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.

• When it comes to speeding up the Defense Department’s acquisition processes for big weapons systems, things are headed in the wrong direction. That is one of the findings of the Government Accountability Office’s annual assessment of the Pentagon’s major procurements. GAO said on average, DoD’s major acquisition programs are taking 11 years to deliver their first capabilities — about three years longer than planned. The report also found slowdowns in DoD’s so-called “middle tier” of acquisition — a pathway that’s explicitly designed for speed.
  (Weapon Systems Annual Assessment - Government Accountability Office)
• The IRS is taking major strides to wean itself off paper. The IRS estimates more than 94% of individual taxpayers no longer need to send mail to the agency, and that 125 million pieces of correspondence can be submitted digitally each year. For taxpayers who still prefer filing paper tax returns, IRS is working on being able to digitize that paper return. “If you choose to send us the paper, we will process it. But we are ushering in some nice tools with the modernization," said Darnita Trower, the director of emerging programs and initiatives at the IRS. "We don't intend to have people continue keying in tax returns manually. We want to scan and extract that data,” Trower said.
  (IRS hit a ‘big milestone’ to wean itself off paper. What comes next? - Federal News Network)
• A National Science Foundation initiative aims to bring better data to the cyber workforce challenge. The Cybersecurity Workforce Data Initiative is out with a new report explaining how many official labor data sources do not fully account for cybersecurity work. That includes classifications used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Education Department. The initiative’s report recommends marrying up cyber workforce definitions with federal labor databases. And the initiative, led out of the NSF, is now preparing to potentially conduct a survey of the U.S. cyber workforce.
  (NSF initiative aims to bring better data to the cyber workforce challenge - Federal News Network)
• The Senate Armed Services Committee has greenlit a number of AI-related provisions in its version of the 2025 defense policy bill. The committee's version of the bill requires the Defense Department to initiate a pilot program that will assess the use of AI to improve DoD shipyards and manufacturing facilities operations. Lawmakers also want the Defense Department to develop a plan to ensure that the budgeting process for AI programs includes cost estimates for the full lifecycle of data management. The bill would also expand the duties of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Governing Council.
  (Senate lawmakers pushing a number of AI-related provisions - Senate Armed Services Committee)
• Victims of identity theft are waiting nearly two years, on average, for the IRS to give them their tax refunds. In cases where a scammer stole someone’s identify to get that person's refund check, the IRS took about 22 months to complete those cases. The National Taxpayer Advocate said the COVID-19 pandemic drove up wait times when the IRS shut down processing centers. But, so far this year, wait times are not going back down to pre-pandemic levels.
  (Identity theft victims are waiting nearly two years to receive their tax refunds - National Taxpayer Advocate)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency just ran the federal government’s first artificial intelligence tabletop exercises. It involved more than 50 AI experts from government and industry, who convened last week at a Microsoft facility in Reston, Virginia. The exercise simulated a cybersecurity incident on an AI-enabled system. The event will help shape an AI Security Incident Collaboration Playbook being developed by CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative.
  (CISA, JCDC, government and industry partners conduct AI tabletop exercise - CISA)
• Senate lawmakers are seeking to limit funding available for the Defense Department's initiative designed to support cyber operations across the military services. It is known as the Joint Warfighting Cyber Architecture (JCWA). The Senate version of the defense policy bill is looking to restrict funding available for the effort until the commander of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM) provides a comprehensive plan to minimize work on the current JCWA. The Senate Armed Services committee also wants CYBERCOM to create a baseline plan for a more advanced version of JCWA. House and Senate leaders will begin negotiating the defense bill once the Senate clears its final version of the measure.
  (Senate seeks to limit funding for JCWA - Senate Armed Services Committee)
• The Biden Administration is contemplating a new acquisition policy that would clear up some confusion on when contractors have to follow the government’s rigorous cost-accounting standards. The Cost Accounting Standards Board is asking for public feedback on potential rules that would lay out exactly how those standards apply to indefinite delivery contracts. According to the Government Accountability Office, those types of agreements make up about half of federal contract spending, but there are not clear standards on when the cost accounting standards apply to them.
  (Whether and How to Amend CAS Rule - Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Cost Accounting Standards Board)

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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 Army tackled one of its toughest challenges: Creating a common operating picture for all of its allied partners.

The recent Yama Sakura 85 exercise demonstrated how the Army, the Australians and the Japanese could securely share information by using an architecture based on zero trust principles.

Col. Rett Burroughs, the chief information officer & G6 for the Army’s I Corps, said over the course of the 10-to-12 day training event last December, the Army successfully brought their allied leaders onto a single and secured network at the tactical edge.

“What we are looking at is properly being distributed across the entirety of the Pacific. We could have a command and control node anywhere in Australia, Thailand, Philippines, Japan, Korea, Hawaii, Guam or Alaska, and back here at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Washington so that now every node has roles and responsibilities. How do we ensure that conductivity happens across all of those different nodes that are very disparate and spread out? And then how do we leverage the technology of transport to ensure that we’re getting applications all the way to the edge?” Burroughs said on Ask the CIO. “We spent months preparing to ensure we had right safeguards in place. In its simplest form, in the application for the warfighter, which is definitely my area of concern, it brought the Australians and the Japanese together because before it was the Australians and the Americans, and then it was the Americans and the Japanese. The Australians couldn’t be in the same Tactical Operations Center as the Japanese. Now we have the ability for the first Australian division commander to talk directly with senior generals from the Japanese Ground Force Command.”

Burroughs said in previous exercises, the Americans and Australians would talk, and then the Americans and Japanese would talk, with the Army acting as the “go-between” for the Australians and Japanese. And Burroughs readily admits everyone knows what happens when you play the game of telephone.

“Our goal here was to establish one common operating picture and the ability to voice video chat, and share specific information,” he said. “The application of this proved critical in the ability for staff to make informed recommendations, and for commanders to make informed decisions. We weren’t just slinging all this data just because commanders need and want everything.”

Broader application than just the Army

The success of the Yama Sakura 85 exercise proved this shared network and zero trust concept for more than just the Army, but any federal organization can take the basic concepts to create a common operating picture.

John Sahlin, the vice president of cyber solutions for General Dynamics-IT, which supported the Army with integration expertise, said these same approaches could help agencies such as FEMA, which has to create shared networks to help cities or states recover from disasters.

“I’ve been fascinated by this problem set ever since I deployed for the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts back about 15 years ago. We started thinking about a military mission for that humanitarian assistance effort and it turned very quickly into an interagency and even local government support mission,” Sahlin said. “We had good communications. We had a good sight picture. We had good mapping data, which nobody else in the area did. We had to quickly share that data with first responders, the local hospital, the parish sheriff, non-government organizations like the Red Cross. I think that these are lessons of zero trust at the tactical edge for information sharing to inform that on scene commander, are lessons that can be learned, not only for the military at the tactical edge, but for any organization that has field-deployed, forward-deployed organizations that need to share data to execute a mission rapidly and make those changes dynamically with first responders with interagency support, things like that.”

Burroughs added this approach of creating a distributed network supported by zero trust tools isn’t just important for the tactical edge, but for Army commanders in garrison or commands who have to coordinate with the National Guard or local first responder communities or anyone outside of the service.

“Now we don’t have to have these disparate networks that do not talk to each other because of classification and policy, which you clearly went through during the Katrina catastrophe,” he said. “Now what we’re doing is we’re taking need to figure this out on the fly out during a catastrophe. We’re actually getting ahead of it now by addressing it before the next catastrophe. So when something does come in competition or crisis, we’re actually able to deal with it in a methodical way instead of reacting.”

Shift toward data-centricity

In many ways what Burroughs and Sahlin are describing is how the Army, and really every agency, must be more of a data-centric organization.

Lt. Col. Roberto Nunez, the chief of signal services support for Army I Corps, said the implementation of zero trust capabilities forces the end users to shift that data culture because they have to tag and label information much more specifically and consistently.

“You can say ‘all right, here’s all my data that I want to share, all my users that are also tagged and labeled as well as what they’re authorized to use and what they cannot use. Therefore, you can plug in with other mission partners to share that information and you can create that common environment moving forward, whether it’s joint coalition, at least from a DoD point of view,” he said. “If you want third parties to join in, whether it’s corporate America, academics, other organizations or other government agencies, you can do that if everything’s data-centric, labeled and tagged accordingly. This is what is great about zero trust.”

Burroughs said planning for the next Yama Sakura 87 exercise in December already is underway. But he said these capabilities aren’t turned on during the exercise and then turned off. The network is always on and therefore the Army is always iterating how to make secure information sharing better, faster and easier.

Chief Warrant Officer 4 Phil Dieppa, a senior services engineer for Army I Corps, said what the Yama Sakura 87 exercise and other demonstrations have shown the service that the “come as you are” model works because of the zero trust capabilities.

“The great thing about zero trust is that we don’t trust anything until we explicitly have that conversation and say that ‘I trust you.’ Once we do that, then we can start communicating and making those services available one at a time,” he said.

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Vice Adm. Carl Chebi, head of U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, which has responsibility for the aircraft military-wide, told lawmakers at a House oversight hearing into a series of recent crashes that it will be at least another six to nine months before the command will be able to complete all of the safety and performance assessments for the Osprey.

Over the lifespan of the program, Chebi said a total of 64 service members have been killed in air and ground accidents, and 93 have been injured. In the last two years, four separate crashes killed a total of 20 service members, and two of those crashes involved catastrophic materiel or mechanical failures the program had not experienced before.

Following a November crash off the coast of Japan that killed eight service members, the fleet was grounded for months. The Ospreys started flying again in a very limited format in March and do not perform the full range of missions, including carrier operations, that the aircraft was made to carry out.

In use since only 2007, the Osprey can fly like an airplane and land like a helicopter. Critics say its innovative design has systemic flaws that are driving the unexpected failures.

One of the reasons for the extension of restricted flight: The military is still working to fix a clutch failure that was identified as one of the primary factors in a June 2022 crash that killed five Marines in California.

The clutch component, like many other parts of the aircraft, has been wearing out far faster than expected. This led to an unprecedented dual hard clutch engagement in the 2022 crash, creating a situation in which the pilots had no way to save the aircraft.

The military has not yet said what exact part failed in the November crash, but Chebi told the panel Wednesday that the cause was something “we’d never seen before.”

Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, told Chebi to reground the entire fleet until all safety issues were fixed.

“What do you think the consequences will be if we have another V-22 go down and we lose more brave Marines or Airmen between now and the time?” Lynch said. “Your whole program’s done. It’s done. If another Osprey goes down, we’re done. This program’s done. So why don’t we ground this now?”

Families of service members killed in Osprey accidents sat behind Chebi as he testified. Each held a photograph of their family member killed, and after the hearing, he stayed to listen as they told him their concerns.

“We’re afraid that they’re aging out, and now we are having all these crashes,” said Bart Collart, whose son Marine Corps Cpl. Spencer Collart was killed in a 2023 Osprey crash off the coast of Australia.

The committee is looking into whether the program has adequate oversight, but to date, it has not received the data and documents it has requested, members said at the hearing.

Among the information that the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs has requested but has yet to receive is the wear and replacement rates on Osprey proprotor gearboxes, a component that was a factor in the crash off Japan.

Committee members also have asked for internal crash reports that the military conducts with surviving air and ground crews and witnesses. The reports aren’t available to the public and cannot be used to punish a crew — they are in place to identify and quickly share any safety issues among the fleet.

To date, the staffers said they had received about 3,500 pages of documents, but information was redacted, leaving them unable to conduct oversight. The committee staffers spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

The staffers said the documents they have reviewed left them concerned about whether Pentagon leadership has maintained a close watch on the Osprey program. Some of the problems with the aircraft date back a decade or more but still haven’t been fixed.

After mechanical and material failures led to the 2022 Osprey crash in California, the military said it had instituted changes to prevent the issue from happening again.

“However, the recent fatal crash and ongoing investigations suggest that more transparency and rigorous testing is needed to verify these claims,” Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the committee, said in a statement to the AP ahead of the hearing.

The Marine Corps is planning on using the Osprey through 2050, while Air Force Special Operations Command has already begun to talk publicly about finding another type of aircraft to conduct missions.

Osprey producers Bell Flight, the Boeing Co. and Rolls-Royce, which supplies the engines, are facing a new lawsuit from families of the five Marines killed in the 2022 California crash. The lawsuit alleges that the companies did not address known parts failures or safety issues that were a factor in the crash.

Boeing and Bell have declined to comment, citing the ongoing litigation.

The staffers say the Pentagon has not provided details on what the restrictions are as the aircraft returns to operations.

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The Non-classified Internet Protocol Generative Pre-training Transformer, or NIPRGPT, is part of the Dark Saber software platform, an ecosystem where airmen experiment, develop and deploy their own applications and capabilities.

The platform is not the end tool or the final solution, said Air Force officials, but rather a testing ground that will allow the service to better understand practical applications of generative AI, run experiments, take note of problems and gather feedback.

The Air Force Research Laboratory, which developed the tool, used publicly available AI models, so the service has yet to commit to a particular vendor. But as commercial AI tools become available, the platform will help the service to better gauge the best approach to buying those tools.

“We’re not committing to any single model or tech vendor — it is too early in the process for that. However, we are leveraging this effort to inform future policy, acquisition and investment decisions,” Chandra Donelson, the Air Force’s acting chief data and artificial intelligence officer, told reporters on Monday.

“We aim to partner with the best models from government, industry and academia to identify which models perform better on our specific tasks, domains, as well as use cases to meet the needs of tomorrow’s warfighter.”

While NIPRGPT is only available on unclassified networks, the service is considering expanding it to higher classification levels depending on demand and interest from airmen and guardians.

“The research will absolutely follow demand. We have already had people signal that there’s interest there working with different and appropriate groups. I think that’s why starting intentionally and clearly so we can learn any of those guardrails but, as you can imagine, people want relationships with knowledge at all levels. And so that has absolutely been considered,” said Air Force Research Lab Chief Information Officer Alexis Bonnel.

As uses of generative AI have exploded in the commercial sector, the Defense Department has been carefully exploring how it can leverage the technology to improve intelligence, operational planning, administrative, business processes and tactical operations. The Pentagon’s Task Force Lima, for example, is evaluating a wide range of use cases and working to synchronize and employ generative AI capabilities across the military services.

In the interim, the Air Force’s office of the chief information officer along with the chief data and artificial intelligence office recently wrapped up a series of roundtables with industry and academia where they explored the potential applications and best practices for adopting GenAI across the service. Air Force CIO Venice Goodwine said the roundtables showed how fast the field of generative AI is growing.

“Now is the time to give our airmen and Guardians the flexibility to develop the necessary skills in parallel. There are multiple modernization efforts going on right now across the federal government and within the DAF to get tools in the hands of the workforce. This tool is another one of those efforts,” said Goodwine.

The post Air Force unveils new generative AI platform first appeared on Federal News Network.

It’s now on the House floor and forming in the Senate committee: The National Defense Authorization Act for 2025. This week, though, will also bring some important matters forward, like the congressional baseball game. For an update on military defense and national-pastime offense,  the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke with Bloomberg Government Deputy News Director Loren Duggan.

Interview Transcript:  

Tom Temin
It’s now on the House floor and forming in the Senate Committee, the National Defense Authorization Act for 2025. That is, this week though we’ll also bring some important matters forward like the congressional baseball game, an update now from Bloomberg Government, Deputy news director, Loren Duggan. And the NDAA is kind of leapfrogging through the House and Senate to the house maybe a little bit ahead. What’s the latest?

Loren Duggan
Yeah, we’re going to see a vote this week on the House floor on that legislation, pretty sweeping. And one of the must pass bills this year, where not a lot is likely to get done. This is one of the bright spots, usually, where no one wants to be the armed services chairman who doesn’t get the job done. So what we’ll see this week is probably a lengthy debate on the House floor with a lot of amendments, I think more than 1300 were submitted by Friday to weigh by the Rules Committee and potentially debate on the floor. But it’s wide ranging, of course, obviously sets defense policy and how much later they will provide through the appropriations bills, but also a number of policy issues at the Pentagon and abroad, which could be one of the sticking points, obviously.

Tom Temin
What are some of the top policy issues that are outside of pure defense authorization?

Loren Duggan
Well, always Ukraine will come into play and whether there will be amendments around that and what to do. Obviously, we had the lengthy debate earlier this year about how much to fund and what conditions to put on it. But anytime a bill like this comes up, that’s a natural place to look for that. There’s also a lot in here for the Defense Department about improving the quality of life for service members, whether it’s a pay boost for younger troops, or are trying to find ways to attract more people into the military. That’s been one of the focuses. And it’s actually in the title of the bill, about quality of life there. And some diversity issues have come up as well, that’s been a sticking point in a lot of the bills with House Republicans in particular, looking to curtail DEI programs, things like that. And because the Defense Department has its own schools, there’s definitely a nexus there. So we’ll be looking there and just what other things may hit you right as it moves forward.

Tom Temin
Sure. And then on the Senate side, there’s just because of everything else going on in the two parties, is likely to be different, leading eventually to some tough reconciliation.

Loren Duggan
There could be. It’s worth noting that despite the partisanship in the house, the committee there approved the 57-1, with only one Democratic vote against it, that could change as the bill gets loaded up with different provisions. We’ll be looking for that final passage vote for that indication of how it can be reconciled with the Senate, where often the starting position in the Senate is a little more bipartisan, just because that’s the only way to get a bill across the floor. Much of the work in the Armed Services Committee has a secret, they do it behind closed doors, and then tell us when they’re done. So we’ll be looking to see what they’ve agreed upon as they work through that bill over the course of the week.

Tom Temin
And we did see a slice of the houses version of regular appropriations for 2025. And for the sliver of government that they have in general government work, there is significant cuts, again, proposed from the House side, is that likely what we’re going to see in the large agency appropriations work? And will that be coming out any of it this week?

Loren Duggan
Yeah, we’ll be seeing more there. So the House passed one bill last week for military construction projects, a small sliver of what DoD gets plus the Veterans Affairs Department. Veterans Affairs, there are some increases there, which is the usual, but as we get more bills that are more in the true domestic agencies will likely be seeing more cuts, as we did with Bill funding the IRS where I think there was a $2 billion cut. And as we see the bills covering the Ag department, and eventually when we get to the Labor HHS Education bill, which is all domestic, that’s where if you’re going to meet this top line number of reduction, there’s probably going to be a lot of chunks there. So we’re planning to see I think six bills move through either subcommittee or full committee over the course of this week. So a lot of action to come there in the house. Their goal is to get them all out of committee by July 10. Pretty tight, but we’ve seen them make a lot of progress so far.

Tom Temin
And they’re around yet for another few weeks, right until the July 4 break?

Loren Duggan
Well next week is going to be a little broken up because of the Juneteenth holiday. I think the Senate might be coming in around that, and the House might be actually out of town so that people can be back in their districts for that. But it is kind of a choppy summer as we saw last week. It was a short week because of D-Day. There’s a lot on the agenda between world events and conventions coming up later in the summer.

Tom Temin
We’re speaking with Loren Dugan, deputy news director at Bloomberg Government. And then speaking of broken up week, they do have, it’s not a bipartisan event. It’s partisan versus partisan, but maybe not quite as Ill themed and that’s the baseball game.

Loren Duggan
Yeah, they band together in a different way where the Republicans and the Democrats will take the field at Nationals Park for this annual event. It’s pretty sacred on the calendar for them to keep that and try to clear floor votes to allow it. We actually saw one subcommittee hearing for one of the appropriations bills moved two weeks into the future to make sure that everybody could get to the game who wants to go. And even if the members aren’t playing, they usually come and sit in the audience or take part in that and it’s kind of a fun little DC tradition that I always tell my interns from out of town. We’re swinging by if you want to see kind of a little slice of DC life.

Tom Temin
And there’s a few members that actually have some baseball chops?

Loren Duggan
Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s people who either played in college or whatever. I don’t think there’s as many pros as in the past when Jim Bunting was in the Senate or something like that. But some people are really good and take it very seriously with practice and trying to keep their record going, and get as many strikeouts or hits as they can. So people take it very seriously.

Tom Temin
And getting back to more serious business, the Senate has some FERC nominees. And that’s a big deal, because obscure as FERC is, it does have a new multi 1000 page rule out there that completely changes governance and regulation of the grid. And so those nominations matter.

Loren Duggan
Absolutely. And it’s a commission that’s a five member commission with a mix of Democrats and Republicans. The folks coming in here now our were approved last week by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee with a pretty solid support. So we’ll see if they can all get over the line in the Senate this week that would fill the void and make sure that it’s got all the members that needs to do the kind of work you were talking about, but kind of odd to see all three back to back to back like that in one week. But they’re moving quickly to try to get that done as soon as possible.

Tom Temin
Right electric car charging, subsidized by one state to another is at stake here. But the vote on those nominees from the committee wasn’t totally party line.

Loren Duggan
No it wasn’t. There was one senator, I think Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who voted against all three. And he said he was disappointed in some of the answers they’ve given. But there could be some at least bipartisanship here, when they have the votes.

Tom Temin
All right. And then the other place that is having some problems, FDIC, the workplace culture, interestingly, the Chairman said he would resign when there’s a successor, which means he’ll be here for the rest of the Biden administration. What’s going on a hearing coming up?

Loren Duggan
The House Financial Services Committee is digging into that. And they say they’re looking at both the failed leadership and the workplace culture. And as you noted, it does get pretty low marks. I think it was 25 out of 26 in a recent survey, and there’s some concerns about how harassment claims have been handled. So a lot to talk about there. And there are definitely people who would like to see Greenberg go sooner. And he lost support among Democrats, which is I think what pushed this forward different Committee, the Senate Banking Committee, where Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio.) is the democratic chair there and up for re election and a pretty tight race was one of the people to come out against him and say he needs to go. So I think this is an agency that will have a lot of discussion around and this will be a concentrated look at the issues there.

Tom Temin
And there’s also a vote on IVF legislation. And that has something to say about the federal employee health benefits plan.

Loren Duggan
Right. This is the second bill in two weeks that Senate Democrats are trying to push. They’re more messaging because the dynamics been there likely won’t get across the finish line. But this one is about IVF coverage, including requiring carriers and the FEHBP to offer IVF services as part of this broader guarantee of access to IVF services.

The post Good Ship NDAA maneuvers steadily through congressional shoals first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Marine Corps celebrated a much sought after milestone in February: obtaining an unmodified audit opinion for fiscal 2023.

This two-year effort proved that the corps’ 2023 financial statements “present a true and fair reflection of the Marine Corps’ financial information,” which is about $46 billion in total assets.

While audits say there still are seven areas where the Marines still need to improve, Greg Koval, the assistant deputy commandant for resources for the Marine Corps, said this historic feat means, for maybe the first time ever, they can provide accountability, transparency and validity for their spending.

“It gives us transparencies into the cost of production, and in the future, it means the tracking of the cost of maintenance for many of our weapons system platforms,” Koval said on the discussion Marine Corps Milestone: Unqualified Audit Insight. “What it does over time is allow us to really plan, program, budget, execute better and identify those programs, where maybe they cost a little bit more, a little bit less, get those funds to the right place more timely so that we’re better able to execute and give the warfighter what they need to execute the mission. Ultimately on the financial side, we’re here to support them, help them and give them everything they need. So when they deploy, they’ve got the best solution, the best weapons systems they can have at that point in time.”

Like most of the Defense Department, the Marine Corps has been under pressure from Capitol Hill for decades to achieve a clean audit and has been putting more significant resources and focus on the challenges since 2017.

Marines new general ledger system

The Marines came close previously to a clean audit before the 2023 opinion. For example in 2012, the Marines thought it had achieved a “favorable opinion,” only for the DoD inspector general to reverse that decision in 2015.

DoD, as a whole, is targeting fiscal 2028 to achieve a clean financial opinion.

The Marines success demonstrates that it is possible for the largest organizations in DoD to successfully align their data, systems and processes to achieve this goal.

“At the beginning of this journey, we moved to a new general ledger. We had what we called SABRS, which was known and loved across the Marine Corps for over three decades. We took everybody off of that accounting system and moved into this new modern enterprise resources planning (ERP) system, which had its set of challenges. We basically adopted a system that smaller DoD components used, and some of our business processes were new to the system, new to the process, so there was a huge learning curve there,” Koval said. “That learning curve didn’t just impact the financial folks, but they impacted supply and procurement. There were times where we were working hard to pay vendors on time because the system wasn’t working as our old system did. But I think it really brought some additional discipline and internal controls to the financial processes that ultimately helped us understand some of our procurement and logistic processes a little bit better. It really kind of opened our aperture on some of the costs that we were incurring, who we were paying, and it gave us that additional transparency and visibility into the data.”

That major shift in the way the Corps did business, Koval said, really kicked the entire effort into gear by providing the financial team with the agility needed to understand and improve its data.

For any agency or large organization, the big data challenge can be daunting, said Joe Nave, principal federal finance transformation lead for KPMG, which helped the Marines achieve the clean audit opinion.

Analyze and assess risks

“You had to sift through the business processes across the board for geographically dispersed organizations such as the Marine Corps. You look at all of the integration across the rest of the DoD and the different partners outside of the spectrum that the Marine Corps has operational control over, and you start to look at how complex and complicated those processes can really be. From our perspective, it was helping them analyze, assess risk, boil down a couple of them and get the activities that we really needed to accomplish down to a finite list, where we could really focus our efforts and help them move some of these big rocks associated with the material weaknesses and audit deficiencies,” Nave said. “I think over time, you look at the way that the workforce is structured and having to do 100% of the day job, and then you add in some of these audit priorities and you add in some of the samples, we’ve really had to look at ways to modernize and automate those processes to help facilitate quicker reviews, quick requests, quality control ease, and make sure that we’re set up for success and able to respond efficiently and effectively to the audit.”

Nave said moving to the new ERP accounting system played a significant role in helping the Corps adapt processes and procedures as the needs change during the modernization process.

“I like dash boarding as a way to make sure that our clients have the insight that they need to see in real-time where progress is being made, and where progress is being made against those discrete buckets [of goals],” he said. “Then usually, we like tiger teams to assess progress against that. These small, mobile, tactical units, if you will, are going out and solving these problems with brute force, and then focusing on the sustainment of that. That really gets us to our end goal of a modified opinion and being able to continue that modified opinion, year in and year out, layering in that automation and modernization to those tiger team efforts.”

Auditors say the Marines still had seven material weaknesses to resolve.

Koval said a lot of those were on the property side and the need to better integrate data from disparate systems.

“What the audit did for us was really bring those organizations closer together. It broke down a lot of the walls and communications in the way that we work with each other,” he said. “Now, supply, logistics, procurement and accounting all have a better understanding of what we do, how we impact each other and what needs to change to make the organization more efficient, effective and to save costs, frankly, going forward.”

Going forward, among the Marines’ goals are to continue to build upon the previous two-year effort to further integrate processes and systems to make them a more efficient organization.

Nave said the Marine Corps now are set up for long term sustainment because of the process and procedural changes they’ve made and for audit response overall.

The key lessons learned from the Marines’ experience that other military services and organizations can heed, Nave said, is adaptability, being comfortable with the plan, and understanding that plans will change over time.

“We really want systems working for us, not against us. We want to make sure that our IT environment is squared away. We want to make sure that all of the interfaces or feeder systems that we have are clearly laid out. And we’ve looked at the complexity of those different processes and made sure that those all make sense,” he said. “So it is really just a rationalization of your portfolio and trying to make the sandbox smaller. First make sure everything’s in the sandbox, and then what can you do to make it smaller? Then I think leadership must set the tone from the top, cascading that information down and emphasizing the importance. Whether it’s an audit or any other objective you’re trying to accomplish, having that buy-in and tone from the top has been critical.”

The post The team effort that led to the Marines’ clean audit triumph first appeared on Federal News Network.

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.

The post How portfolio management is helping the Navy divest old tech, invest in new first appeared on Federal News Network.

• The Defense Innovation Unit and the Army are joining forces to ramp up the service’s nuclear power capabilities. The Army is looking to develop and test a prototype of a nuclear reactor as part of the service’s push to bring nuclear energy to its installations. The service is heavily dependent on off-site electricity providers to obtain energy and conduct its missions. If successful, these micro-reactor power plants could be operational by 2030. The Army’s effort along with the Air Force’s microreactor pilot are paving the way for deployments of nuclear power technology across military installations.
  (Army seeking to develop nuclear reactor prototype - Defense Innovation Unit)
• Former senior government officials are joining the growing calls against Schedule F. The former officials from the Bush administration said civil service reform is necessary, as is holding federal employees accountable. But they said Schedule F is not the answer. The now-revoked policy from the Trump administration aimed to reclassify feds to make them easier to fire. In a letter to House and Senate leadership this week, the former officials are calling on Congress to pass more protections for government workers in national security and law enforcement. The letter to lawmakers comes in light of former President Trump’s plans to revive a policy akin to Schedule F if he’s reelected.
  (Ensuring the accountability of the federal civil service: An urgent call to action - Former Bush administration officials)
• Nurses at the Department of Veterans Affairs are pointing to staffing shortages that are making it harder to treat veterans. The VA employs 122,000 nurses, which is the largest nursing workforce in the U.S. That is also a record high for the department. But the National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC) and National Nurses United (NNU) said the VA is leaving thousands of positions unfilled and spreading nurses thin. Irma Westmoreland is NNU’s vice president and a registered nurse who works at the VA medical center in Augusta, Georgia. She said VA nurses are being assigned more patients, which is contributing to burnout. “We feel that we are chronically understaffed in nursing, and that is erodes the patient care that we’re able to provide for our veterans," Westmoreland said.
  (VA touts its largest nursing workforce, but union says they're 'chronically understaffed' - Federal News Network)
• The Department of Housing and Urban Development has put the help wanted sign out for a new chief information officer. Beth Niblock, who has been CIO since July 2021, transitioned to a new role in May, the senior adviser for disaster management. One reason for the move is Niblock was a political appointee and HUD is moving the CIO's position back to a career job. The CIO job announcement closes June 13. Sairah Ijaz, who has been deputy CIO since March 2023, is the acting CIO until HUD hires a permanent career technology leader.
  (HUD searching for new CIO - USAjobs.gov)
• DoD's chief information officer is stepping down. John Sherman is moving on to a new role at Texas A&M University, where he will serve as dean of the Bush School of Government. Sherman has led the CIO's office since December 2021. Before that, he was the intelligence community's CIO. Defense officials said they still have not decided who will fill the DoD CIO role when Sherman departs at the end of this month.
  (DoD CIO John Sherman to step down at end of June - Federal News Network)
• Starting in August, service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses will no longer be able to self-certify status for set-aside or sole source prime or subcontracts. The Small Business Administration's final rule issued yesterday requires companies to obtain approval through the SBA's Veteran Small Business Certification Program (VetCert). Without this certification, agencies and prime vendors will not receive socio-economic credit for contracting with these firms. Previously, SDVOSBs could self-certify they met the criteria, but Congress changed the requirements in the 2024 Defense authorization bill. The rule becomes effective August 5, but SBA is accepting comments through July 8 and reserves the right to withdraw the rule if it receives enough significant adverse concerns.
  (SBA takes self-certification for service-disabled veteran-owned small businesses mostly off the table - Federal Register)
• Senate Democrats are heightening their push to create better access to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments and medications. New legislation that the lawmakers introduced this week rolls together several previous bills aiming to expand the fertility treatments. Under the bill, there would be increased access to IVF coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits program, as well as coverage for veterans. The new bill comes in light of a growing push from federal employees to offer more fertility-related health benefits. The Senate is slated to vote on the Right to IVF Act next week.
  (Right to IVF Act - Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.))
• The Defense Department is continuing its push to consolidate its purchasing for wireless services. A new memo from the DoD CIO told all DoD components that they will need to use the Navy’s new “Spiral 4” wireless contract vehicle to buy their mobile services for employees in the continental U.S. The Navy awarded seven separate indefinite, delivery indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contracts last month, including to the big three wireless providers. All together, those IDIQs are worth up to $2.7 billion over the next decade.
  (Memorandum for the Senior Pentagon Leadership - DoD)
• The Postal Service is putting the first of its custom-built, next-generation delivery vehicles to work. USPS received its first Next-Generation Delivery Vehicles from the manufacturer Oshkosh Defense. They are the first of about 60,000 custom vehicles USPS will buy over the coming years. Electric vehicles will make up at least 75% of the next-generation fleet. USPS is sending its first round of vehicles to a large facility in Athens, Georgia.
  (First NGDVs delivered to the Postal Service - National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association )
• The Marine Corps has opened a new center to focus on the future of war. The General Robert B. Neller Center for Wargaming and Analysis, named after the 37th Commandant of the Marine Corps, will help the service develop capabilities through experimentation, doctrine and policy review, and science and technology examination. The center will be maintained by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and will feature next-generation technology, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. The center is located on the Marine Corps University campus near Washington, D.C.
  (Marine Corps opens up advanced wargaming center - DVIDS)

The post Army looks to bring nuclear energy to its installations first appeared on Federal News Network.

Maj. Gen. Jeth Rey ended his three-year tenure as the director of the Army’s Network Cross Functional team last week. When he started in 2021, Rey laid out a four-pronged vision to move the Army toward a data-centric environment.

Rey, who moved to a new job at the Pentagon as the director of architecture, operations, networks and space at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, G-6, said the Army has made tremendous progress to become a data-centric organization over the last three years.

“The problem said that we had in the Army, and across DoD, is we didn’t have a data problem, we had a data management problem,” Rey said in an interview at the Army TEMS conference. “Therefore, we tried to find a way to get to data centric using agnostic transport to move the data as freely as possible to where it needs to go, a cloud-enabled asset to catch and move the data, and then, obviously, you needed a layered security architecture. We wanted a multi-level security architecture where we can move the data from one classification to another seamlessly.”

Brig. Gen. Patrick Ellis, the former deputy chief of staff, G-3 for the Army Europe-Africa took over for Rey in early June.

Under the Network Cross Functional team, Rey’s four pillars were:

• Agnostic transport
• Moving to a data-centric environment from a network-centric environment
• Implementing a multi-level security architecture to include a zero trust architecture
• Ensuring cybersecurity is considered early as part of system development

Rey said he worked closely with Army Program Executive Office Command, Control and Communications Tactical (PEO-C3T) and the Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C5ISR) Center in the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command to take the vision and make it into a reality.

“My role is setting the vision and then keeping the momentum going forward. I would set a timeframe that I would want to see a part of the project achieved, and then I just continue to drive the momentum going forward,” Rey said. “We are the influencers as the Network Cross Functional team to get to the end state and keep people focusing on track.”

Army’s transport is now multi-threaded

The Army demonstrated its progress in advancing these capabilities over the past few years at Project Convergence and NetModX, which is one of their major exercises that is run by the C5ISR.

Rey said one way the Army is better off than it was three years ago is how it processes data across multiple infrastructure approaches.

At one time, the soldiers could only use one type of approach, or single threaded, such as only using Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES).

He said the C5ISR office created an automate planning for primary, alternate, contingency and emergency (PACE) communications plan to create the multiple threaded approach to transport.

“I wanted to see if there was a way to automate pace that we could go from 5G to low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite to GOES to medium Earth orbit (MEO) satellites. I think, three years later, we are almost there as an accomplishment when it comes to that part of our pillar,” Rey said.

A second pillar where Rey believes the Army has made significant progress in is moving to a data-centric environment. He said the advancements in the network architecture is a big part of this change.

“I believe that the way data is being approached today is a little different. I think what we need to think about is the way we create data because today data is stored on your laptop or it’s stored on your phone or it is stored in a data center or it stored in the cloud. It’s still really siloed, and from my perspective, we need more of a in a large data fabric where we can catch and make sense of data by using artificial intelligence and machine learning,” he said. “We need open application programming interfaces (APIs) in order for us to be able to share data. If we get to a point where I’d like down to the attribute base level of data sharing. Until we actually get there, we will continue to have data siloed the way we are today.”

The Army took a big step in this direction in January, starting to implement its unified data reference architecture (UDRA). The service recently completed version 1.0 of the UDRA while also building out an implementation plan of the framework in partnership with the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM).

Keep the momentum going

The Army expects UDRA to bring together principles and efforts for data mesh and data fabric. While data mesh involves a decentralized approach where data product ownership is distributed across teams and domains, the data platform will facilitate seamless access and integration of data products from different formats and locations.

Rey said the concepts that make the data mesh and data fabric work go back to creating a unified network, especially in the tactical environment.

“There are two separate areas that we’re trying to unify together. In the tactical space is where we believe the data fabric is more important for us today because of all the sensors that are on the battlefield and in order to make sense of the information that’s out there,” he said. “That is the catcher’s mitt that needs to ingest the data, use analytics and then egress of data for the commander to make an informed decision across the board. I think we’re we have a lot of momentum right now. We’ve talked about the next generation of command and control systems that’s coming, and that’s going to be an ecosystem that allows us to really have a more robust type of data environment that will move data and echelon.”

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George on May 28 signed off on the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) Capability Characteristics (C2 Next).

Rey said creating data in a way that also foresees wanting to share it remains one of the biggest challenges for the Army.

“The only way you can share it is if we decide what those attributes are going to look like, whether I’m with a partner or whether I’m just dealing with a US entity,” he said. “So, attributes are going to be key with how we tag label the data, and then be an in are able to share it at the end of the onset.”

As for the new director of the Network Cross Functional team Rey said his advice to Ellis was simple: “Don’t allow the momentum to slow down.”

The post Gen. Rey reflects on leading Network Cross Functional team first appeared on Federal News Network.

Sherman has accepted a position as dean at the Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University, the same institution he graduated from in 1992 before becoming an Army air defense officer. He’ll start that position on Aug. 1, the school said in a statement.

“The spirit of service and focus on preparing students for the future they instilled in the school will be our guiding light as we look to the challenges the next generation of leaders will face,” Sherman said. “Liz and I are excited to get back home to College Station and beginning this next chapter in our lives.”

Defense officials did not immediately announce who would succeed Sherman in the DoD CIO role. One likely candidate, at least on an interim basis, would be Leslie Beavers, the office’s current principal deputy.

In a statement, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin credited Sherman with leading the department through several major technology advancements over the past two and a half years, including a restructured cybersecurity approach through DoD’s first-ever zero trust strategy.

“Mr. Sherman has been a steadfast advisor and an innovative leader who has helped the department adopt and utilize modern information technology to keep our country safe,” Austin said. “His technical expertise has proven invaluable in tackling a variety of digital challenges. His focus on mission readiness has ensured that each of the services is equipped with both the capabilities and the digital workforce necessary for modern warfighting.”

Sherman spent most of his federal civilian career in the intelligence community, starting as an imagery analyst. He worked his way up through the IC over the next 20 years, including positions as the CIA’s deputy director for open source intelligence, and eventually as the IC’s chief information officer. He joined DoD as its CIO in December 2021.

At Texas A&M, Sherman will succeed retired Gen. Mark Welsh, a former Air Force chief of staff, as the Bush School’s dean. Welsh now serves as the president of the university.

“When President Bush laid out his vision for the Bush School of Government and Public Service and the importance of preparing new generations of dedicated public servants, he thought of people like John Sherman,” Welsh said. “John is a true public servant, having worked in government service his entire career, including 25-plus years in the U.S. intelligence community. He’s built an incredible professional reputation as a leader in public service and national security, but maybe more importantly, for how he treats others.”

The post DoD CIO John Sherman to step down at end of June first appeared on Federal News Network.

Over the last year, the service conducted multiple studies examining its cyber and electronic warfare resources and capabilities, including the 120-day study conducted by the Cyber Center of Excellence team, followed by a series of classified studies conducted by Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Last month, the service held an EW tabletop exercise at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, where participants, including I Corps, III Corps, XVIII Airborne Corps and Multi-Domain Task Force, among others, examined over 70 different EW capabilities across the service. The goal was to understand how those capabilities fit into current operational scenarios, identify gaps and develop potential approaches to operational challenges.

“Some of the gaps — it was more of a scenario-based. But fundamentally, just understanding what you look like in the electromagnetic spectrum, what your adversaries look like and how you can be influenced is really one of the the main areas that we walked away from,”  Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said during a C4ISRnet event Wednesday.

“It really validated that you got to have that kind of layered approach to address those gaps. I think the takeaway was we have to treat the EMS as terrain — you have to be able to hold terrain, you have to be able to maneuver inside of it and you also have to be able to affect the enemy. That was probably the biggest takeaway.”

Due to the unique nature of different operational environments, the U.S. forces can’t rely on a single solution. For example, given particular characteristics of the Pacific theater, air-launched effects, or the ability to deploy EW capabilities from a distance, are needed. 

At closer ranges, EW capabilities are needed to protect specific platforms, such as tanks or Bradley Fighting Vehicles, against threats like inbound drones.

“If you want to non-kinetically effect inbound drone to ensure that it misses a tank, that’s similar physics, but the ranges and the outcomes are somewhat different. So you’re doing something in a very long range. And then you’re also, you know, making sure that you can protect those close-in assets,” Baker said.

“From a technical standpoint, it’s definitely a significantly different problem — protecting something within 500 kilometers versus protecting something within the last 500 meters.”

Data challenges 

Despite units having to rely on different systems and capabilities depending on their geographical location, they need to be connected to share real-time data and intelligence.

The Army Cyber Center of Excellence is currently conducting an EW pilot to develop a unified EW data architecture that will allow seamless data integration from different sources and regions.

“We have to just be comfortable with the fact that they’re going to be geographically dispersed and have to operate independently, but then also be interconnected. The data conversation is absolutely real – you have to understand the fundamentals underlying data challenges associated with the EW space,” said Baker. 

Sharing data with partners

The Army and Marine Corps are conducting a pilot to develop common data standards and capabilities.

The Army recently decided to shift from the Electronic Warfare Planning and Management Tool’s electromagnetic warfare and spectrum management capabilities to the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK) framework, where applications for situational awareness data and geospatial visualizations can be built. The effort is being led by the Electronic Warfare Integration product management office.

“It aligns ourselves with the rest of the fires in the maneuver communities to achieve a commonality across software development, user interfaces, common experiences, underlying data and it’s part of that overall TAK architecture,” said Baker.

The post Army develops its approach to electronic warfare first appeared on Federal News Network.

As a proposal to create a separate Army drone branch advances in the House, Army leaders continue to push back against the idea.

Gen. James Rainey, who leads the Army Futures Command, said it is “too early” for the service to establish a drone corps.

“I think unmanned aerial systems are going to come to bear at echelon. I think individual soldiers [need to be able] to employ them just like they employ their weapon.  So 11 Bravos, I think, the tanks should be able to have a robot sitting next to him that can launch UAS. I think every maneuver person is going to need them. They have huge sustainment implications,” Rainey said during the Center for Strategic and International Studies event on Monday.

Given the existing occupational specialties for enlisted soldiers and warrant officers that focus on UAS and various drone-related programs and training, the service should prioritize integrating the technology into “every formation, at every echelon,” said Rainey.

“I don’t know that it’s going to warrant its own branch. And certainly, I’d say it’s too soon for that. The bigger thing is getting UAVs into our formation at echelon right now. We [need to] have good requirements and good acquisition approaches for UAVs at echelon. We need to stop buying a thing and buy a capability,” said Rainey.

Gen. James Rainey is the latest Army official to push back against the House Armed Services Committee’s proposal to create a drone corps.

The committee wants the new branch to serve as a command center for all drone-related activities. It would help integrate drone systems across the service, conduct research, development and testing of those systems and provide personnel with specialized training in such aircraft.

Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Virginia), chair of the HASC Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, has long advocated for better counter-UAS capabilities. During a hearing in March, he further pushed the idea, saying that “it is time to give serious consideration” to setting up a drone corps within the Army.

“Unlocking the full potential of unmanned platforms for the Army will require soldiers to develop specialized skills and a deep understanding of various associated technologies. A drone corps may better lend itself to allowing the broad array of expertise required to mature within the Army and for these systems’ unique capabilities to grow beyond their role primarily as enablers to the current combat arms branches,” said Wittman.

Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo, however, said creating a new institutional structure would distract from the service’s current efforts to bring the technology to soldiers and adopt it at scale.

“I think the institutional implications of it, to me, are secondary at this point as opposed to figuring out how we’re going to employ the technology and what technology works the best. It’s important, in my view, to get after giving units these [commercial off-the-shelf] UAS capabilities to let them experiment. I want to better understand the [tactics, techniques and procedures] about how they’re going to employ them at different echelons and to be able to understand how that affects the way that our formations will fight,” Camarillo said last month.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. John Ferrari, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that drone warfare is moving fast and the service needs to be able to organize around those weapon systems to keep pace with the technology.

“Giving drones to the old branches that are going to worry about whether they’re now competing for resources may not be the best idea. What you want to do is you want to innovate not just the hardware, but the tactics. So having somebody that’s got resources so it’s not competing for resources from the people it’s trying to displace. If it was its own branch with its own funding to do procurement and acquisition and operations, then it can show up to the formations and go,  ‘Look, here’s what we got,’ as opposed to, ‘We need to take money from the helicopter program in order to do it,’” Ferrari told Federal News Network.

“What I would say is the Army is not at risk of moving too fast. It’s at risk of moving too slowly on this.”

The House Armed Services Committee adopted the measure last month but it will need to pass the rest of the House and Senate to make it into the final defense bill.

The post It is ‘too early’ for an Army drone branch, Rainey says first appeared on Federal News Network.

For the Army, the command post of the future will need to be agile, resilient and intuitive.

It will be a big lift not only for the Army, but for the contractors who are building the technology to support it.

This is one of many reasons why the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George on May 28 signed off on the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) Capability Characteristics (C2 Next).

The Army released a notice on SAM.gov to say the characteristics of needs are available, but vendors have to “apply” to see them as they are not public.

George and other Army senior leaders, speaking at the Army TEMS conference in Philadelphia last week, offered a preview of the characteristics, outlining key concepts and insight into what command and control of the future needs to encompass.

George said with the network being the Army’s top priority, these new characteristics are a key building block.

“I was out at the National Training Center I think it was March for Project Convergence. One of the things that I challenged everybody a year ago, and especially Army Future Command, was I want to be able to be on the network and I want us to be able to operate with tablets, phones, software-defined radios in a very simple architecture. What I saw when I was out there in March is that the technology exists now to do those kinds of things,” George said. “We had a platoon leader talking to a company commander or talking to a battalion commander talking to a brigade commander, and they were talking on tablets. All those big systems that we used to have, the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS) is one of them, can be an app. It can be on that tablet. So rather than having a truck or two trucks and 10 people, you have an application. That’s where we have to go.”

George said the commanders were excited about these capabilities because it speeds the decision process and makes them more lethal.

Army details C2 Next

The Army developed this initial set of C2Next characteristics to support the concepts George talked about: Speed to decision, the lethality of the units, the ability to adapt and be agile based on real-time threats, challenges and needs.

Joe Welch, the director of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance Center (C5ISR) for the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, said what’s in the characteristics are not just capabilities to build or have, but they give you the ability to tailor and adapt C2 for the commander and their staff based on their needs and information requirements. He said these characteristics aren’t even necessarily the nuts and bolts of the capabilities of systems.

Welch outlined several focus areas for C2 Next, starting with a key ingredient agnostic transport, meaning the data gets to the users no matter the infrastructure such as cloud or satellite or on-premise data center.

“[It has to be] robust and resilient. We’ve been making lots of progress in terms of that, not just in the variety of transport paths that we have for our networks to be able to support data transmission, but to do it in an automated way and a highly secure way,” Welch said. “I see this as a continued evolution. In the characteristics of need, we talk specifically about being threat informed in this area. We started from a perspective of, we just need to be able to communicate; we need to be able to get the data where it needs to go in order to accomplish the mission.”

A second area that will be critical, Welch said, is a robust services architecture that is cloud native and based on open systems standards that let commanders easily iterate new capabilities.

“A consistent theme here recently is as-a-service. We’re seeing that in more and more areas. What’s really meant by that is that we don’t want to be fixed on any particular thing. We want to be able to experiment, prototype, move very quickly into deployment, and use something as long as it’s working, and be able to challenge it when there’s something that’s better out there when the need changes or the technology changes,” he said. “That gets into a lot more mechanics than the concepts or the capabilities that we’re describing. But it’s a very fundamental underpinning of where we’re looking to go.”

Testing C2 characteristics

Welch added C2 Next is part of a necessary and complete revamp of the way that the Army will generate, produce, consume and discover data, and it’s necessary in order to apply machine learning on to it at all.

He said if the Army wants to be able to do informed and enabled decision making much faster than the adversary, then the characteristics of need will play a huge role.

The Army has been testing many of these concepts over the last 12-18 months and improving them as it went along. Most recently at Project Convergence, an annual technology and capability demonstration, Dr. Jean Vettel, Next Generation C2 chief scientist for experimentation at Army Capabilities Command for C5ISR, said they measured some of the benefits of the C2Next characteristics.

“In the characteristics of need, you’ll see that we’ll talk a lot about modularity or…this really focus we have on composability. What does that actually mean?” Vettel said.

As an example, Vettel said commanders developing a plan to set up a command post in minutes versus hours using commercial technology called Raspberry Pis.

“Within that they had 16 Raspberry Pi’s that they put out, where they emulated the electromagnetic signature of the command post as decoys. Whenever we think about adaptability, what is the metric of adaptability that would be successful for Next C2?” she said.

The idea was to protect the command and control technologies from jamming or other cyber attacks. Vettel said this is an example of how the C2 Next characteristics emphasize adaptability.

“If it’s adaptable, that means that in the fight, whenever a pure adversary now has identified that we’re creating our decoys with electromagnetic signatures, then our warfighters need to have access to data that they couldn’t tell us they would need beforehand,” she said. “They have to have the ability to know what data they have available and how do they try to spoof or create a different decoy because they have access to the data because it’s adaptable to what they need to fight the peer adversary.”

She added this example also shows building capabilities in modules that can be plugged into, removed and changed as necessary is another key piece in the C2 Next characteristics.

A living document to be updated

C2Next characteristics are out for review and comment for industry and other folks in the Army.

Welch said the intent is to make C2 Next characteristics of need a living document that will be updated every six months or so.

Additionally, the Army Futures Command is in the early stages of planning a new contract vehicle to help bring these C2 Next characteristics into technology capabilities. While it’s still early, the Army may use an Other Transaction Authority type of approach as a way to bring multiple companies into the mix and experiment with different parts of the characteristics.

“I think what you’ll see is the characteristics of need, which may sound very principled and very large overarching statements, I’m expecting that they’re going to get iterated into some greater and greater levels of detail as we continue through Next Generation C2 experimentation,” Welch said. “We’re certainly moving fast and in alignment with the chief’s objective to be moving with speed and urgency. We’re going to be moving in conjunction with our partners at Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (ASA(ALT) as we look beyond experimentation and prototyping and into delivery of Next Generation C2 capability.”

The post Agile, adaptable, modular: The future of Army C2 first appeared on Federal News Network.