On DoD Federal News Network | Hubbard Radio

This episode features two discussions from the 2024 Sea Air Space conference, starting with a focus on sustainment and logistics. Over the past several years, the Navy has been using a sweeping process improvement effort to wring almost a billion dollars in savings out of its supply chains under a project called Naval Sustainment System-Supply. Now, under a 2.0 version of NSS-Supply, the focus is changing – to boosting the readiness of the Navy’s ship and aircraft fleets. For more on how it’s all going, Jared Serbu talked with Commander Kirk Engler, the director of NSS-Supply at Naval Supply Systems Command, and Melissa Olson, the project’s deputy director.
Later on the show, we’ll have some highlights from a panel Jared moderated at this year’s Sea Air Space conference on digital transformation with senior leaders from the Coast Guard, Navy and Marine Corps.

Federal News Network has covered the difficulties federal employees and military members have seen when it comes to getting access to health care in Japan. On this edition of the show, we’re going to talk about that – but not just about that. We’re also going to talk about military spouse unemployment. In the case of Japan, and Okinawa specifically, the two things are very related. A new report by a volunteer group of experts called Hire Oki Spouses found there are actually plenty of spouses in Okinawa with health care expertise who could be working as nurses, for example, to solve the provider shortage there. They’re just not being hired.
On the show this time, we’re joined by two of the co-authors of the report who’ve both lived in Okinawa recently and seen a lot of these issues firsthand:
Elayne Saejung is an Air Force spouse and public health researcher
Kelly Pretorius, is Ph.D. health care researcher and licensed nurse practitioner

It’s been a decade of major change for the Military Health System in general, and the Defense Health Agency in particular. From its beginning as primarily a shared services provider, DHA has grown to become the sole operator of all of the military’s hospitals and clinics, the overseer of the TRICARE health plans and a central player in most other aspects of Defense health care.
On this episode of On DoD, Lt. Gen. Telita Crosland, DHA’s director, talks with Jared about the agency’s new strategic plan – including her intent to move DHA from a long period of transition to the “execution phase.”

On this edition of On DoD, Jared talks with two leaders from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) who are experimenting with technologies like 5G and proliferated low-earth orbit satellites. We'll talk about the massive increase in bandwidth those technologies allow and the improvements they might enable -- both for quality of life issues when sailors are underway, and for mission requirements.
Our guests:
-- Rob Wolborsky, NAVWAR's chief engineer
-- Ron Wolfe, the Navy's technical warrant holder for mobility 

On this edition of On DoD: Up until a year ago, the Office of the Secretary of Defense was a bit of an outlier when it came to IT management and governance. Despite having 19,000 employees, there was no single person in charge of making sure those workers had a decent user experience, and no one in charge of delivering common IT services. That changed last October, when Danielle Metz became the OSD chief information officer. She joins Jared Serbu to talk about what’s happened and what’s ahead, including the impending rollout of Microsoft 365 at the classified level.
Later in the hour, Federal News Network’s Jason Miller talks with Leo Garciga, the Army’s new CIO. We’ll hear details about his plans to institutionalize and simplify cloud computing across the Army, and a big push to get the service to start moving toward DoD’s new JWCC cloud contract. 

Up until this summer, it wasn’t uncommon for Navy IT users, even at the most senior ranks in the Pentagon, to plan part of their mornings around the 10 minutes it took for their computers to boot. But as part of a concerted effort to improve user experience, the service has shown it’s possible to cut those maddening daily waits to only about 30 seconds.
On this episode of On DoD, Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy's acting chief technology officer talks with Jared about what the Navy's learned from its digital experience pilots so far, and how quickly they might be able to scale throughout the fleet.