group is critical, said Justin Fanelli, the Navy Department’s acting chief technology officer.

“Horizons is an agile framework that came from top consulting firms, and it says three to two to one to zero is the only way you divest. We have a parking lot full of cars, we keep having cars pulling in on top of other cars, and we can’t even get cars out effectively right now,” he said. “New private sector organizations have no tech debt, and that’s why they’re so agile; the longer you’re around, the better you have to be at divestment. This is why we have horizons: You need to do trade offs.”

A third new framework the Navy is using is called “World-Class Alignment Metrics (WAMs).” That’s how the Navy decides which IT solutions might make sense as a candidate in one of its Horizon 3 entry points.

“We’ve got many folks who are perhaps proposing pilots this week. How do we know which of these good ideas is better? The way we are going to choose among them with all those opportunities is with WAMs that are outcome and mission-driven,” Koplin said. “It’s a consistent evaluation framework that lets us say we’re going to measure everything within certain swim lanes. We’re not going to compete a new laptop against a cyber situational awareness tool. But it gives us a way, within the portfolios and sub-portfolios, to say, ‘Oh, this is going to move the needle a lot,’ or ‘That’s going to maybe move the needle not so much.’”

Outside groups have also been urging the broader Defense Department to move toward portfolio-centric approaches. In its final report in January, the Atlantic Council’s commission on Defense innovation adoption specifically raised PEO Digital’s approach as an example of how organizations can make better technology decisions more quickly. And in March, the Congressional commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution (PPBE) reform also urged DoD and lawmakers to move from a program-centric management approach to portfolios of capabilities.

Fanelli said there are very clear signs that the portfolio approach is letting the Navy examine and adopt more new technologies than it ever has before. One data point: The Navy has made 10 times more Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards over the past 14 months than it had in the decade before that, he said.

And Congress has shown a good degree of interest in helping to solve the “valley of death” problem: getting those programs from those early stages to one of those more mature “horizons.”

As part of its version of the 2025 defense appropriations bill the House Appropriations Committee approved last week, the lawmakers advanced language that would significantly increase the funding for a broader DoD program called Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT). Under APFIT, DoD would have $400 million dollars available to help companies bridge the valley next year, up from just $100 million in 2022, when it was first created.

“The funding is compounding right now, because they want technologies to transition to programs of record, and you have to have a service and PEOs signing off on these things. We jumped on it,” Fanelli said.

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Robert Burke, who served as vice chief of naval operations, faces federal charges including bribery and conspiracy for what prosecutors allege was a corrupt scheme that led to the company hiring him after his retirement in 2022 with a starting annual salary of $500,000. He oversaw naval operations in Europe, Russia, and most of Africa.

Also charged in the case are Yongchul “Charlie” Kim and Meghan Messenger, who are co-chief executive officers of the company. The company is not named in court papers, but Kim and Messenger are named as the CEOs on the website for a company called NextJump, which provides training programs.

“The law does not make exceptions for admirals or CEOs. Those who pay and receive bribes must be held accountable,” said Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. “The urgency is at its greatest when, as here, senior government officials and senior executives are allegedly involved in the corruption.”

Burke, 62, of Coconut Creek, Florida, made his initial appearance in Miami on Friday but didn’t enter a plea during the hearing, according to defense attorney Timothy Parlatore. The lawyer said Burke will plead not guilty and intends to clear his name at trial.

“I think a jury will see through this,” Parlatore said.

Burke conditionally retired from the Navy on July 31, 2022. Senior officers will often conditionally retire if there are administrative matters pending.

Rear Adm. Ryan Perry said the Department of the Navy has fully cooperated with the investigation.

“We take this matter very seriously and will continue to cooperate with the Department of Justice,” Perry said in a statement.

Kim and Messenger’s company provided a workforce training pilot program to a component of the Navy from August 2018 through July 2019. The Navy terminated the pilot program in late 2019 and directed the company not to contact Burke.

But the two company executives arranged to meet with Burke in Washington, D.C., in July 2021. During the meeting, Kim and Messenger proposed that Burke use his Navy position to steer them a contract in exchange for future employment at the company, the indictment alleges.

In December 2021, Burke ordered his staff to award a $355,000 contract to train personnel under Burke’s command in Italy and Spain, according to the indictment. Burke began working at the company in October 2022.

Parlatore noted that the value of that contract was smaller than Burke’s starting salary.

“There was no connection between this contract and his employment.” Parlatore said. “The math just doesn’t make sense that he would give them this relatively small contract for that type of a job offer.”

___

Associated Press writer Lolita C, Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

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A new policy allows service members to collect extra pay based on their Basic Allowance for Housing at the without-dependent rate to cover housing expenses at their second location.

Troops are eligible for this daily stipend if they are stationed at their training location for under a year and return to their primary duty station, where they must maintain their primary residence. Service members are not eligible for the stipend if they live in no-cost government housing.

Service members will still receive their Basic Allowance for Housing stipend at the with-dependent rate for their primary residence where their family resides. If they happen to lose their BAH stipend for their primary residency, they must immediately contact their servicing finance office to correct the error and restart their payments.

“We understand that these short moves, while necessary, can be disruptive to the lives and finances of Airmen and Guardians with families — particularly in situations where they are slated to return to their original duty station,” Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs Alex Wagner said in a statement.

“This new allowance gives our service members and their families additional resources to weather these times away without the added stress of financial uncertainties.”

Lawmakers directed the Defense Department to implement the policy as part of the defense policy bill for fiscal 2023.

The Navy and Marine Corps announced the policy in March, and the Air Force and Space Force introduced the changes earlier this month. The Army has yet to update its policy.

The policy changes were incorporated into the Joint Travel Regulation, which establishes travel and transportation allowances for service members. Those changes took effect on Nov. 1, 2023.

Service members who attended training on or after Dec. 23, 2022, and meet the eligibility criteria for the stipend under the new policy will receive payments retroactively.

The new policy is part of a slew of changes the Defense Department has recently introduced to improve quality of life of service members and their families.

A provision in the House Armed Services Committee’s draft defense policy bill for fiscal 2025 directs the Defense Department to increase housing allowance. Since 2016, the department has covered 95% of the housing costs. If passed, the defense bill would require the DoD to reverse the 5% reduction in Basic Allowance for Housing and make sure it covers 100% of the calculated rate for the military housing area.

The provision was adopted last week, but it will have to be voted on by the rest of the House and Senate before making it into the final version of the bill. The House Armed Services Committee’s lawmakers on the quality of life panel recommended increasing BAH in their final quality of life report.

“What we’ve seen over the past few years is that military families are spending more and more out of pocket to obtain safe housing in in the duty station that they’ve been assigned to. Because of skyrocketing housing costs, we know that housing costs have have just shot up all over the country but the stipends haven’t always kept up in the past year,” Jessica Strong, the senior director of applied research at Blue Star Families, told Federal News Network.

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The Navy isn’t the only military service that struggles with big shipbuilding programs. Two of the Coast Guard’s biggest programs — the Offshore Patrol Cutter and the Polar Security Cutter — are years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says those cost and schedule increases are signs of broader management and oversight problems. For more on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin, Federal News Networks Host of On DoD, Jared Serbu talked with Shelby Oakley, GAO’s Director for Contracting and National Security Issues.

Interview Transcript: 

Jared Serbu I think it’s fair to say the Coast Guard has really had major struggles over the years with these major acquisition programs. I know your recent testimony was focused really on just a couple of those, the offshore patrol cutter and the polar security cutter. So what did those programs sort of tell us about the state of play in major shipbuilding programs across the Coast Guard, and how much things have improved or not over the years?

Shelby Oakley Yeah, unfortunately, I think with OPC (Offshore Patrol Cutter) and PSC (Polar Security Cutter), they are kind of indicative of the things that we’ve seen as struggles for Coast Guard shipbuilding, but also Navy shipbuilding over the years. Just major challenges with achieving stable designs to support actually beginning construction, and what that often results in is rework and delays and that kind of thing. And I think, OPC and PSC are delayed four and five years respectively, are now 11 billion and at least $2 billion over budget. So these outcomes are just a bit of a challenge, especially for an organization like Coast Guard with such a small budget for acquisitions.

Jared Serbu Yeah. And you talk about concurrency in the testimony, is that really the main issue here, moving ahead into later phases of the program before you really have a clear picture of what you’re doing?

Shelby Oakley It’s a huge issue. We’ve done a lot of work over the years on commercial shipbuilding. And the outcomes that commercial shipbuilders achieve are nothing like we see in the Coast Guard and the Navy. They are on time and on budget. And it’s not kind of a question. And the common things that we see them do, or what we call leading practices for shipbuilding and ship design, and one of the main parameters is they just don’t move forward until they’re, key elements of their design are matured. This is like structural layouts, where the equipment’s going to go. All sorts of things like that need to be figured out before you move forward and start cutting steel or bending metal, as they say, because any changes at that point really result in reverberating bad effects. And we saw that on PSC. They had designed the height of the deck, for one of the lower decks of the ship incorrectly. And that had reverberating design change impacts throughout the ship. Had they have begun constructing that ship, at this point, we would have been in big trouble. But at least they’re just focused on redesigning those aspects at this point.

Jared Serbu You mentioned the agency size issue earlier, and that’s kind of where my head goes sometimes when I think about the Coast Guard challenges relatively small agency doing incredibly complex engineering and acquisition work. But then I remind myself, well, the Navy has an entire command that’s, I think, bigger than the whole Coast Guard that does this stuff. And they face many of the same issues. So is there just something inherent to naval shipbuilding or is this really all process improvement stuff?

Shelby Oakley Yeah. I think one of the key differences that we see, between like government shipbuilding and commercial shipbuilding is this issue of lack of discipline. And this is sometimes driven by, the industrial base. So with commercial shipbuilding they have a ship lined up right after one another. So they have to keep those ships moving through the shipyards, otherwise there’s severe financial ramifications for those companies. That’s just not what we see in government shipbuilding. And government shipbuilding, they’re allowed to proceed with design, with construction too early. Any challenges that we run into, we end up just throwing more money at these programs. There’s been a lack of incentive in the industrial base because of kind of fits and starts of demand signal from the Navy and the Coast Guard. And so there’s a lack of incentive to do and key investments, in technology or processes that could improve their performance in design and construction. And so there is something about government shipbuilding that’s a little bit different. But if you look at the practices that we outline, there really just kind of common sense, they’re not shocking to anybody. They’re like logical and disciplined approaches that anybody would apply to their own life if you were buying a house or designing a pool.

Jared Serbu One of the things in in your testimony that was striking to me, as you talk about these very long periods between milestone events, which are, I guess, the triggers that are designed to get senior leaders to really review a program in depth and make course corrections if they need to. They’re like 4 or 5 years apart on these programs, like how big a role does that play in letting these things kind of spin out of control?

Shelby Oakley Well, it’s the early warning signal. If you don’t have a milestone for several years, you’re not tracking anything. You’re not tracking delays to that. So it doesn’t trigger this oversight review from Coast Guard officials or even DHS officials to be able to say, hey, wait, we’re heading in the wrong direction or things aren’t going so great, maybe we need to figure it out. And so we’ve made a number of recommendations over the years for the Coast Guard to add milestones to their acquisition baselines, so that there can be closer tracking of that progress to give a sense of how well the program is doing.

Jared Serbu These two programs that we were talking about, specifically the OPC and the PSC. They’re pretty far down the line at this point. On those programs specifically, to what extent is the diet kind of cast by past decisions that have been made? And how much can they specifically do to improve on these two?

Shelby Oakley Yeah. So I think there’s two separate answers there. So OPC as you know, has two stages. OPC stage one with just the first four ships are already underway and construction. OPC stage two is planning to start construction in September. And so we would suggest that the Coast Guard has an opportunity to make sure that the design of OPC stage two is matured sufficiently to be able to justify moving forward with that construction decision. And so if they do that, that could put them on a better path for OPC stage two. After those first 15 ships, the Coast Guard’s intending to buy 25 ships total. We think for that next ten, there’s an opportunity to really rethink how we’re going about building these ships and driving more of these commercial practices into their approaches for that. So we think that there will be an opportunity in the long run for this program to make some changes. With regard to PSC, they plan to start construction by the end of the year. And we made a recommendation that they ensure that their design is mature and they understand how everything’s working before they move forward with that. They concurred. But we have yet to have, confidence that they will actually ensure that the design is mature before they move forward. If they don’t, it’s going to lead to a lot of risky decisions and a lot of risky, risky outcomes that hopefully the Coast Guard at that point would more closely manage and ensure that we’re executing that program to the best extent possible, given the risk that we’ve accepted by moving forward.

Jared Serbu As you mentioned, these leading practices have been down on paper since 2009. Still not much evidence of them showing up in programs. Is this something Congress should consider getting involved in?

Shelby Oakley Yeah. So, we did our first tranche of work in 2009. And Congress has taken some action, specifically with regard to Navy programs, in requiring certain aspects of those leading practices. We have some matters for congressional consideration out there for Coast Guard programs that we’re hoping that the Congress takes a good look at, especially in light of our most recent report that we updated those practices, this spring. There are a lot of similarities, but some new nuances given ten years, ten plus years of advancements in technology that these commercial shipbuilders all around the world are really employing to a great extent and to great success.

Jared Serbu I did want to ask you one more question about the comparison between commercial and military. It seems like it wouldn’t be that easy for government work to just get plugged into one of these commercial shipyards that doesn’t already do much government work. That’s one of the issues here, you sort of do need people with government experience?

Shelby Oakley Yeah. I think we’ve seen on the, OPC and PSC that the shipbuilders have a lack of experience in government contracting. And that has led to some of the problems. They don’t have the systems or capacities available that a lot of these major shipbuilders have that are consistently in this kind of government space. And so with the commercial practices, we’re not necessarily saying go to commercial yards and have those ships built there. What we’re saying is these builders that work for the government, that’s their primary business, need to begin thinking about those practices that commercial builders use and how they could apply them in the government space to achieve better outcomes. And the DoD and the Coast Guard play a role in incentivizing them to do that, and requiring them to do that.

The post Coast Guard still struggling with major acquisition programs first appeared on Federal News Network.

Over the past year, the Navy has had, on average, about 18,000 unfilled positions on its ships. The reason is pretty straightforward: There simply aren’t enough sailors in the service because of ongoing recruiting challenges.

In 2023, the Navy missed its recruiting goal by about 7,000 sailors. Nonetheless, officials say the picture appears to be improving: Last year, the service onboarded 6,000 more uniformed service members than it did in 2022, and so far this year, it’s about 2,900 recruits ahead of where it was at the same point in 2023.

But those gains have not been enough to close manpower gaps at sea, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.

“The recruiting effort is all hands on deck, and we may miss our goal by about 6,200 this year,” he said. “I think it’s going to be far less than that, but we actually decided to raise our goal to recruit more sailors this year, unlike the other services. We set our goal at 40,600 because of the shortfalls that we have at sea.”

Navy about 21,000 personnel smaller than three years ago

According to official DoD statistics, the Navy is still shrinking despite some improvements in recruiting figures. There were 327,000 active duty sailors in the fleet at the end of March, the most recent figures available. That’s down 5,000 from the same month a year ago, and down 21,000 from 2021.

Del Toro said one of the biggest challenges recruiters are still facing is getting access to high school campuses for in-person recruiting events. That became a huge problem during the COVID pandemic and still hasn’t been fully resolved.

“We’re working very closely with the Department of Education and with schools from across the nation to try to break down those barriers,” he said. “Our recruiters currently are being allowed in two times a year. We want to increase that to about four times a year. I’ve written thousands of letters to high school principals, in fact. It’s the number one challenge we have in terms of getting to the high school students themselves.”

Another recent issue has been DoD’s implementation of MHS Genesis, the new electronic health record system that reached full deployment earlier this year. Officials emphasize Genesis itself is generally working fine — but because of its interconnections with other medical providers’ databases, more past medical issues are being noticed among prospective service members. And each of those needs to be resolved, often with additional paperwork, before a new sailor can move through the recruiting pipeline.

“We’ve had a lot of discussions about Genesis with all of the service chiefs, the [Office of the Secretary of Defense] and the Defense Health Agency to provide feedback about where it is potentially slowing things down,” said Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the chief of naval operations. “I think we’ve made some definite improvements in streamlining the process and reducing the amount of times people have to go back and get paperwork, and DHA continues to take this feedback. It’s a little bit of growing pains with the new system, and we’re really committed to working with DHA to make sure that it gets our recruits into the system as quickly as possible.”

Organizational, policy changes to boost recruiting

The Navy says it’s made several organizational changes to help improve its recruiting numbers. For example, the service elevated the commander of its recruiting command to a two-star admiral position. It stood up a new “Recruiting Operations Center” to help standardize recruiting processes across the service. It raised the maximum enlistment age from 38 to 41. And borrowing an idea from the Army, it created a new future sailor preparatory course to help prospective candidates meet its standards.

But Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, the deputy chief of naval operations for personnel, insists none of that means that standards are lowering.

“I’m certain that recruiting will continue to get better as we focus on the data behind it,” he said during a session at the Navy League’s recent Sea Air Space conference in National Harbor, Maryland. “But the Navy is not lowering standards. The standard is you must graduate from boot camp. You must graduate from your A school. Are we allowing more people the opportunity to do that? Absolutely, because we have to and we should. But the standards remain, and we’re confident in our force going forward when we do that.”

Reaching more recruiting “influencers”

As Navy officials have delved into their recruiting data, one thing they’ve noticed is that there’s a very clear correlation between whether someone agrees to join, and whether they’ve been talking with someone other than a Navy recruiter about the possibility of public service. Because of that, officials are also looking for ways to engage with potential “influencers.”

“We’re getting plenty of interest in the United States Navy — where we lose it is with the influencers. It’s become a little bit generational,” he said. “I need everybody who was associated with the military to be able to talk to a young person about service. Our stats are very clear. As we dive into the data, it takes 10 cold calls to get a recruit — a 10-to-one conversion rate. If anybody is actively mentoring that recruit, it’s a seven-to-one conversion rate. If the active mentor is associated with the Navy, it’s a five-to-one conversion rate; 50% better. So we need to be influencing the influencers so that our outreach isn’t just with the younger population. It is with all of us as well and you all can help us play a part with that.”

And Cheeseman said one reason to think that the recruiting crisis is a temporary problem is that once sailors have joined the Navy, they tend to stay. Like the other military services, retention is at near record high levels.

“We are crushing retention in all zones. If I can get a sailor in the Navy, they’re generally staying in the Navy,” he said. “For those with zero to six years of service, we’re at about 117% of our goal. For six to 10 years of service, it’s 100%. And if I can get you past 10, it’s well over 100%. There’s been a culture of, ‘If you cannot deploy worldwide, you gotta go.’ We’re changing that culture. If you can do any job in the Navy, that’s a reason for you to stay, and we welcome you to stay.”

The post Navy grapples with at-sea shortages as recruiting lags first appeared on Federal News Network.

New military aircraft designs don’t necessarily require super jet engines or hundreds of billions in development costs. A case in point: The Navy’s bid for a light plane that can take off and land in less than a football field. The Naval Air Systems Command recently hired a company called Electra to study the development of such an electrically-powered plane. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with the founder and CEO of Electra.aero, John Langford.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And just a brief technological description of what your company does. It’s more than just planes that can land in a short space, but it’s the propulsion that’s radically different.

John Langford Exactly. Electra.aero is a US company started about four years ago, whose focus is sustainable aviation. We believe that the whole next generation of aviation, at least commercial aviation, is really all about decarbonization. And we’re working in a part of the market that we think is relatively unaddressed within, but with enormous market potential, which is sort of the short haul and regional air mobility market. What Electra is doing is developing a hybrid electric, extreme short takeoff and landing airplane. Think of something with the operational flexibility of a helicopter, but with the cost structure at or below existing fixed wing airplanes. Electra uses a technique called blown lift, which is an idea that has been around for many years, was pioneered by NASA back in the 60s and demonstrated by NASA and the Air Force in the 70s, but which has never yet reached commercial utilization, primarily because the engines that existed at the time were not well suited economically to this idea of blown lift. But electric propulsion, distributed electric propulsion is really the breakthrough, which, combined with the idea of blown lift, makes this new category of airplanes possible. That’s what Electra it’s all about.

Tom Temin Blown lift then makes the wing feel like it’s going faster than it actually is. So the plane goes up even though it’s not going forward as fast as usual, rotation speed.

John Langford Exactly. The idea of blown lift is you bathe the wing in accelerated flow from many different propellers on there, and it accelerates the flow over the wing and it effectively makes the wing look bigger than it physically is, which is how we get the eventually the high lift coefficients. Then the slow flight speeds and the slow speeds are what allow you to do the really short takeoff and landings.

Tom Temin And have you tested it with a barn door yet?

John Langford We’ve tested it with a whole range of things, from pencil and pen calculations to computer fluid dynamics to subscale models. And now today, we have a full scale manned demonstrator flying right out at Manassas Regional Airport. And it’s really neat to see how all of the theory actually translates into practice very well.

Tom Temin And what has the Navy asked you to do to prototype a plane for its use, or to study the concept? What is the actual contract deliverable here?

John Langford So Electra’s primary focus is a commercial product aimed at, commercial operators. But at the same time, there’s a lot of government uses for an airplane that can take off and land very quietly in very small spaces. Our biggest financial backer to date from the government has been the Air Force through their Agility Prime program, which is helping sponsor the development, not only of the test program that we’re flying today, but also of a prototype airplane of the nine seed airplane product. As they’ve seen, the Air Force interests, both the Army and the Navy, have now become interested in how this technology might actually benefit them. And the Navy contract that we announced last week is really the first study of how that might be applied in the marine environment.

Tom Temin So they need not just the technology, but it sounds like they’re looking for a use case for this type of craft.

John Langford Absolutely. An airplane that can operate in sort of helicopter like spaces, but at the very low cost, comparatively, of a fixed wing airplane has a lot of potential uses. And commercially, what we’re trying to do is get in and out of the Wall Street Heliport, which would allow fixed wing airplanes to fly right into Manhattan, which is a little bit of a mind boggling idea when you think about it. That would enable direct air service from Manhattan to Washington, DC, right on a on a fixed wing airplane, not on a helicopter. And if you can land on that, if you’re familiar with what that heliport looks like. Barge in the East River. And that’s where the space of 300ft by 100ft, our operating requirement  comes from there. Once you can operate in a space that size, there’s all kinds of other places you can go the top of parking garages, literally any soccer field. And as you start to look at the marine environment, you start to go, wow, when you have a little wind over the deck, now you’re talking about distances that are even shorter than the 300 foot or the 150 foot ground rule that we’re talking about. These  airplanes take off and land between 25 and 30 knots, which is down in the range of ships can achieve that. And if there’s wind over the deck, either generated by ship motion or by by the wind itself, you can get into situations where these airplanes literally can almost take off vertically. There are historical examples of previous Stol airplanes, not blown lift airplanes, but previous Stol airplanes that can do essentially a vertical takeoff in the right wind conditions. And that’s really the heart of the study we’re going to be doing for the Navy is, well, what does this really mean? Some of the ideas we’re thinking about is this allows you to take container ships. And use a container ship to add aircraft, fixed wing aircraft operations off a container ship, off an oil tanker, off anything with a space of 50 to 100ft. That’s part of the study. How you treat some of these, the idea that now you have a reliable wind over the deck condition. What does that really mean for the operations of an airplane like this, which only needs 150ft ground roll to begin with? How does that really work in practice in the marine environment? That’s the focus of this initial study.

Tom Temin We’re Speaking with John Langford, he’s the founder and CEO of Electra.aero. And what is the status of this propulsion technology? Because pure electric planes have been flown, but they’re kind of like electric motorcycles. Lots of fun if you don’t want to go anywhere.

John Langford Exactly. When you look at conventional jet fuel, and you look at the very best batteries, there’s still a factor of between 50 and 100 in the amount of energy you can contain for a given amount of weight. And in cars, if your car weighs twice, your battery car weighs twice what your, gas car weighs, nobody really notices. The people who have to maintain the roads or the people who sell you the tires, they notice. But the average consumer doesn’t really realize how much heavier their electric cars are. Aviation weight is everything. Absolutely, the name of the game is how you get this high performance at low weight. And so batteries are not really well suited to aviation today. They may well be as the battery technology progresses over the next, 10, 25, 50, 100 years. But today it’s only in very limited cases that batteries buy their way on to an airplane. So what we are focused on is a hybrid solution. Think very much like, a Prius where there is both batteries and there is, in our case, a small gas turbine engine. Think of it like an auxiliary propulsion unit or something like that. They will work together in normal operations for takeoff and landing. Either one can power the airplane in an emergency. So one of the cool things the hybrid does is it gives you lots of redundancies that you don’t have on an airplane normally in this weight category. And then they allow lots of really neat advantages. Essentially what we do is we operate the gas turbine at a single fixed operating point, and we run it that way for a really long time.

John Langford So the two big drivers of maintenance cost on jet engines are how many throttle cycles you do, and how many times you turn it off and on. So both of those are dramatically reduced in the hybrid thing. And all of the throttle excursions are taken up by the batteries, which are actually pretty good at changing their loads very quickly. So we think it’s really a nice combination that is going to work well, and not just in our nine seat airplane. We actually think this technology is very scalable. We’re already talking with NASA about ideas about how this might scale up into airplanes as large as several hundred seats in a passenger. I think the whole idea of hybrid electric airplanes is actually something we’re going to hear a lot about over the next couple of decades. And we think Electra is really just a pioneer in that in the technology and in the market space.

Tom Temin But just to be clear, you do have craft built and flying around with this technology.

John Langford Absolutely right. We started out companies four years old. We spent the first two years developing and proving the hybrid electric system before we even built any kind of airplane. We spent the first two years developing and testing the hybrid electric propulsion system, and then we built an airplane. We wrapped the airplane around it. And that airplane, is called the, the EL2, goldfinch. And it’s flying today out in Manassas. It’s a two place airplane about the size of a Cessna 172. And it’s being used to validate all of the systems before we build the actual product, which is a nine passenger version.

Tom Temin It strikes me you could have the future locomotive at your fingertips also.

John Langford The electrification of things is going to be a big part of the next industrial revolution. And over the last 20 years, it’s all been how do you put everything on the internet. The next 25 years is going to be how you make everything, some version of electric. Whether it’s pure battery, whether it’s hybrid. I’m a big believer of hybrid. These are steps towards a future that may be hydrogen based or something like that, but there are steps that can be taken today with the existing technology, and they don’t require a rework of the entire distribution system. And so they’re very practical even if they’re only interim steps. And by interim, I mean this makes several generations 25 to 50 years, which is still a pretty good product lifecycle.

The post Navy hired this company to develop a new type of aircraft first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Defense Department, once again, dominated the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition. Service members from the Army and Marines Corps and a team of DoD experts won the individual and team competitions at this 5th annual event run by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

But civilian agencies are starting to close the gap.

Michael Harpin, the competitions section chief for the President’s Cup Competition at CISA, said once again the competition let federal workers demonstrate their cyber skillsets and gain some recognition for their talents.

CISA completed the finals of the 5^th annual competition on April 26 and the Office of the National Cyber Director will honor the winners at an award ceremony at the White House on May 20.

The results of Track A for defensive operations:

1. Army Maj. Nolan Miles,
2. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Michael Torres
3. Air Force 1st Lt. Sears Schulz

“We primarily focused on cyber defense incident responder and the cyber defense forensic analyst positions,” Harpin said. “In that competition, we had some challenges, like recovering from a ransomware attack. You also had to explore some network traffic to find an eight digit code for flood gates in a dam system. So we wanted to try and create some of these real-world type situations within our competition.”

The results of Track B for offensive operations:

1. Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Michael Torres
2. Army Capt Brian Welch
3. Jakob Kreuze of the Air Force

“Some of the challenges they had to go through for this year’s competition included one was exploiting SCADA systems on a spaceship. In that, our challenge server would constantly check the environment that you’re in and provide you a flag if you properly overheated the reactors of the spaceship,” he said. “That was actually one of my personal favorite challenges this year. In another one, the individuals had to analyze a public GitLab site, so they could compromise a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline.”

The results of the Team competition:

1. Artificially Intelligent — whose team included members of the Army and the Air Force. Four of the members were also on the winning team in 2022.
2. Touch grass.txt — whose team included members of the Department of Defense
3. Cyber Warfare Extremists — whose team included members of the Navy

Harpin said the team competition was one of the closest ever with Artificially Intelligent winning by just 60 points over Touch grass.txt out of a total of more than 30,000 points.

“Our team’s competition is broken up over two days in the finals. The first day we incorporated an industrial control system escape room developed by the Idaho National Lab. That was something new that we incorporated this year to give them a different experience,” he said. “In the ICS escape room, they were actually hands on some hardware. It was a fictional story of insider threat of a chemical company being acquired by a new company. So these people weren’t very happy. They raised pandemonium, which was the name of our of the escape room, with within the company. The goal was to restore the systems and then validate that you can complete an automated batch and they had to find some programmable logic controllers. They had to restore some human machine interface displays and even some virtual reality goggles as well within the escape room, so that that was a good new experience.”

Harpin said this is one area where a civilian agency team stood out. He said the team called the “Justice League” from the FBI was the only team that managed to escape during the competition.

Harpin said CISA already is planning President’s Cup 6 for next year. He said there are three things that the planning committee will take from this year’s competition.

“One is in continuing to incorporate new environments like the industrial control system (ICS) escape room. How can we give the finalists a new experience that can contest maybe even some soft skills like communication that’s why I wanted to shout out the team from the FBI that during that escape room. You had to constantly communicate a puzzle you solved or a password you found, and they are the ones who are out there, putting it on a whiteboard more than the other teams,” he said. “We want to find some hardware challenges as well that give them some new experiences. Another is continuously taking feedback from our participants. Getting back to our finals in person has been really valuable for us that we can have these open conversations with the finalists afterwards. And that’s been great. That’s how we grow the competition every year.”

Another possible change for future competitions is how to recognize individual or team efforts outside of the winner’s circle, such as fastest time to solve a challenge or top performing “rookie” competitors.

Harpin said next year’s competition is scheduled to start in January and go through April.

In the meantime, he said CISA is putting this year’s puzzles and challenges on the President’s Cup website for everyone to try and gauge their skillsets.

“We’ll have, at this point, over 200 challenges and within the coming weeks, we’ll make sure all of the challenges we used in Presidents Cup 5 finals are available. We post all the solution guides for those challenges on CISA’s, GitHub repository for individuals that get stuck. I can all admit that’s me a lot of times when I’m playing through the challenges, and it’s a great learning tool,” Harpin said. “If you have that step-by-step guide, it’s still a learning process to understand how to how to do a lot of these tasks. Since we stood up that President’s Cup practice area in September of 2023, we’ve had over 8,000 attempts so far. We’re excited to see that grow and continue to get used, all of that material can be found through CISA’s website.”

Harpin said the practice area is open to federal employees, and the GitHub repository is open to the public.

“We’re getting out to do more workshops using our President’s Cup material will be at the NICCE conference in Dallas, Texas in June where we are hosting a workshop called using games to motivate train and retain a cybersecurity workforce that will give people an opportunity to play through a handful of challenges, and how we build them on some open source applications,” he said. “We want to be able to scale that out how can we how can we do that more for the public and more for state and local governments. We’re exploring different ways that we can use that do that with the content we build within the President’s Cup competition.”

The post DoD continues domination of President’s Cup competition first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Navy runs on ships and people. They need fuel, ammo, food and tons of other stuff. Now ships are on duty around the world, while some are on heightened alert because of the world situation. It all highlights the importance of supplies and the supply chain. For an update, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with the Vice Commander and Executive Director of the Naval Supply Systems Command, Kurt Wendelken.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin And there is a lot going on around the world. Tell us what the top concerns are now for the Navy relative to, say, a year ago or two years ago?

Kurt Wendelken Yeah, well, obviously, the events in the Red sea have become front and center for the Navy. There’s lots of naval activity in that space. I don’t think that was really on anybody’s bingo card for 2024. But that’s where we are. And we’re supporting the fleet and a lot of allied partners engaging in those operations in the Red sea. And we’re still continuing with preparations to make sure we’re ready in the Pacific. And then more broadly, NAVSUP has been working a supply chain transformation program for the last five years, and we’re continuing forward with that as well.

Tom Temin And on the Red sea, I mean, there have been dangers to shipping. And I guess before we get to the specific question there for the Navy, I was wondering, in all the years we’ve spoken, how does the Navy get stuff around? Is it strictly on Navy vessels, or do you use commercial vessels maritime or how it works?

Kurt Wendelken It’s really a mix of lots of cooperation between standard road trucking. Right. A really important part of our supply chain is moving material out of depots. They also could go by aircraft and then ultimately they’re going to end up on a ship at some point and then get delivered to the Navy. So it could go on a commercial ship to a certain point. We work with Transcom as a provider of either government airlift or commercial airlift. And then what we refer to as the last tactical mile is typically done by the Navy, either by a Navy aircraft or a Navy ship. We’ll do the last tactical mile to support Navy vessels that are underway.

Tom Temin So just the sheer movement itself sounds like a pretty heavy logistical exercise.

Kurt Wendelken It really is amazing. We sort of take it for granted because it works so well, but it only works so well because there are so many amazing people, both in the private sector and working for the government, that are making that a success.

Tom Temin So from depots, there might even be overseas depots.

Kurt Wendelken Absolutely. And it varies by what kinds of material we’re moving. But yeah, it could definitely be overseas depots where materials coming from.

Tom Temin And just another detail question. Do things get delivered to ships at sea.

Kurt Wendelken They absolutely get delivered to ships at sea. What’s referred to as unwrap or underway replenishment, where another ship will come alongside the ship and they will refuel the ship while the ship is moving. And then also, very often material will be brought over by helicopter while the two ships are refueling to bring stuff like food and parts and other things like that. So we absolutely get resupplied while we’re underway.

Tom Temin Well, I’ve learned something I thought only aerial refueling was the way thing is moving around in the military.

Kurt Wendelken And again, you know, for people who are interested, I direct you to YouTube to go see some amazing videos of Navy ships getting refueled at sea.

Tom Temin All right. I’m going to take a look at that, because my feeds do show the aircraft being done and flying that boom down into that little tiny nozzle there. So the Red sea, what are some of the specific effects or things you’re watching for right now?

Kurt Wendelken You know, we’re making sure that the vessels that are operating in the Red sea have all the material that they need, and it’s sort of a challenge because that’s not a place where we’ve traditionally operated in this way. For as long as I’ve been working with the Navy, which has been for over 30 years. So what happens is when a new area of operations opens up, then all the logisticians have to figure out how are we getting material there? What new ways do we have to use to get our material there? What are the ports that we can use? What are the airports that we can use? And then what are the challenges of getting material to ships while they’re engaged in operation? So again, I think that’s a novel space that we traditionally have not resupplied in that we’ve had to flex our muscles. And I think both the Navy and our joint partners, like the Defense Logistics Agency and have been rising to the challenge.

Tom Temin What’s the old saying? Amateurs plan battle strategies. Professionals plan logistics.

Kurt Wendelken It’s absolutely true, right? I hate to advertise for myself, but yeah, I think that is absolutely true.

Tom Temin And the South China Sea, that’s been troublesome. You know, if you’re the Philippines and there’s been actual shooting, you know, and so forth and boardings and this kind of thing, the United States has a huge strategic interest there, the pivot to the Pacific and the whole nine yards. What’s the situation there? What are some of the challenges?

Kurt Wendelken So I think that’s an area where we do operate traditionally. So we have more structure there to support us, but we’re really taking a look to make sure that we have everything that we need in place. Should something occur there that requires the Navy to respond on behalf of the nation?

Tom Temin And what about the commercial partners that you might use in areas that are semi contested or temporarily contested? Does that take cajoling to have them go there, or do they have to go to the same places for their other customers?

Kurt Wendelken I think it requires a slightly different way of thinking. But typically, you know, our commercial partners have been alongside with us. The last tactical mile might be the last tactical 100 miles or 500 miles where material will get moved on to a Navy vessel or aircraft earlier to make sure we can bring that material in without placing people in undue danger.

Tom Temin We speaking with Kurt Wendelken. He is the vice commander and executive director of the Naval Supply Systems Command. And just a couple of detailed questions while we have you getting to the supply chain itself. I just read recently that you have standardized contract language for logistical purposes, and I didn’t realize that was a thing. Tell us about that initiative.

Kurt Wendelken So that’s part of our own internal supply chain transformation. One of the things that we really recognized as we started better conversations with our suppliers is that we had to learn to become better customers ourselves. So we discovered that some of our contracts missed some of the configuration management language that we really needed in there, and we’ve been cleaning up those contracts to make it easier for our suppliers to come in and do what are called requests for variances. So if there was something that needed to be changed in how we wrote the contract, we needed to make sure that we had the language in there so they knew exactly what to do. And we didn’t always do that. So there’s a broader Navy effort called Get Real, Get Better, and this is really us working to get real about things that we weren’t doing as well as we could and try to get better. So we had the language in only 17% of our contracts in FY 20, in fiscal year 23. We brought that up to 94%, and now we’re up to 100% in fiscal year 24. So hats off to our contracting team for taking that critical look at how they were working with our suppliers and making things better.

Tom Temin Well, maybe an example of what type of variants might be called for and what would the language say roughly.

Kurt Wendelken So we would ask for something in the contract. There would be a specification in the contract, and maybe the vendor would come back to us and say, hey, I can’t deliver it in exactly that way. I can deliver it in this way, which we think is materially the same. Does the Navy agree? But again, it’s administrivia, right? And sometimes bureaucracies get rightly criticized for making the administrivia too hard. But this is really important administrivia and really is part of us becoming a better customer with our suppliers.

Tom Temin In other words, you could get better value and maybe more efficiency. But for contract language.

Kurt Wendelken I couldn’t have said it better. Right? So it’s really a place where the contractor is trying to help the Navy get a better product or get something on a different timeline. And instead of just saying no, I said it to you one time, just do what I said. It’s really a two way dialog, which is really the way we should be working with our suppliers.

Tom Temin And I imagine this applies to everything from, say, crates of oranges to capstan or shaft bearings.

Kurt Wendelken It can absolutely apply to everything. Right. And I think back to get real, get better. It really highlights what Navy’s trying to do, which is a really important way for Navy to become better and be able to support the nation better.

Tom Temin And you mentioned the supply chain transformation effort. That’s one part of it. What are some of the big things this year?

Kurt Wendelken Right now we’re really focusing on our surface combatants, which are destroyers, amphibious ships. It’s not always clear to the nation what it is that the Navy does, but I think one of the great things that came out of the Red sea is the nation has been able to see our Navy in action. So Navy’s been on a journey where we started working in the aviation space, our supply chain transformation. We then moved to improve our support to submarines, and now we’re working on destroyers to make sure that they have the material that they need on board in the form of spare parts, and that we’re really doing as much as we can to support them, because, again, they’re an important part of what the Navy can do for the nation.

Tom Temin So it’s more of an improvement, say, in just in time or in having the resilience if something goes wrong.

Kurt Wendelken So it’s really both of those things. And I think and you and I have talked about this before, Covid kind of showed us where just in time falls down where, you know, key medical supplies, toilet paper, PPE. Just wasn’t available because businesses had really gone to a just in time model. And what we really have to do as a Navy is we have to balance just in time with having what we need when we need it. So it’s a real challenge to make sure that we’re buying the right material. We use mathematical models and AI to help us do that, but we’re continuing to improve that because we want to make sure we have exactly the material that the fleet needs when they need it.

Tom Temin Right. So you could almost anticipate needs with the right algorithms and the right data ahead of when they themselves might know.

Kurt Wendelken That’s exactly what we want, right? So they have a store of parts on board. So we want to make sure that they’re bringing what they need depending on what part of planet Earth they’re traveling to. And then we want to make sure that we’re backstopping them with more material ashore in case they need it.

Tom Temin It strikes me that because the command of a ship changes regularly and maybe 18 months or whatever, and that captain is gone, NAVSUP, knows the whole history of what’s been going on in terms of requirements for that given vessel.

Kurt Wendelken Absolutely right. And that’s a really important component for us to be able to forecast correctly. And we work very closely with the engineers at NAVSEA to make sure that we’re updating those calculations with the best data that we have.

Tom Temin And a final question. You know, the government has done well on a percentage and dollar basis with small business. But as the Pentagon, you know, writ large, has said, the number of participants from small business is going down. There’s a million reasons for that. What do you hope to accomplish to get more people attracted to military business and NAVSUP?

Kurt Wendelken That’s a great question. The Navy writ large is really, really focused on small business. And we have a number of different programs, including a mentor protege program, where we take a small business. We would team them with a very large defense OEM, and they would help that small business develop their business with the government. And we all have to remember, every large business started out as a small business. They’re really, really critical to both our supply chain at NAVSUP but to our larger economy in the United States.

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Over the past several years, the Navy has been using an ongoing process improvement effort to improve its supply chains, and leaders say they’ve managed to find almost $1 billion in cost savings along the way. Now, the service is trying to make the supply chain fixes more tangible to its warfighting communities.

Under a new 2.0 version of Naval Sustainment System-Supply, the Navy is moving to a more explicit focus on improving the readiness of its aviation, surface and submarine fleets — trying to ensure supply problems aren’t contributing to downtime, as they currently are.

The first waves of NSS-Supply were focused mainly on putting dollar valuations around the cost of readiness — so the Navy could figure out ways to deliver more within a limited budget. The change in emphasis is meant to make more of the value of process improvements clearer to the Navy’s operational communities.

“We’re not having to make that leap to explain to them, ‘Commercial industry does it this way, they’re more lean, they’re more efficient, and then translate that into what it means for their readiness North Star,” Melissa Olson, the deputy director of NSS-Supply at Naval Supply Systems Command said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “We’re just going right to the root causes — the diagnostics of what’s holding up their [goals of] 75 mission capable ships or their 80% ready submarines. From a materials or supply chain perspective, we are the ‘get better’ side of that data analysis. We can just say, ‘This is your gap analysis, this is where our root causes are, and we’re leaning into those for supply.”

Symptoms vs. root causes in Navy supply chain

So far, the overall effort has tacked 30 distinct supply problems in seven “waves” of initiatives. Under the first wave of the 2.0 version — Wave 8 — the Navy is building on some of what it’s learned so far.

For example, in some of the earlier waves, NAVSUP was able to identify how often ships waiting for maintenance were delayed mainly on account of unfilled parts orders. But that iteration of NSS-S also pointed to those unfilled orders as merely symptoms of more systemic “upstream” problems, like failing to forecast or “allowance” the parts a ship is likely to need in its next maintenance period, said Cmdr. Kirk Engler, the director of NSS-S.

“As a Navy, we have not been very disciplined in those modeling efforts. For instance, until recently, the Aegis SPY radar system had not been remodeled in over 12 years,” he said. “When you rerun the model, you take into account updated failure rates, updated demand rates, updated repair rates, all of the things that are taken into account when you look at a systems operational availability. That’s mean time, between failure, mean time, between repair, mean logistics downtime, all those factors really go into how confident we can be that the system is online. So when we started saying there’s a problem with modeling, we can start to see in the future how that remodeling effort is going to improve downstream allowances onboard the ships. For an older model, we’ll have exactly the parts that they need on board, versus when maybe the system was brand new, and we didn’t know how often the parts would fail or how long it would take to get a new part on board.”

Raising sustainment issues to senior leaders

Officials said the radar system parts availability problems are just one instance in which what might, on its face, look like a pure supply chain problem, is actually much more multifaceted. So another big focus of NSS-Supply, from the beginning, has been to raise issues to the flag officer level across the Navy’s systems commands and in the Pentagon.

Another similar example: the effort helped reveal that the Navy’s Virginia Class submarine program could see big readiness gains if there were a bill of materials for each ship — rather than a BOM for the class as a whole — letting officials forecast supply needs for each vessel’s maintenance periods before they reach drydock.

“That has really allowed us to stop blaming other organizations and get at the problem,” Rear Adm. Jason Lloyd, the deputy commander for ship design, integration and engineering at Naval Sea Systems Command said at the Navy League’s Sea Air Space conference earlier this month. “It also lets us put that bill up before Congress to get the authorization to buy the material that we need to shore up the supply system. Without this teaming that lets us question each other — instead of pointing fingers of blame — I don’t think we would have gotten to where we are.”

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The Navy’s Program Executive Office for Manpower, Logistics and Business Solutions is iteratively building out a customer experience approach to better serve sailors and Marines.

PEO MLB delivers a range of enterprise business applications and services to the Navy and Marine Corps. Petra Alfred, director of customer experience at PEO MLB, said her team is in the early days of rolling out a voice of the customer capability across the organization.

“Our priority is to ensure that all systems that we manage at PEO MLB are considering the user or the customer in their design, in their development, in their sustainment,” Alfred said during the Federal News Network’s CX Exchange 2024. “And in order to do that, we have to roll it out to the different portfolios that manage the systems.”

The PEO established its Voice of the Customer (VoC) Program last year. And last June, the White House Office of Management and Budget granted VoC survey approval, allowing Alfred’s team to ask a standard set of CX questions without needing to go through lengthy paperwork approvals.

Alfred said the program is in its infancy but gaining traction.

“The first initiative needs to always be educating and informing,” she said. “You’re trying to shift a culture. But that doesn’t happen overnight.”

CX ‘pulse survey’

The VoC capability has some early adopters in the PEO. Alfred’s team is now running a pulse survey of 15,000 Navy personnel who use systems managed by PEO MLB.

“People want to speak, and they’re able to tell you for those systems that they frequently use, what has your experience been? What are these top issues?” she explained. “How are you accessing the system? So that we can begin to get an understanding of the baseline and the lay of the land. Because that’s how we should be focusing resources. There may be a program that’s already doing a great deal of human-centered design and human factors. And we want to leverage those best practices to then share with other areas of the organization.”

CX working group within PEO MLB

Alfred said PEO MLB has also established a CX working group. It meets bi-weekly to discuss success stories, challenges, and other ways to help spread CX across the organization.

“That’s where we can share across the different portfolios. That’s where we can give people guidance if they’re just getting started,” she said. “We’ve been developing templates, determining what are those key metrics that we want to capture for customer experience and user experience across the portfolios. Some of that has been slow. But I think it’s slow for a reason because we want to be sure that we do it right. And we want to roll it out appropriately and ensure that we’re doing it with those industry best practices and science behind it.”

One area Alfred is keen on understanding is how the PEO should allocate resources toward CX. She pointed out that some program offices may not have a billet dedicated toward customer or user experience.

“The data will speak to us,” she said. “But I don’t think we have enough data yet to figure out what those lessons are.”

But more data is coming, from the pulse survey and other CX tools that are slowly spreading across the organization. And Alfred said it will be important for the organization to use artificial intelligence and other technologies to harness that data.

“You need to ask the users of your system, and they are not shy, they will tell you exactly what’s working and what’s not working,” Alfred said. “We just have to learn how to use the technology, so that we’re not overburdened with all of this data. The tools are where we can leverage automation and those analysis capabilities. How do we look at all this text and come up with themes and word clouds? How do we use statistics to analyze the data? Some of these things we’re still exploring.”

Discover more customer experience tactics and takeaways from Federal News Network’s CX Exchange 2024 now.

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For nearly a decade, the Army has not been able to hit its recruitment targets. 2024, however, could mark a turning point in the service’s recruitment efforts. 

The Air Force missed its recruiting goals for the first time since 1999 last year. But Air Force officials are “cautiously optimistic” that the service is on track to hit its active duty and reserve recruitment targets.

The Navy, however, is projected to miss its goals by 6,700 recruits in 2024—marking the second year in a row the service will not be able to attract enough sailors.

And while 2024 is shaping up to be a better year for the services, this mixed recruitment picture highlights the complex and multifaceted challenges the military continues to face. A strong labor market, general lack of awareness about military service, restricted access to schools in the post-pandemic world and growing distrust in public institutions have “turned into a perfect storm,” Alex Wagner, Air Force personnel boss, said in December. 

The Army wants to bring in 55,000 new recruits by the end of 2024. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said she is “feeling a lot better” about recruiting this year.

“I don’t want to be overconfident but I think we feel that we have a good shot at making that goal this year,” Wormuth told lawmakers during a congressional hearing on Tuesday.

Wormuth said the service is doing better this year partly due to the success of its future soldier prep course, a program that helps new recruits meet military standards and go into basic training. Since 2022, the program has graduated about 18,000 soldiers with a 95% success rate.

“There’s an academic track for young people who haven’t quite scored high enough on the test that we use. And then there’s a physical track if you’re not quite within the body fat standards – young people can take one or the other. We now have expanded it and they can take them in parallel. They often are going into basic training and taking on leadership roles in basic training. So it’s been very successful so far,” Wormuth told lawmakers during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.

The service is now conducting a study that tracks future soldier prep course graduates as they transition to their first duty station and receive their first assignments to see how they perform. 

The Army is also transforming the way it runs its recruitment offices. The service is in the middle of standing up an innovation directorate that will be part of the Army Recruiting Command.

The new unit will help develop a pipeline of specialized recruiters and integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into recruitment. 

“They’re helping us look at what we would call the recruiting station of the future. We really think we need to fundamentally relook everything from the storefronts to how our recruiting stations operate,” said Wormuth.

Still, the Army set a lower goal for itself this year. In 2023, the goal was to bring in 65,000 new soldiers. Earlier this year, the service decided to bring down its authorized troop levels to 470,000 soldiers by 2029 from 494,000 soldiers due to its transition from counterinsurgency missions to large-scale combat operations.

The Air Force is also projected to meet its recruiting goals this year. The service wants to bring in 26,000 active duty airmen this year. In response to a decline in retention rates this year, the service recently increased its recruiting goal by 1,200.

“We’re actually doing very well this year. The Air Force is on track at this point to essentially meet its goals. In fact, we’re looking at revising the goals up slightly. The Reserves are doing well. Also, the Guard has improved their performance over last year, but it’s not quite meeting their targets,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall told lawmakers last week.

Lt. Gen. Caroline Miller, Air Force deputy chief of staff for manpower, personnel and services, told lawmakers they are “cautiously optimistic we will meet fiscal 2024 recruiting goals due to modification of our policies.” The service adjusted its internal requirements, including its tattoo policies, body composition and drug testing requirements. Additionally, to expand its recruitment pool, the service now allows legal permanent residents to enlist.

At the same time, the Navy is “aggressively pursuing” 40,600 new recruits this year but will most likely miss the goal.

“We continue to face challenges in the current and forecasted economic environment and tough labor market, resulting in projected recruiting shortfalls in the coming years,” Vice Adm. Rick Cheeseman, the chief of naval personnel, told lawmakers in a statement. 

The Navy has also introduced a series of reforms to attract new sailors. Earlier this year, the service made a decision to allow recruits without a high school diploma or a General Educational Development to enlist. New recruits can now join as long as they score over 50 on the qualification test.

At the same time, the Marine Corps met its recruitment goals last year and is on track to hit its targets in 2024. But top officials are concerned as the service’s “start pool” of recruits fell well below its usual 50% level.

“This requires Marine recruiters to focus on finding individuals to ship in the near term, impacting their time to physically and mentally prepare for the rigors of the transformation process to Marine. We are working to grow the start pool, but it is a slow and deliberate process,” Lt. Gen. James Glynn, Marine Corps deputy commandant for manpower, told lawmakers. 

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The details of the project and the capabilities it will provide to sailors have been shrouded in secrecy since its inception, but at least three carrier strike groups and numbered fleets already have the capabilities Project Overmatch provides.

“As far as the exact numbers – I won’t talk to that, but it’s more than strike groups. It’s also at fleets and numbered fleets. Certainly afloat and ashore. We continue to be ahead [of schedule],” Rear Adm. Douglas Small, who leads the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, said during the Navy’s Sea Air Space conference on Monday.

Fielding software on existing hardware is the fastest way to move, Small said. So the service is laser-focused on software, whether it’s software-defined networking or software-based battle management aids.

“My biggest ask is just be software-centric. That has been our mantra to just focus on software,” Small said.

“We’re fielding a data fabric that connects across the force. We provide all of those things as a platform. What we need are the applications, not new computers—that just takes longer to install on ships and shore facilities. Focusing on software is our key. We have plenty of contract vehicles to get your software into the brains of sailors tomorrow.”

The Navy uses end-to-end DevSecOps, or the process of integrating security practices throughout the entire software development life cycle, which allows the service to update software “over the air” to ships at sea. The goal is to integrate updates in an agile manner instead of sending ships to the shipyard for upgrades.

“Because we’ve been able to stay agile, we’ve been able to take on new things as they come in and make sure that they get plugged into the architecture,” said Small.

“We have been focused on starting with what we have—bringing some fairly critical but mature technologies to build on what we have. And that’s how you get to fast track and speed. You’re not waiting for the next big thing—you’re delivering based on what you have.”

Small said they have “tremendous” flexibility to integrate new capabilities. “We’ve demonstrated that.”

“You can almost view Overmatch as a platform for getting those types of equipment integrated into, I’ll say, the Navy, but the Joint Force,” he added.

The service is hosting several industry days this year, some of those are conducted with the Air Force. Most industry days require some level of security clearance.

The service requested at least $192 million for Project Overmatch in 2024 and spent about $226 million in 2023. Overall, the Navy is looking to spend $716.7 million on the project over the period of five years.

Project Overmatch is how the Navy contributes to the department-wide initiative to connect all networks known as the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control. The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office recently delivered a minimum viable capability that is “up and running.” The office is currently working on expanding the data integration layer, a crucial step to delivering CJADC2.

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It is an old story, but new versions keep happening. A high-level military official negotiates with a contractor. He seeks employment, leaves the government, and joins the contractor. He may not have a conflict of interest, but if it looks like he does, that’s trouble. The Federal Drive with Tom Temin discusses this potential problem with Zach Prince, a procurement attorney with Haynes and Boone, LLP.

Interview Transcript:  

Tom Temin Zach, tell us about the most recent decision resulted from protest, but a company was left out of a competition because of that appearance. What happened? Yeah.

Zach Prince So this is a procurement involving, dual band decoy system, which is intended to be, mitigation system for radar guided missiles that are targeting military aircraft and specifically the F-18. So right now, that you’ve got missiles that use two bands of radar to track aircraft, it’s very challenging to have effective countermeasures for them. So, the Navy is trying to develop and then implement a replacement for their current solution. So, they had two rounds of this and they’re going to have multiple iterations of the program. The first was a technical demonstration type portion that started a few years ago and followed on with an engineering, manufacturing and design phase and phase. Now, ultimately, it’ll go into, you know, low rate and full rate production. BAE and Raytheon were both recipients of the contract for the demonstration of the existing technologies. As part of this, at some point between that portion and the next portion, Raytheon started discussing employment with a Navy employee, longtime mathematician and technical expert with the Navy, with Navy Air, specifically who was running this program. And he left and joined Raytheon and then began representing Raytheon back to the government as a concern. This program had something to do with their response to the Navy’s request for information for the second round, some disputed amount of involvement for the submission of the proposal for the second round. And at some point the Navy realized, hey, this at least has a bad smell to it, and started doing a pretty thorough investigation.

Tom Temin Right? So, this fellow VK had participated in all of the work on the Navy’s behalf for the first phase of this long-term program, and while he was negotiating and dealing with Raytheon, he was also trying to get a job there, basically, and got the job. And now they’re into the dealing with the Navy for the follow on.

Zach Prince Yeah, to be fair, it wasn’t as egregious as I think. We all remember the tanker case from back in the early 2000 with the Air Force and Boeing. This guy VK was not actually negotiating for the government. He was doing some very technical work making recommendations on the technical implementation of the program. He wasn’t deciding solutions, but he did have access to proprietary information. And he had signed an NDA with the Navy expressly saying that he wouldn’t work for anybody who was part of this program.

Tom Temin Okay, so if it’s a very wide gray area, he was at one edge of it, let’s say, and a contracting officer decided to pull on that thread.

Zach Prince Yeah, he did. And somebody from the government raised the issue internally. The Navy did exactly what they’re supposed to do. They did a very thorough, extensive, monthslong investigation where they spoke to a number of people in the Navy. They gave Raytheon multiple opportunities to offer, comment and respond. And ultimately, they concluded that the appearance of impropriety here, they didn’t say there was necessarily impropriety, although it was really close, but at least the appearance was enough that they felt they had to exclude Raytheon from the competition.

Tom Temin And therefore I imagine Raytheon said, nope, we protest.

Zach Prince That’s right. I mean, it’s an important program. And the initial award, the MD phase, I think it was maybe $50 million. So, it’s not huge. But I think long term this is going to be multiple hundreds of millions of dollars not to get into full rate production or more. So, this is an important project for them. They protested to GAO and lost. Because the agency has a lot of discretion in these types of determinations. And then they filed that on to the court.

Tom Temin Right. And what happened at the court level?

Zach Prince They lost again, they had some pretty extensive briefing, some interesting arguments raised about why the mere appearance of impropriety without real hard facts that taint the procurement is not enough. But ultimately, their arguments tried to sideline some pretty clear Federal Circuit case law and the consistent decisions of the Court of Federal Claims, which really uphold the decisions of the contracting officer on this issue. In fact, Judge Sampson, who wrote this decision, said he did a survey of all the cases that have been decided by the court on this issue, at least since a federal Circuit decision that sort of set the precedent in the early 2000s. And not once has the court overturned the government’s decision on this.

Tom Temin Yeah. You wonder what the motivation of the company, or at least the judgment of the company was. I mean, you can see from an employee standpoint, the industry beckons with compensation packages, you know, in a cushy type of situation. But the company institutionally knows these shoals, especially long serving old line company like Raytheon. I mean, we can only speculate. So right now, then they’re out. Period. The end.

Zach Prince Yeah. That’s right. And my impression from reading these cases, I don’t think Raytheon really knew at all how much in-depth involvement this guy had with the program, and they knew that he was a fairly senior, very technically skilled individual from the Navy office that they have dealings with. And I think the level of expertise in electronic warfare countermeasures, particularly that this guy had, are really unique. So, Raytheon wanted to hire him on. He didn’t tell them that he had involvement with this program. And in fact, he called HR, the record shows like two days after he started with Raytheon and said that his involvement was very, very light in this program. He didn’t tell his ethics people that in the government, when he got his ethics letter, it was pretty clear that he was obfuscating his involvement because he did want to go to the private sector.

Tom Temin Right. So, one of the lessons is you don’t have to be part of the source selection board to get the government and your future employer into trouble.

Zach Prince Yeah. That’s right. If you’re a contractor, don’t let your contracting officer counterparts be blindsided by stuff like this if you possibly can. And maybe they couldn’t have. Here, make sure that you’re coming up with some mitigation strategy as early as you can. And Raytheon, as much as I just said, yeah, they probably didn’t know his full involvement. The record also shows it, BAE sent a letter to Raytheon not long after this guy started saying, hey, we know that you’ve got this guy. We think that there are some major issues with you having had this guy, because he had major exposure to our technical solutions and IP, you know, make sure to be following those government employment restrictions. They didn’t really.

Tom Temin Yeah. It’s almost what happened with the Defense Department more recently with the cloud contract, the Jedi contract that ultimately got sank. And one of the reasons involved there was that someone had worked in the government and ended up at the cloud company, or had been at the cloud company, then at the government, whatever. Not a source selection person necessarily, but an influencer, an adviser deep in there. And somebody ferreted that out and that ultimately helped sink that whole program, which they’ve now replaced with the joint warfare cloud capability. And that one is going and its multiple vendors. So, any other lessons that companies ought to take from this?

Zach Prince Yeah. It’s always such a challenging balancing act because on the one hand, as a company doing business with DoD, you want to have people who understand the inner workings of DoD. On the other hand, there are many situations were hiring just those types of people can create at least the appearance of conflicts, and that’s enough to taint the procurement. If the government is not convinced that there are mitigation mechanisms in place. So, you do want a firewall. People like this off from their former programs as much as possible, set up some ways in advance that you’ve documented for avoiding the appearance of impropriety, because otherwise you could end up in this type of situation precluded from doing work in a major program.

Tom Temin Yeah, sometimes the revolving door leads to a brick wall, you might say.

Zach Prince Good way to frame it.

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