First off, the National Parks Service posted this on their Twitter account reminding everyone of all the monuments and parks that they manage. This evening, the National Mall, managed by NPS, will be host to fireworks in Washington, DC.

National parks are home to many of the nation’s most beloved monuments, historic sites, & landscapes. They tell stories from the road to revolution & creation of a new nation, to the journey of people continuing the fight for the freedom & liberty that our nation was founded on. pic.twitter.com/AG6T7Kf7ga

— National Park Service (@NatlParkService) July 4, 2022

The armed forces also wished everyone a great holiday:

Celebrating independence on watch around the globe, and at home. 🇺🇲⚓️ #HappyIndependenceDay #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/dW3R9ljqwh

— U.S. Navy (@USNavy) July 4, 2022

Happy 4th of July from the world’s greatest Air Force 💥 pic.twitter.com/Mw6qxkidx2

— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) July 4, 2022

We wish you all a very happy, but most importantly safe, 4th of July! 🇺🇸 🎆#coastguard #4thofJuly #semperparatus pic.twitter.com/vX0JowIACf

— U.S. Coast Guard (@USCG) July 4, 2022

#DYK
John Adams believed July 2nd was the correct date to celebrate and would reportedly turn down invitations to appear at July 4th events in protest.

Adams & Thomas Jefferson both died July 4, 1826 – the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. pic.twitter.com/MnVkqUnQdB

— U.S. Army (@USArmy) July 4, 2022

Elsewhere in the government, the National Archives and Records Administration celebrated in style. Pictured below is the Acting Archivist of the United States, Debra Steidel Wall standing with a few costumed colonists.

In Boston, the USS Constitution set sail in celebration of Independence Day.

In Poznan, Poland, U.S. soldiers celebrated with lunch and a cake.

In Asunción, Paraguay, Marines prepared for an Independence Day celebration at the U.S. Embassy.

The service brought together high-ranking Navy officials, enlisted sailors, think tank experts, non-governmental organizations, industry and legislative aides to participate in a tabletop exercise focused on responding to a climate event.

The exercise signals the increasing importance of climate change factors on how the military operates and plans for the future.

The situation involved a fictional scenario in late 2030 where the Navy is conducting an amphibious exercise on an island nation in the western Pacific. A typhoon forms, changes course and heads directly for the exercise.

“We had our groups built into three breakout groups that were related and dealing with that the same impacts in different ways at different times,” Meredith Berger, Navy assistant secretary for energy, installations and environment, told reporters during a roundtable. “They were faced with dilemmas. They had to work together as a team to make sure that they could answer questions and try to understand the practical operational applications.”

Berger said the exercise was an opportunity for the Navy to address some of the “very real” impacts that it knows are coming as a result of climate change. She said one of the key takeaways from the training is that the Navy cannot allow climate contingencies to become a surprise. The Navy must develop flexibility to address the issues that will arise from the new threat.

“Another lesson is tied to logistics,” Berger said. “The more that we can reduce those dependencies, the more that we can diversify where we do have dependencies the better we are set up for success. It is important that we think about redundancy and everything that we are doing to be more effective to safeguard against those types of failures. It goes back to the planning and it shows that we’re on the right course, that we are anticipating, that we are thinking about how to be efficient, how to be effective, how to make sure that we are sharing burdens and sharing opportunities to be effective warfighters.”

The Defense Department is also thinking about these issues by reinforcing its supply chain and considering adding to its emergency stockpiles.

Berger said the Navy is planning to build climate contingencies into other exercises and to start conducting more exercises specifically tailored to climate change.

The Navy and the military writ large have been putting increasing focus on climate change. That means making installations and weapons more resilient, figuring out how to operate in extreme weather and decreasing the military’s impact on the environment.

In May, the Navy released its climate action 2030 plan. The service has developed its strategy around DoD’s five lines of effort on climate change. Those include things like climate-informed decision making, where Navy leaders train for situations of extreme weather, and supply chain resilience, in which the Navy invests in companies that support national security and climate benefits.

Last October, the Pentagon took its largest step yet to become more climate conscious by releasing its climate adaptation strategy. DoD announced it will create a climate chief and stated that it will consider climate in every decision it makes from now on.

The Navy is taking several steps to shorten the time it takes to get its vessels in and out of maintenance at its shipyards, including with a huge, multiyear and multibillion dollar program to modernize the yards’ outdated infrastructure.

But as officials dug into the problem of maintenance delays and broader logistics issues, they found at least one other massive contributor that’s arguably easier to fix: getting the parts the Navy’s tradesmen need to do their work at the jobsite at the time the projects begin. Fixing that problem alone could go a long way toward making sure ships’ maintenance availabilities are finished on time.

That’s one of the more potent discoveries the Navy has made as part of a much broader project called Naval Sustainment System-Supply (NSS-S), led by Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP), and in the case of the shipyards, supported by Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA).

Rear Adm. Peter Stamatopoulos, NAVSUP’s commander, said the project’s data analytics showed that, on average, only about 30% of the parts needed to complete a submarine or surface ship’s planned maintenance were available when the vessel entered the yard. And those late-arriving supplies, in turn, are responsible for about 30% of the total delays in ships’ scheduled maintenance periods.

“What happens is that the rest of the material requirements are discovered as that availability is moving along. Some of it is never identified upfront in the planning process, and some of it occurs when they open and inspect a planned job, but what we’ve found is that oftentimes, in that growth work, we should have the parts on hand and ready to go before the work is actually started,” he said during a wide-ranging interview about NSS-S for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “It’s part of the dysfunction that has developed over the course of time — we haven’t been able to be as predictive as we need to be in our requirements determination to support those jobs. But we’re getting after that.”

In the year-and-a-half NAVSUP has been working on NSS-S, the parts availability rate has improved noticeably, to 37%. The objective by the end of the five-year project is 100%, though Stamatopolous acknowledged that’s a stretch goal.

Another discovery Navy officials made as part of NSS-S: the low availability rates have flown under the radar until recently, in part, because local supply departments at each Navy shipyard have tried to solve the missing parts problems by themselves, ordering what they need on their own.

“So requirements were finding their way around the supply system, and not going through a central point,” Stamatopolous said. “And when we don’t go through a central point, we don’t have the demand visibility we need so that we can be more predictive with the material that we should have on hand, either in the shipyard ready to go, or in our wholesale supply system in NAVSUP and the Defense Logistics Agency.”

Going forward, the idea is to minimize the number of instances in which the Navy’s four public shipyards need to order items from vendors separately. NAVSUP is trying to centralize more of those orders through its own supply system to take advantage of the broader Navy’s buying power, apply category management principles, and give its vendors more predictability so that each of its shipyards aren’t, in effect, competing against each other with urgent requests for the same items that could, ideally, have been bought ahead of time and stocked in Navy or DLA warehouses.

Although the shipyard element has been a major focus of the NSS-S initiative, it’s only one of many. Stamatopolous said the bigger project — which ranges from improving NAVSUP’s industry relationships to getting a better handle on cash management in its working capital fund — has achieved about $600 million in verified savings thus far.

And many of the “pillars” of the project are interrelated.

For example, if the Navy can do a better job of forecasting the parts it’ll need for maintenance availability and minimize the amount of local purchasing, NAVSUP is likely to do a much better job of forecasting its demand to vendors.

“One of the things that I continuously hear from them is they would like to have a more stable demand signal,” Stamatopolous said. “We also need to make sure that we have the right mix of organic repair and commercial repair, because we have to preserve and protect both [capabilities], and the best way that we can do that for the commercial base is to give them a solid, stable demand. We have to be sensitive to their needs for cash.”

Meanwhile, the Navy is also starting pilot programs that try not only to minimize the number of cases in which local elements of the Navy’s sustainment system is competing for the same parts, but also the number of instances in which the acquisition portions of the Navy bureaucracy are competing against the sustainment portions for the exact same items.

“What we’re doing in NSS-Supply is bringing both of those disciplines into the room,” Stamatopolous said. “We’re creating RFPs for not only the new procurement of parts, but also the sustainment, and bringing it together. That’s the first time that that’s happened in at least 20 years, and what it allows us to do is bring the full buying power of both the acquisition community and NAVSUP into the same room. We’re negotiating upfront sustainment before we talk about how many numbers of airplanes or components that we’re going to be purchasing. It’s a whole different approach to how we do contracting and acquisition. And it’s exciting.”

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The Department of the Navy has a new strategy for dealing with climate challenges. Like past plans, it addresses what the Navy and the Marine Corps can do to make their operations more resilient to climate change. But this one also lays out some specific goals to reduce the services’ impacts to the climate. Deborah Loomis is senior adviser for climate change to the Secretary of the Navy, and she joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to talk more about it.

Interview transcript:

Jared Serbu: Ms. Loomis, I think the important place to start here is to talk a bit about why climate is a concern for the Department of Navy in the first place and why the Navy needs a climate plan. Describe for us a little bit why it is important or as as the Secretary put it in his sort of preamble letter, existential I think is the word he used?

Deborah Loomis: Yeah, for sure. So Secretary [Carlos] Del Toro has called it existential. Others have as well, Secretary [Lloyd] Austin, certainly the president has. Secretary Del Toro also called it one of the most destabilizing forces of our time. And it’s hitting us as the Department of the Navy on a few different fronts. On one hand, it’s shaping the whole context, for the world, and certainly in which warfighting will happen. Right, so it’s making the world a more unstable place. It’s making it harder for us to respond by threatening our installations, challenging putting our sailors and Marines and our platforms and more challenging conditions, and increasing the demand signal on things we need to respond to. So it’s hitting us on a number of fronts, and it’s fundamentally shaping kind of the global context.

Jared Serbu: Why is 2030 the target horizon in this particular plan? There’s certainly some things you can do on smaller scales, in that, I guess in the next eight years, we have that the plan covers. Some things have longer time horizons on the climate front. Talk about what can be done in that, again, shorter timeframe.

Deborah Loomis: Sure. So our north star is net zero by 2050. But we did call it “Climate Action 2030.” And that’s for a couple of reasons. One, the scientific community has been very clear that we are in the critical decade, as a world. We are in the critical decade, to really reverse the trajectory or alter the trajectory in a way that avoids those worst-case scenarios of climate change. So the time is now. And as a department, it’s hard to organize yourself around something that’s so far away as 2050. And so we wanted to keep it kind of closer in. We are facing – climate change is here today, it is not a someday threat, it is not a speculative phenomenon. So we really wanted to stay focused on the here and now. So that’s why that time horizon.

Jared Serbu: I want to talk about the resilience side of the plan in just a minute. But first, just let’s go through some of the things that Navy believes that it should be doing as its contribution to things like reducing greenhouse gases, etc. Reducing the Navy’s direct impact to climate change, I think has not been as much of a focus in previous years under previous administrations, under previous secretaries. It very much is in this plan. Can you talk first about why those factors are incorporated into this plan and some of the key things that you want to do there?

Deborah Loomis: So you are right, we set the strategic objective was to build a climate-ready force. And we were very deliberate and intentional, that that has two components. We can make ourselves resilient. And we will absolutely do that. And there’s, we have a long track record of working on that. And we can talk about some of the initiatives that we’ll do on that front. And we do have a responsibility as part of kind of humanity, the greater collective. We have a responsibility to do our part, like everybody else does, if not us, if not the Department of the Navy, an organization of just tremendous reach and breadth and agency. Who else are we going to call on to do their part? When we do that. it’s not just altruistic. We were very, I hope, diligent and made very clear in this plan how and when we do that, when we reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we make ourselves better warfighters. When we reduce platforms need for fuel or refueling, if you can go longer between refueling, that’s a more capable platform. If you can generate energy for tactical forces at the far edge of the battlefield, and reduce your need to resupply and reduce the vulnerability of supply lines. That is a more capable force. Those benefits go on and on when you are at home on a shore installation. When we, like Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany that we announced the day that we launched our strategy, we also announced that was a net zero energy installation. They’re saving around $600,000 a month in their energy costs based on – and they expect that savings to grow – based on being net zero. Those are savings that can be reapplied to something else making us a stronger force. So we really do believe that there’s no daylight and there’s like, only reinforcement between making ourselves more efficient and making ourselves more capable force.

Jared Serbu: Let’s talk about resiliency a little bit. What are the most important things that you think the Navy needs to do in the near term to make those installations more resilient against these climate challenges, and maybe not just installations, but the whole enterprise?

Deborah Loomis: Well, we can start with installations. And we’ve been doing great work on energy for a long time. We have a commitment in the plan to really expand the use of micro grids and sort of long-term battery storage. For installations, energy is obviously a big concern in the face of climate impacts, like storms etc., wildfires etc. So we have a long history on energy, and we’re going to continue those efforts. Microgrids being one of them, in renewable generation. Just energy efficiency, again, making us – the power that you don’t need is the best kind of power. So that’s the most resilient, resilience you don’t need to buy when you are more efficient. One of the things that we’ve emphasized in this plan that we have been doing but maybe have been less vocal about is nature-based resilience. And climate change comes down to water, too much water, too little water, too hot. So the ability of nature to sort of mitigate or dampen or withstand those effects. So we’re going to work really hard. And we have a lot of examples all around the country already on things like living shorelines. We are coastal force, obviously, as the Department of the Navy. We are right on those right on those coastlines, and facing all those impacts from storm surge and erosion and sea level rise. So that is an area that we’re going to invest in a lot. It makes so much sense. And we can partner with defense communities, with other conservation organizations, municipalities, and really make those dollars go further and protect not just our bases, but where we live and work in those communities and our neighbors.

Jared Serbu: And in speaking of dollars, the plan talks specifically about integrating climate considerations into the budget process every year and the planning cycles every year. And I assume by that you’re not just talking about budgeting for climate-related activities, but kind of weaving these things into everything that the department does. Can you talk a bit more about how you think about that process?

Deborah Loomis: Yeah, no, exactly. You’ve got it exactly right. And we’ve already taken a turn at looking backwards. When the administration came in, looking backward, what would we say are investments that are kind of aligned to climate, either building resilience, making ourselves more efficient? We’re actually already spending quite a bit on things that are making us more resilient, are making us more efficient. And that is precisely because this is not a political endeavor. This happened through the last four years. And there were significant investments in things like advanced batteries, investing in domestic supply chains for batteries and other rare earth minerals that are key components of our platforms. So they have a climate angle, and they have a very strong warfighting angle. So I think you’re exactly correct in that what we’re trying to do in this plan is make this not sort of a one-trick pony, or there’s no kind of silver bullet or magic program that I’m going to hold up and say this is the answer. Because the answer is going to come across all domains, in many solution sets large and small, like some of the ones I’ve already cited, or like hull coatings, making your ship have less friction on it so that it can go further. That’s a climate benefit. It’s a warfighting benefit as well. So you’re right. It’s absolutely integrated into everything we do. And we’re just looking at it more intentionally, to try to make sure that we’re making all the investments that we can and that we’re smart about getting the greatest sort of climate bang for the buck that we can, along with those warfighting and resilience benefits.

Jared Serbu: Again, we’re unfortunately just because of time not going to get to every single aspect of this report. But one interesting one is the Department of the Navy has plans for carbon drawdown, which is not something I’ve heard the military talk about being involved in before. Can you share a little bit about what the DON’s doing there?

Deborah Loomis: Yeah. So if you look at the Department of the Navy and trying to get to net zero, we have ships and aircraft and tactical vehicles that are going to be consuming fossil fuels for some time. And we just can’t turn that that spigot off regardless of we can be really ambitious. But that’s just the reality for a little while longer. And so we are harnessing the power of nature, basic photosynthesis, trees, grasslands, we’ve managed around 5 million acres of land in the Department of the Navy. That’s a lot of nature. And that’s a lot of vegetation drawing carbon out of the atmosphere. The international community has been clear that we as a world can’t reach the targets that we need to reach without investing in carbon drawdown at scale. So we are fortunate to be stewards of a lot of land, and a lot of natural resources. We have a wonderful track record of conservation. And we think these are really kind of a no brainer, bipartisan, win-win-win all around. When you invest in nature, you are making communities more resilient, you are making those bases more habitable, more resilient to those climate impacts. So this is an area that we’re, they’re cost efficient. It’s an area that we’re really excited about, and we think it’s going to be a key contributor to actually achieving that net zero.

Jared Serbu: Super interesting. Is that mostly just a matter of applying kind of already known science, planting more trees, or is there a learning process here too where you’re going to partially use Navy real property to study how drawdown can be done most effectively?

Deborah Loomis: I think you’re right, there’s both. Planting trees, there’s what’s called blue carbon. So things like sea grasses and kelp. We also manage a lot of land in the desert ecosystem. So water resilient, I looked at the Desert Southwest, obviously, that’s ground zero for climate change in this country, or certainly one of the most striking challenges that we face. And so we’re looking at what can we do, what can we learn about getting water back in those ecosystems, making that watershed function better than it is right now and perhaps contributing to a solution set on water resilience for the country and for the world?

Jared Serbu: That’s Deborah Loomis, Senior Advisor for climate change to the Secretary of the Navy. We’ll post a link to the new strategy climate action 2030 at Federal News network.com/federal Drive

But that preparation focused mainly around kinetic warfare where Marines or soldiers would have to face an enemy that was, relatively speaking, close and understood.

Todd Harrison, a senior associate in the Aerospace Security Project and Defense Budget Analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Security (CSIS) wrote in a 2021 report that “For some types of non-kinetic attack, third parties may not be able to see that an attack has occurred, or the party being attacked may not know right away who is attacking. For these reasons, non-kinetic attacks may be perceived as less escalatory in some situations, although this remains a point of debate. It can be difficult to determine if some non-kinetic forms of attack are effective, particularly if the effects are not publicly visible. And some methods of attack — such as exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in a cyberattack — may have a limited period of effectiveness before an adversary develops defenses against them.”

The non-kinetic attacks are not limited to just weapons systems, but logistics to move supplies and troops, communications to make data sharing more difficult and GPS jamming and spoofing.

Today, the Marines are preparing for an environment that is disconnected, denied, intermittent and/or with limited bandwidth (DDIL) where the enemy could be hundreds of miles away, behind screens and impacting both kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities.

The Marine Corps awarded General Dynamics IT (GDIT) a task order under the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract to test out how they can receive Microsoft Office capabilities both on-premise and in the cloud in a classified environment approved at the secret level.

The Defense Information Systems Agency and the General Services Administration awarded GDIT the 10-year DEOS contract that has a $7.6 billion ceiling in August 2019. DISA began migrating users to DEOS in January 2021 after protests and corrective action delayed the implementation.

Navy leading DDIL working group

Jim Matney, vice president and general manager of the DISA and Enterprise Services Sector for GDIT’s defense division, said in an email to Federal News Network that GDIT already is supporting an unclassified environment for these services that is rated at impact level 5 (IL5). He said through this proof of concept that mainly will be done in a lab environment, the Marines will be able to see how the enterprise collaboration tools can work in DDIL environments.

The six-month project is worth under $1 million.

The Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity (MCTSSA) has put together a DoD DDIL lab environment where GDIT will evaluate these proposed architectures and developed capabilities.

GDIT says it also will partner with Microsoft to test capabilities, investigate scenarios and provide applicable recommendations for mission partners deployed in a DDIL environment.

“[T]hese collaboration services must also operate on-premises. As cloud service providers are providing more software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to support collaboration, such as Office 365, users must have access to the cloud to leverage these capabilities,” Matney said. “The challenge then becomes ensuring the on-premises solution used to support DDIL in an outside the continental U.S. (OCONUS) environment can interface with the enterprise capability that is being used in CONUS.”

Matney said the on-premises collaborative capabilities, such as Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint, must remain and integrate with the cloud-based services.

GDIT says the proof of concept will include testing several different scenarios to access capabilities including word processing and spreadsheets, email and calendar and file sharing and instant messaging.

All of this is helping the DoD figure out how to deploy DEOS in DDIL environments, where reliable and timely connectivity to warfighters at the tactical edge is critical.

Refine requirements, develop use cases

This task order proof of concept with the Marines is part of the DoD chief information officer’s effort to find technology capabilities that provide seamless operations in denied, degraded, intermittent and limited bandwidth environments.

In 2021, the DoD CIO designated the Department of Navy CIO as the executive agent to lead a cross-service joint working group focused on DDIL.

“These low bandwidth and high latency conditions are prevalent at the tactical edge and experience regular disconnects from the broader network, including cloud services, often for substantial periods of time,” the DON CIO’s office wrote in late 2021. “Network server software and hardware exist at the tactical edge to provide critical IT services and data in these DDIL environments, along with a variety of spectrum communications and unclassified and classified network transports leveraging satellite links and low-Earth Orbit (LEO), Wi-Fi, cellular/4G LTE, millimeter wave/5G and others.”

The working group is leaning on industry for help in refining DoD requirements and use cases to develop standardized architectures and capabilities in these austere environments.

“These tools operate as a hybrid capability, which will allow users access to the full feature set when cloud connectivity is available, but remain productive locally within the DDIL environment,” the DON CIO wrote.

Matney said GDIT is currently supporting multiple agencies across the DoD, civilian, and intelligence sectors with on-premises collaborative capabilities that may be considered and tested as potential DDIL approaches.

The challenge that the Marines are trying to solve isn’t just a Marines or DoD challenge. It’s one nearly every agency from the departments of Treasury to Homeland Security to Justice face. And with so much dependency on email communication and collaboration tools, having access no matter the network environment is critical.

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There’s yet another lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The latest class action targets the Air Force’s religious accommodation process, arguing that process is set up in such a way that getting a religious exemption to the vaccine is almost impossible. The plaintiffs argue that violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment. Mike Barry is senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit legal group that focuses on religious liberty issues. He’s one of the attorneys representing the airmen challenging the mandate, and he spoke more to Jared Serbu on the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Jared Serbu: Mike, thanks for being here. And let’s start by talking a bit about your clients, where they are in the Air Force vaccine exemption process and what led you to file the suit?

Mike Barry: Well, First Liberty Institute represents nine Air Force members who are challenging the Air Force’s enforcement of its vaccine mandate. And our clients are, they’re stationed in various locations, quite a few of them are here in Texas. And they have different ranks, different different job responsibilities in the Air Force, a number of them are actually pilots in the Air Force. And so all of them have requested religious accommodations from the vaccine mandate, which is, of course, something that DoD regulations and even federal law, clearly permit and allow. And, in fact, the Department of Defense allows medical exemptions and administrative exemptions from the vaccine. But although the Air Force has approved hundreds of medical and administrative exemptions, they have only approved a very small handful of religious exemptions and even the ones that they’ve approved by their own admission, they are only for Air Force members who are basically already separating or are already on their way out. So our lawsuit is really predicated on on the argument that this is all a sham, that the Air Force is not following the Constitution. They’re not following federal law. They’re not following their own regulations. And they’re discriminating against people in the military.

Jared Serbu: This case seems remarkably similar to another case that I think First Liberty was also counsel on with a group of Navy SEALs before the very same judge, I believe too. You got a preliminary injunction in that case and a favorable ruling from the Fifth Circuit. Are there major differences here? The story seems pretty similar to what’s going on with these airmen.

Mike Barry: No, really, I mean, this is happening across the entire Department of Defense. The only difference is really is that each branch of the military has their own internal regulations and policies for how they adjudicate these things. And so of course, that means you have to bring different lawsuits on behalf of people, depending on what branch of the military that they’re in. But in terms of the underlying legal issues that are raised, no, they’re exactly the same. The military across the board is discriminating discriminating against people of faith. They are, they’re ignoring the law, they’re ignoring the Constitution. And really, the greatest harm here is not just to our members of the military who are suffering under this, but it’s actually to our nation. Our military, I mean, you can open any news feed that you want. And you’ll see headline after headline talking about the recruiting and retention woes that plague our military right now. We are hemorrhaging people like crazy, and we’re having a really hard time recruiting capable people to join our military. That means that this is quickly becoming a national security concern. We are kicking out people by the thousands. And yet we’re short, we’re saying that we’re having a hard time recruiting people. And in one instance, I saw one of the head people for recruiting in the military said, “We’re having a really hard time identifying, basically people who are eligible to serve in the military. And one of the reasons for that is if they if they’re between the ages of 17 and 23, and they’re not vaccinated, we’re not even willing to talk to them.” And so they’re basically closing off an entire segment of society in a discriminatory manner. Because of those people’s religious beliefs and religious convictions. I mean, this is quickly becoming a national security issue for our nation.

Jared Serbu: I want to go back to what you said earlier about the process being a sham, because I want to try and draw how much of an issue that actually is, in these cases. In a hypothetical alternate universe where it were the Navy and the Air Force, the rest of the services had an exemption process or a waiver process that did look more credible to you and to the court, do you lose these cases?

Mike Barry: No, I think what happens is they become much smaller cases, right? They become the exception and not the norm. I think that a process that is not a sham looks a little bit something like the military regardless of what branch we’re talking about, takes an honest look and says okay, what is this person’s job or their function? And is there somewhere else we can assign them where maybe they’re at less risk of of COVID transmission or they start looking at the data, right, the actual CDC data and the COVID day they start look kicking it around and saying, You know what? Starbucks, for example, doesn’t have a vaccine requirement. And yet people who work and – I mean, you’re coming in very close proximity with thousands of people per day, hundreds of people per hour. And at least in the Starbucks is that I’ve been in recently where they’ve been packed in like sardines. And yet they say, you know what, we now believe that it’s okay, for our employees to not be vaccinated, it’s okay for our customers to not be vaccinated. And I haven’t heard of a single Starbucks shutting down. Same thing on airplanes, right? Commercial airlines has said, you know what, we’re gonna lift the mask mandate. Of course, that came because of a federal judge’s ruling. But nevertheless, how many, I fly almost on a weekly basis for my job. And I have yet to hear of a single flight being canceled because there was a COVID outbreak at 30,000 feet. So everywhere else in society has been able to figure this out, but our military hasn’t because they take such an iron fisted, draconian approach to everything. And to say, basically, no, you will do this because we said so and if you don’t, we’re gonna kick you out. And then if you come back and you say, oh, no, but my exemption is a medical exemption [see Contraindications and Precautions] not a religious exemption, then the military says, Oh, well, in that case, we welcome you with open arms. And that is textbook discrimination, right? When you treat people who have a medical exemption for more favorably than you treat somebody who has a religious exemption, that is textbook discrimination, and that’s what’s happening. And that’s why this is a sham.Jared Serbu: The Air Force case is a putative class action. If the court certifies the class does the class become all unvaccinated airmen or everyone who’s been denied a religious exemption? How large is the class?

Mike Barry: It would be everyone who is requested and been denied a religious accommodation from the vaccine mandates, specifically the COVID vaccine mandate. So that, right now that number is several thousand. I know, off the top of my head, the number in the Navy is somewhere near 4,100. It’s just under 4,100. The Air Force number is probably in the same ballpark.

Jared Serbu: Got it. I think one of the military’s concerns is what’s the limiting principle here? Because how do you avoid getting to the point where anyone can deny or refuse any lawful order by claiming that they have a sincerely held religious belief that would be encumbered by it?

Mike Barry: Well, I mean, that’s the beauty of the way that the law works, right? The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), it doesn’t, the sincerity issue is what everybody seems to be concerned with, right? Well, what if somebody’s not really sincere? And what if this is political ideology masquerading as as religious piety? Right? Well, the good news is the law is set up so that the government actually can win those cases, when all they have to do is demonstrate that they have a compelling interest. And the way that they are accomplishing their compelling interest is the least restrictive means on the person’s religious beliefs. So if you can find a way to accommodate somebody’s religious beliefs, in a less burdensome way right, a way that’s less obstructive or cumbersome on their religious exercise, then if the person is really sincere in their religious beliefs, they’ll usually accept that. They’ll accept that alternative and say, okay, you know, I’m willing to do that instead. So for example, in a different context, somebody who says that they’re a Sabbath observer, and they cannot work on the Sabbath, but that they’re willing to trade ships with somebody, most of the cases I’ve seen, they’re actually willing to take, what most people consider be a less favorable shift. Right? So if they work Sunday afternoon, or if they’re scheduled to work a particular Sunday afternoon, they say, “Well, I’m a Sabbath observer on Sundays. Hey you have the Friday night shift, right? I’m happy to take that one from you. If you want to swap with me,” and they do that through the employer, or their employer offers that. They’re usually willing to accept that and say, look, yeah, I’m happy to. Night shifts aren’t popular, especially on Friday night, and things like that. But I’m willing to do that. It’s really the same thing in the military context with this vaccine, where they’re saying, Look, teleworking or, doing a lot of these other measures, right, social distancing, masking, testing, whatever the case might be. They’re not pleasant. They’re burdensome, but the person says, “But you know what, at the end of the day, I’m not have to inject something in my body that violates my religious beliefs. I’m willing to go through that.” And usually when somebody is willing to go through those measures, that demonstrates a degree of sincerity. The problem here is that the government is simply unwilling to offer any compromises. They’re basically saying, “Nope, the vaccine is the only way that we’re going to allow you to continue to remain in the service.” And one of the things I forgot to mention was the whole concept of natural immunity. Why is the DoD ignoring natural immunity when the CDC and other epidemiologists and medical experts have all generally agreed natural immunity is a real thing. And in some cases, according to some reports, it’s even more durable than the vaccine and you don’t have to get boosters and things like that. But the DoD is just saying “Nope, we won’t even recognize that we won’t even consider it,” even though they consider natural immunity for other communicable diseases and infections and things like that.

Jared Serbu: Last thing, there’s a lot of these vaccine cases, even just military vaccine cases floating around in various district courts and circuits the moment.

Mike Barry: I think there’s almost 30 now.

Jared Serbu: Yeah, there’s a ton. Assuming, maybe I’m assuming too much. But if they eventually get consolidated in the Supreme Court grants cert [writs of certiorari] on something that considers the issue more broadly, would you expect that we’ll get a case or a ruling that goes beyond the narrow issue of vaccines and gives the military some guidance as to how RFRA and broader religious accommodation issues apply to the military?

Mike Barry: Probably not at the Supreme Court level. The Supreme Court is historically, they only address the legal issues that are brought before them, right. They don’t offer what are, in the legal speak, we call advisory opinions. In other words, it’s usually ill-advised to take an opinion on one subject or one issue, and then try to extrapolate and say and that and say, Well, that should apply across the board to all issues. So that’s usually unwise, and so practitioners who are in front of the Supreme Court frequently like us, we usually know not to do that. So I think that if one of these cases does end up in front of the Supreme Court, it will probably be addressed just on the narrow vaccine issue. And now people will be able to take the analysis Supreme Court used and say, “Okay, the way that they analyzed this issue, that might give us some indication of how they would analyze other issues,” right. But what we can’t do is say, well, because they ruled this way, in this case, this is how they’re going to rule in all cases.

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What if instead of looking at lines of code to protect the cybersecurity of military weapons systems, troops could look at a vast tableau of visualizations showing intrusions on ships, facilities and other assets?

That’s one option the Navy and the National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) are working on to gamify the way service members see cyber intrusions into their systems.

NSIN finished up its Reality Bytes: Visualizing Cyber Operations Hackathon last week, where it heard pitches from different companies about how to best show those intrusions. The prize was $70,000 to prototype solutions.

“If you look at cyber defense right now, you have teams and you have coalition partners that are created and disband, you have adversaries and you have the attempt to defend assets in an environment that is very complex,” said Rachel Bondi, technical director of cybersecurity at Navy Information War Systems Command. “For me that was very akin to what you might see in a massive multiplayer game. I was interested in taking the backend that we’ve built, and being able to display that to people who are coming out of high school or college and into the military at a young age, who are very familiar with games and gameplay, and wanted to see if there was a way to do cyber defense with those visualizations. That was the goal.”

One finalist included the University of Hawaii, where students developed CyberCOP, a virtual reality common operating picture. The project supports cyber operations in low-bandwidth, denied and degraded areas. During attacks, the program alerts users and automatically reroutes network traffic to the best route for use.

Hawaii students also created Cyberworld, which gamified datasets across multiple industries.

Other contestants used HoloLens and Oculus virtual reality consoles to visualize data and attacks.

“What they would be looking at is real assets that the Navy has and how we would defend them in a in a joint security environment for cyber operations,” Bondi said. “Some of the visuals that people came up with were actual digital twins of ships. They had different several different solutions for visualizing even signals within the air for communications, the assets themselves, visualizations of when an attack was occurring, how to identify that and pull out those different responses, which would normally be seen as lines of code or thousands of logs sitting at a desktop. It really brought it to life.”

The hope is that these programs can lower the barrier to entry for cybersecurity professionals. Anyone who is used to playing games and is familiar with the set up can strap into the virtual reality sets and defend Navy assets.

Kedar Pavgi, program manager of the hacks program at NSIN, said the next steps for the companies and student teams would be developing prototypes.

Businesses need to identify hurdles in order to build out their programs. Student groups will get aid from NSIN to help develop their solution in an academic setting.

“Our goal is that we can find opportunities, whether it’s the test and evaluation space or specific contracting opportunities, or something that is this dual use in the commercial world, where they will be able to succeed, develop the solution, and ultimately scale it in a way that is usable throughout the rest of the department,” Pavgi said.

The targets are part of the service’s new climate change strategy, which the Navy released on Tuesday. The document follows the broader Defense Department strategy, which braces the military against the future effects of extreme weather and attempts to mitigate some of the Pentagon’s impacts on the environment.

“The Navy is truly in the crosshairs of the climate crisis and it does impact our combat readiness at the Naval Academy and out in the fleet and in the Marine Corps as well too,” Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee last week. “We’re making great strides to try to come to terms with this.”

Del Toro noted that Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany became the military’s first net-zero base this month, meaning it gets as much power from renewable resources as it does from fossil fuels.

The report laid out a handful of specific targets that will achieve two specific goals: making sure the Navy and its facilities can operate in a world impacted by climate change; and reducing the Navy’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

To reduce waste, the Navy will cut back emissions by 65% by 2050, will get all of its power from carbon pollution-free sources by 2030 and buy zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. All light-duty vehicles will be zero-emission by 2027. The Navy will also reduce emissions from buildings by 50% by 2032 and divert at least half of its waste from landfills by using other methods like composting food.

The Navy has made efforts in the past to cut back on emissions, but never to this extent. In 2016, it launched its Great Green Fleet, which used alternative fuels to power ships and other vehicles.

The service is developing its strategy around DoD’s five lines of effort on climate change. Those include things like climate-informed decision making, where Navy leaders train for situations of extreme weather, and supply chain resilience, in which the Navy invests in companies that support national security and climate benefits.

“The Navy is leveraging public and private innovation in the climate and energy resilience sectors by implementing Silicon Valley-based principles through NavalX Tech Bridges and business accelerators,” the report states. “Tech Bridges attract small and medium businesses using innovation challenges, often teaming with the National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension Partnership organizations and the DoD-funded National Security Innovation Network.”

Last October, the Pentagon took its largest step yet to become more climate conscious by releasing its climate adaptation strategy. DoD announced it will create a climate chief and stated that it will consider climate in every decision it makes from now on.

“Climate change will continue to amplify operational demands on the force, degrade installations and infrastructure, increase health risks to our service members, and could require modifications to existing and planned equipment,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in the plan. “Extreme weather events are already costing the Department billions of dollars and are degrading mission capabilities.”

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The Navy builds lots of things that float, but it also needs ports, depots and other constructed facilities. The Naval Construction Battalion Center is celebrating 80 years having been established June 2, 1942. For the latest on the Seabees’ contemporary mission and activities, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turned to its commander Capt. Jeff Powell.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Capt. Powell, good to have you on.

Jeff Powell: Thanks, Tom. It’s great to be with you today.

Tom Temin: Well, let’s begin with the beginning. What exactly does the Seabees do at the Naval Construction Battalion Center?

Jeff Powell: So the Seabees were formed in World War II in 1942. There was a need for overseas construction, and that was being accomplished by civilian contractors. As the war progressed and enemy activity increased, they realize they cannot have civilians that were untrained. They want combatants out in these far flung reaches mostly in the Pacific. And so the idea was born that we needed kind of combat construction personnel. And so the original Seabees, and their numbers swelled to 350,000 or so during World War II, but the original Seabees were tradesmen. I mean, they weren’t not necessarily your 18-year-old recruits. They were some 30, 40, 50 years old at the time, and they came in at different rates and pay grades, and they put them in military formations. And their exploits during World War II were pivotal, certainly in the Pacific, but also across the European theaters.

Tom Temin: Right, they built runways and so forth.

Jeff Powell: They would go to an uninhabited island in the middle of Pacific and tear down the jungle and figure out how to get the rock and quarry and water and supplies. And they would build a runway and build a base and, I’m no aviation expert or ship expert, but our ships and our planes did not have the range that they do now. And so they needed these intermediate staging areas. They walk across the Pacific on their way to Japan and taking the fight to the enemy. So they needed a lot of bases back then. And then certainly, anytime you need expeditionary construction, quick construction, they call the Seabees. And that’s where the history and the legacy of the units were born.

Tom Temin: Now that’s less of a requirement in ordinary times nowadays. So what does the battalion do these days?

Jeff Powell: Over the years, as the Navy, the entire Department of Defense would swell up for World War II and then it would contract a little bit. We’d have, they called it peace dividend, right? Your ships are decommissioned and units are decommissioned. And then it would increase again for Korea and then it would contract again. So we have ebbed and flowed over the years. Currently there are six active duty battalions, and there are five reserve battalions. Just a few years ago, kind of the height of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were 21 total battalions. There were nine active and 12 reserves. So even in recent history, in the last 10 or 15 years, we have contracted and gone back to this steady state of now about 11 battalions. They are still deploying and so we have three active battalions here at the base in Gulfport, Mississippi. There’s three active battalions in a base out west called Port Hueneme, California. And they deploy on a six month rotation headquartered in Rota, Spain, and our case here in Gulfport. And then from there, they fanned out to all over Europe, Africa and even some of them go to the Pacific. And they are doing peacetime construction. They’re doing training, they’re doing partner kind of nation building, and their afforded presence, like a ship or any other military asset overseas ready to respond to anything that may be called upon. But they’re doing all kinds of construction. And certainly, nowadays, the specialty and the focus is going to be on airfield damage repair, port damage repair, again, when and if we need to, for a contingency getting an airfield and port facilities up and running so that our planes and our ships or submarines can refuel and resupply.

Tom Temin: I guess it’s overlooked sometimes, the fact that the Navy does need airfields because planes from carriers don’t live their entire lifecycle just on a carrier.

Jeff Powell: Correct. No, of course, I’m a little biased but I think the Navy obviously goes from space to air to surface to below surface and in my world, people for years have asked me after 27 years in the Navy, what ships have I been on? I’ve never been on a ship. I am a dirt sailor. So there’s certainly a land component to the Navy and there’s certainly need for facilities ashore. And that’s where the Seabees come in, primarily in overseas and contingency and hostile environments.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Capt. Jeff Powell. He’s commander of the Naval Construction Battalion Center – Seabees – now celebrating its 80th anniversary. So just to make sure we understand for U.S.-based facilities that need modernizing and construction, that’s not the Seabees. That’s contractors the Navy hires, otherwise?

Jeff Powell: That is correct. So Seabees might do some small projects here and there. So I mentioned their six-month deployment, they’re then home for 12 months, and that’s kind of the 18-month cycle. So while they’re home for 12 months, they might do small projects on this base, or on another base to train. But it’s a lot of classes, they’re doing weapons proficiency, they’re doing military tactics, they’re taking different specialized construction classes. They’re not necessarily building things on this base. A lot of the projects we’re doing are pretty complex. There’s lots of environmental considerations and mechanical, electrical and computer systems that have to go into a lot of our facilities now. And so those are contracted out to civilian contractors. Different tours that I’ve been in I’ve managed those kinds of projects as well. But the Seabees are kind of fast expeditionary construction, not necessarily the finished permanent facilities that we would occupy in the United States and on a military base.

Tom Temin: Yes. So what kind of talent do you need to fill out the Seabees? And what specific types of work do they do? I mean, the old pictures show people smearing concrete and digging and that kind of thing. Do they still do that kind of thing? And what kind of talent do you need?

Jeff Powell: Across the Navy, there is different ratings, right, there’s medical corpsman, and there’s air traffic controllers, and there’s engine men on ships. Well the Seabees has seven different ratings. There are builders and steel workers, electricians, utilities, men who are plumbers, engineering aides or surveyors, drafters, equipment operators, and construction mechanics. So we have tons of construction equipment, generators and all kinds of things that need to be maintained. So that’s the equipment operators. We have a training program, lots of mobile cranes. So equipment operators, mechanics keep equipment running. They also will do some, what we call horizontal construction. So they’ll do the dirt work and earthwork and digging and berms and grading and road construction. And that’s where the runways and things come in. And then we have our utilities folks which are electricians and plumbers, connecting generators, building expeditionary restroom facilities, laundry facilities, things like that. And also they can wire a house or wire an operations center if we’re building an expeditionary kind of a hut to be an operation center, they can put plumbing and power in there if they need to. And then we have your typical builder – what they’re doing – masonry, carpentry, woodworking, any kind of construction. And then we have engineering aids, which are surveyors and they’re doing the testing and some of the planning and the drawing and the drafting for those. So it all comes together in a team. You mentioned concrete, on a concrete day though, maybe every Seabee is out there, helping place the concrete because that’s kind of an all-hands-on-deck evolution. There’s definitely some what we call cross grading. You may be trained as an electrician, but you’re also gonna understand how to place concrete or maybe you have to get into a piece of equipment and operate it. So that’s kind of where the Seabees are fairly legendary for their creativity and their teamwork and their can-do spirit.

Tom Temin: Well that takes the operation of a whirlybird when you’re done with the concrete roughed in. And so what I’m driving at is that it sounds like a great Naval career that could lead to a fantastic civilian career, because those jobs are in demand, they pay well, and anyone that’s ever seen the controls of a steam shovel or a crane knows that’s complex work.

Jeff Powell: Absolutely. And I will tell you, there’s lots of great jobs in the Navy, the Seabees are definitely ones that have applicability whenever that service members done serving, whether that’s their initial four-year stint, or whether you’re 20 or 30 years. The skills that they have are definitely in demand, project planning, they’ve done some deployments, they understand construction, they understand how to work together as a team, but they definitely have a tangible skill. And I’m not taking anything away from folks that are operating weapon systems on ships or submarines or things like that. But there’s not necessarily a civilian equivalent of that as direct as the Seabees have. So it’s definitely a neat part of the Navy that a lot of folks don’t know about. I should mention numbers, there’s about 9,000 active duty Seabees. And just for context, there’s about 330,000 active duty sailors in the Navy. So it’s something like 2% of the Navy is Seabees. It’s a pretty small thing. And the Navy has mostly ships and submarines and aviation. But we are there to support and move ashore when the Navy needs us to.

Tom Temin: And how are you celebrating the 80th anniversary?

Jeff Powell: Well so two big events this year: I mentioned 1942, and March 5 is actually the birthday, the Seabees celebrated their 80th anniversary as a force, as a part of the Navy. The base here in Gulfport, Mississippi, was also formed in 1942. And more specifically in June. But we had two big events already this year with some more highlights and celebrations to come later this year. But our big event was we have a Seabee ball every year. So there’s a Navy ball and the Army has a ball and the Marine Corps has a ball. The Seabees have their own ball, and it’s a great tradition. We get dressed up and we get some great remembrances and a good speaker and a good meal. And we did that in March. And then a better part of a month ago here we had what we call Seabee Day on the base, which is an open house, static displays of weapons and equipment and materials, and we had food vendors and live music and essentially our version of an air show for this base. It’s open to the public and we had about 4,000 to 5,000 people here. It’s something we do every couple of years and we happened to do this year with a theme built around the 80th anniversary of the base and how important it is to the community here in South Mississippi.

Tom Temin: And you said there’s some more coming up though.

Jeff Powell: We’ll just continue to have profiles and we’re getting some good public affairs products out there. And there’s some proclamations still coming from the city and some things like that that are gonna to celebrate the great relationship we have with the city of Gulfport, Mississippi.

Tom Temin: Yeah, probably a good chance to remind your congressional overseers too, and appropriators, “Hey, we’re here and look what we do.”

Jeff Powell: Right. It’s interesting, a lot of folks don’t know there’s Navy bases in Mississippi. There’s 70 bases in the Navy and we’re one of them, and we have an important mission. And I should just mention, we don’t just have Seabees here, we have other tenants. There’s about 40 tenants on this base. We provide some other services. They’re building ships in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and there’s also a huge Navy presence out at Stennis Space Center. We provide some services out there as well. So there’s a lot of military here and on the coast of Mississippi, and we’re the lone base down here providing a lot of the support and services to enable them to do their missions.

Tom Temin: And as commander, did you come up through the Seabees yourself and what was your particular skills?

Jeff Powell: I’m not prior enlisted, I went to Clemson University in South Carolina – Go Tigers – I’m sorry, I have to say that. And then I’ve done a variety of tours. So in our community as an officer community, we’re not always with the Seabees. I’m sometimes with just the short facilities I mentioned, managing civil and construction contracts or I’ve been the public works officer of a base. I’ve been to D.C. and worked at the Pentagon on the programming and budgeting side. Done lots of deployments and different things. I’ve had about five tours with the Seabees in different capacities as leadership capacities, but I don’t necessarily have a trade. I mean, my background, my degrees are in engineering. So that’s the leadership and oversight that I provide to the units as I’ve been with them.

Tom Temin: Well if you know your way around the [Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution process], that’s kind of a trade in and of itself.

Jeff Powell: Oh, yes. I enjoyed D.C. It’s fantastic, good tour, in fact I counsel a lot of our mid-grade and junior officers that they have to get to D.C. to understand how the sausage is made and how the Navy and the nation works. And so it was a great tour, and I really enjoyed my time in the Pentagon. Hard to believe that but that is true.

Tom Temin: All right. Capt. Jeff Powell is commander of the Naval Construction Battalion Center, the Seabees, now celebrating its 80th anniversary. Thanks so much for joining me.

Jeff Powell: It’s great, Tom, great to talk to you and thanks for your time this morning.

The Navy’s top enlisted sailor says the pandemic has exacerbated mental health issues throughout the service and there is a serious lack of mental health professionals to care for service members.

“Except for the most egregious cases like those at the precipice of suicide, appointment times average five weeks,” Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Russel Smith told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Tuesday. “We’ve had some successes in doing more with less, but few outcomes remain achievable through efficiencies alone.”

The Navy has been able to make some extra capacity through programs like the Mental Health Operational Outreach Division in San Diego, which facilitates collaboration between medical facilities, support centers and embedded medical assets to provide about 100 walk-ins a week. However, Smith said many of those programs have been expanded to their full potential without additional resources.

The Navy, and the nation as a whole, is facing a shortage of mental health professionals. Smith said in his written testimony that the Navy still have half of its Deployed Resiliency Counselor positions vacant. Those positions provide short-term non-medical counseling that has been helpful for sailors aboard ships.

“While it’s important to recognize that we have had some success in the mental health struggle by making these adjustments and improvements, there are very few outcomes that remain to be achieved through efficiencies alone,” Smith said. “We also need to continue efforts to recruit and retain mental providers, and recognize as we do so that we are in competition with the civilian sector for this unique talent.”

The Navy is currently investigating five suicides on the USS George Washington. Three occurred last month.

Smith said he did not think the issue was leadership on first blush.

“As a sailor who has been through several dry dockings, it is the hardest thing, far harder than deployment,” he said.

Smith said Newport News is oversaturated because it is attending to two carriers. The location is having trouble accommodating the quality of life sailors need in terms of mental health care, traffic, parking, childcare and other issues.

He added that it is still too early to tell what the biggest problems are without finishing the investigation.

Smith said that chief petty officers need to do a better job at leaning in and being the first care providers to their sailors.

“They need to be that first compassionate shoulder, the person who says ‘What’s going on?’” Smith said. “They need to recognize a difference or a change in pattern that lets you know something is different and something needs to be done.”

The military is wrestling with some of its highest suicide rates. The Pentagon commissioned an independent review committee to look into military suicide and make recommendations.

“It is imperative that we take care of all our teammates and continue to reinforce that mental health and suicide prevention remain a key priority,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in the memo establishing the committee. “One death by suicide is one too many. And suicide rates among our service members are still too high. So, clearly we have more work to do.”

The issue of whether there should be a Space National Guard has gone back and forth between Defense officials and lawmakers for the past couple years. Now, legislators are making moves to establish a part-time component for the new service.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers are introducing a bill in both houses to create a Space National Guard. The effort led by Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) would ensure a pipeline for guardians to work part-time and move between active duty and the Guard.

It would eliminate the need for the Space Force to route funding between it and the Air Force, and would allow the Space Force more control over Guard members who work on space functions.

Currently there are more than 1,000 Air National Guard members who perform space missions.

“Without a National Guard component for Space Force, we risk losing many talented individuals who want to keep serving their country and their states after they leave active duty, and that is simply unacceptable,” Feinstein said. “Creating a Space Force National Guard would also save money and ensure a smoother process in the event we need to activate personnel. Not establishing a Space National Guard was a mistake when Space Force was created, and this bill will remedy that.”

Not everyone is convinced that a Space National Guard is the best idea, however. Kaitlyn Johnson, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tweeted last Friday that she thinks the component is a bad idea.

“Why would a governor ever need satellite operators to support their state/local issues? The argument that people are already doing this is not a good one — sounds like a realignment issue and not a ‘Let’s just create another bureaucratic org,’” she wrote. “What happened to the Space Force being new/revolutionary/unique? What happened to redefining how we support the space mission? Seems to me like Feinstein and Rubio are forcing the opposite values that the USSF was established on to get more money for their states.”

The Space Force itself isn’t so sure it wants a traditional Guard component. Service officials floated the idea of a “space component” last month during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, which would be a hybrid structure merging full- and part-time guardians.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond described it as the service’s number one legislative priority.

“You could keep the Guard units in the Air National Guard and have the Air National Guard continue to provide support,” Raymond said. “Option two is you could take the men and women out of the Air National Guard and set up a separate Space National Guard. Or you can take those capabilities out of the Guard totally and put them in this one component.” — SM

Air Force missing out on DoD’s colorless money software pilots

As part of its 2023 budget, the Air Force is making a serious effort at getting in on the Defense Department’s effort to prove that budgeting for software development is very, very different from budgeting for traditional weapons systems.

As of now, the Air Force is the only military service that’s not participating in DoD’s Software and Digital Technology Pilot Program at all. And the vast majority of the Pentagon’s overall proposed increase for 2023 within the pilot effort is explained by Air Force requests to change that. The service has teed up eight potential candidates for Congressional consideration.

Under the program sometimes called the “Budget Activity 8” pilot, DoD components are allowed to use “colorless” money for software development, without having to worry about whether the phase of development they’re in should be funded by R&D, procurement or operations accounts. Critics have long argued that funding construct, intended for weapons system development, makes no sense for software and simply bogs down efforts toward agile development.

Andrew Hunter, the recently-confirmed assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, said his discovery that the Air Force wasn’t participating in the pilot caused him “dismay” when he assumed the new role.

“But it’s not from lack of interest,” he said during a conference hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School last week. “The Air Force submitted several candidates [in past years] to be part of the software pilot program, but we were unsuccessful in the competition for being selected. I’m rueful that we aren’t doing it. And it’s maybe slightly ironic, because I’d like to think the Air Force was a leading voice in making the case for the flexibilities required to do effective software development.”

The pilot program is only in its second year, but so far, Congress hasn’t shown overwhelming enthusiasm toward expanding it. Lawmakers didn’t approve the addition of any new programs between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022. The House Appropriations Committee’s version of the 2022 bill would have expanded the program, but its Senate counterpart never approved a Defense spending bill of its own.

Overall, for 2023, the Defense budget proposal would place $1.785 billion worth of DoD software programs in the BA-8 pilot, up from the $742 million Congress approved for this year. The vast majority of that increase would come from the Air Force’s proposed additions, which total $946 million.

The programs include:

• Strategic Mission Planning and Execution System ($100 million)
• Air & Space Operations Center ($178 million)
• Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System ($136 million)
• Distributed Cyber Warfare Operations ($37 million)
• Air Force Defensive Cyber Systems ($241 million)
• All Domain Common Platform ($190 million)
• Air Force Weather Programs ($58 million)
• Electronic Warfare Integrated Reprogramming ($6 million)

—JS

USS George Washington deaths on Austin’s radar

The tragic events aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington are catching the attention of the nation’s top Defense official.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers last week he was concerned about the three suicides aboard the ship last month and the five in total over the past year.

“This is a really, really important issue,” Austin told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. “That’s why we’re asking you for, in this budget, additional resources to help us provide greater access to our troops which includes telehealth care opportunities as well.”

About 400 sailors were living aboard the USS George Washington as it is being repaired in Newport News, Virginia. The Navy is now moving more than 250 sailors off the ship for mental health purposes and is looking at moving all the sailors to short.

“There are choices that have been made or will be made in the future in terms of how billet sailors when that repair is ongoing,” Austin said. Whether or not we made the right choices is left to be seen. Certainly there’s a problem there, we got to understand what that problem was a bit more and then we have to figure out what to do to ensure that we don’t have these kinds of problems in the future.”

Austin is waiting on two investigations from the Navy on the climate and command aboard the ship. The maintenance is taking longer than expected and the ship will be docked for another year. It was supposed to be finished this year.

“For hundreds of those sailors they have no access to housing or a car and they’re stuck on a ship. This is really demoralizing,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said. “I am troubled by the Defense submission on the Navy because I see it getting worse. I just wanted to point a flashlight at this part of the budget and say, we got to do something and I’m not sure what it is.”

There have been seven deaths in the last year among the 2,700 sailors working aboard the ship as it is overhauling at a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia.

Five of those deaths are apparent suicides, three of which were in the space of one week last month, leading the service and others to wonder about the mental health among the Nimitz-class carrier.

The Navy is already taking some steps to address mental health concerns. It has embossed a 13-person special psychiatric rapid intervention team to provide services from April 16-19. The ship also added an additional clinical psychologist and social worker. Sailors are being given expedited appointments with mental health services on shore in Hampton Roads. Telehealth options are also available.

NBC News reported that the Navy is offering other morale boosting activities like a video game competition and soccer tournament.

However, sailors told NBC that morale remains low and some feel that the efforts are too little, too late.

Late last month, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) sent a letter to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday asking for answers on conditions and climate aboard the ship.

“I am calling on the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, and CNO Gilday to provide the House Armed Services Committee and members of Congress with a full accounting of what steps are being taken to address command climate, safety concerns, mental health, and other issues that may have contributed to this tragic loss of life on USS George Washington,” she said. “Every member of our armed forces must be treated with respect, and we have an obligation to ensure that our active-duty personnel on USS George Washington and around the world are being heard and supported while serving our country.” — SM

It’s the only military academy, so far, where cadets may face such penalties. The Army and Navy said that as of now, none of their seniors are being prevented from graduating at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., or the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, due to vaccine refusals. The graduations are in about two weeks.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin last year made the COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory for service members, including those at the military academies, saying the vaccine is critical to maintaining military readiness and the health of the force.

Military leaders have argued that troops for decades have been required to get as many as 17 vaccines in order to maintain the health of the force, particularly those deploying overseas. Students arriving at the military academies get a regimen of shots on their first day, such as measles, mumps and Rubella, if they aren’t already vaccinated. And they routinely get regular flu shots in the fall.

Members of Congress, the military and the public have questioned if the exemption reviews by the military services have been fair. And there have been multiple lawsuits filed against the mandate, mainly centering on the fact that very few service members have been granted religious exemptions from the shots.

Until the COVID-19 vaccine, very few military members sought religious exemptions to any vaccines.

Lt. Col. Brian Maguire, Air Force Academy spokesman said that while vaccination status may hinder the four seniors’ graduation, “there are still two weeks until graduation, so their status could change as the cadets weigh their options.”

According to Maguire, the four cadets, who are not named, have been informed of the potential consequences, and have met with the academy’s superintendent. In addition to those four, there are two juniors, one sophomore and six freshmen at the academy who have also refused the vaccine.

The military academies for years have required students under certain circumstances to repay tuition costs if they leave during their junior or senior year. Often those involve students with disciplinary issues or similar problems. The costs can be as much as $200,000, or more, and any final decision on repayment is made by the service secretary.

West Point said that there are no members of the Class of 2022 who have refused to get the vaccine.

Across the military, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have discharged nearly 4,000 active duty service members for refusing the vaccine. According to recent data released by the services, more than 2,100 Marines, 900 sailors, 500 Army soldiers and 360 airmen have been thrown out of the military, and at least 50 were discharged during entry level training, before they moved into active duty service.

Those who flatly refuse the vaccine without seeking an exemption are still being discharged. But the courts have stalled additional discharges of service members who sought religious exemptions.

Last month, a federal judge in Texas barred the Navy from taking action for now against sailors who have objected to being vaccinated on religious grounds.

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor had, in January, issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Navy from disciplining or discharging 35 sailors who sued over the Navy’s vaccine policy while their case played out. In April, O’Connor agreed the case could go forward as a class action lawsuit and issued a preliminary injunction covering about 4,000 sailors who have objected on religious grounds to being vaccinated.

Also last month, a federal judge in Ohio granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Air Force from disciplining a dozen officers and some additional airmen and reservists who were seeking religious exemptions. The officers, mostly from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, filed a lawsuit in February after their exemption requests were denied.

According to the military, as many as 20,000 service members have asked for religious exemptions. Thousands have been denied.

As of recent data, the Air Force has approved 73 religious exemptions, the Marine Corps has approved seven, and the Army has approved eight. Prior to the injunction, the Navy conditionally approved one reservist and 26 active duty requests for religious exemptions, and 10 requests from members of the Individual Ready Reserve. The IRR approvals mean that those sailors don’t have to be vaccinated until they are actually called to serve.

About 99% of the active duty Navy and 98% of the Air Force, Marine Corps and Army have gotten at least one shot.

The Navy knows its shipyards are in rough shape. To help solve the problem, officials started an ambitious renovation plan in 2018 that will spend $21 billion over the next two decades.

But the massive shipyard overhaul is off to a rocky start. The backlog of needed improvements is growing, not shrinking; costs are escalating, and in the case of at least one yard, overall facility conditions have gotten measurably worse instead of better.

Navy officials said they are still learning lessons about how to approach the massive recapitalization project for the service’s four aging public shipyards, and that four years into what’s called the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program (SIOP), they now have a better handle on how to control costs.

Jay Stefany, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition said the service is fully committed to what it views as a “once-in-a-century opportunity” to modernize the shipyards, and the service’s 2023 budget reflects its biggest investment in years: $1.7 billion in 2023, and a total of $8.3 billion over the next five years.

“We understand that for SIOP to succeed, we must properly plan and execute the work without impacting the shipyards’ ability to execute their mission,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week. “Balancing SIOP’s needs with the needs of the fleet is and will continue to be a critical and iterative process involving all stakeholders. We are committed to working as a team to ensure the program is ruthlessly executed to avoid impacting fleet operations or ship maintenance periods.”

But despite the Navy’s commitment to recapitalize the facilities, the Government Accountability Office said there are reasons to be worried about how SIOP is going.

The office’s most recent reporting shows the overall project hasn’t made a dent in the deferred maintenance backlog — rather, it’s grown by $1.6 billion over the past five years, and now totals more than $7 billion. Meanwhile, more than half the equipment in the shipyards is now past its planned service life. And at one yard, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia, facility condition ratings have gotten worse, not better.

“Big picture, all four of the public shipyards are still rated as poor in terms of overall facility conditions, and we remain gravely concerned about that,” said Diana Maurer, a GAO director for Defense capabilities and management. “The estimated costs for the first three drydock improvement projects have grown from just under $1 billion to nearly $6 billion. That does not bode well for the future costs of the 11 other planned drydock projects. [We’re also] concerned that these increasing drydock costs could crowd out other planned [shipyard] improvements. Drydocks should be a top priority, but they are not the only priority.”

But Navy officials think they now have a better understanding of how to control construction cost growth going forward.

Naval Facilities Engineering Command, which is in charge of striking deals with contractors for the shipyard construction projects, is now engaging in discussions with vendors much earlier in the process. Meanwhile, the Navy has also placed a single senior official in charge of the overall SIOP program, treating it with the same sort of management rigor as it would a major Defense acquisition program.

“One of the lessons was getting the design much more mature before we actually put out a formal estimate,” Stafany said. “I feel like the projects — the ones we have planned in the next five years — are mature enough that there’s not going to be continued growth on those projects. And we have enough funding to do the work we need to do in those years.”

But GAO said there are still a lot of unknowns, partly because the SIOP program isn’t even fully developed yet.

The Navy’s long-term approach calls for each of the four public shipyards to have their own detailed investment plan, called an Area Development Plan. Those detailed planning efforts have been delayed by three years, and the Navy doesn’t currently expect them to be fully drafted until 2025.

And beyond the shipyards’ capacity to meet current ship maintenance demands, Maurer said GAO’s biggest concern is that the sorts of drydocks that will be needed to service the newer classes of nuclear powered ships it’s adding to the fleet in the next couple of decades – the Ford Class carrier and the Virginia Class submarine – don’t exist at all.

Even if the docks could adequately accommodate those ships, the industrial facilities surrounding them aren’t quite up to the task either.

“These shipyards were built well over a century ago to repair wind and steam powered ships. Their layout is far from efficient to maintain nuclear powered vessels,” she said. “Moving the people, equipment and parts necessary to repair a submarine is like trying to drive the century old streets of Boston.”

But the Navy emphasizes the SIOP plan isn’t just about digging out of the huge deferred maintenance backlog. Officials say by the time those area development plans are complete, they’ll have answers for issues like outdated facility layout and inefficient workflows too.

Vice Admiral William Galinis, the commander of Naval Sea Systems Command — which operates the shipyards — said the Navy is consulting its own shipyard workforce to solve some of those problems, as part of a separate effort called Naval Sustainment System-Shipyard.

“We target the workforce for specific things in terms of the barriers that they see,” he said. “Leadership within my organization, and me personally, have been sitting down with small groups of mechanics and supervisors to just kind of have a discussion about whether what we’re trying to get after matches up with some of the challenges that they’re seeing. In some cases, we’re seeing that close lash up. In other cases, we’re not. So we’re really starting to see, down at the trade level at the waterfront, the embrace of some of the improvement initiatives that we’re putting in place. That’s where it needs to start in order to sustain what we’re doing.”

The Navy said it is now investigating a rash of deaths among sailors working on the aircraft carrier USS George Washington.

There have been seven deaths in the last year among the 2,700 sailors working aboard the ship as it is overhauling at a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia.

Five of those deaths are apparent suicides, three of which were in the space of one week last month, leading the service and others to wonder about the mental health among the Nimitz-class carrier. About 400 of the sailors lived aboard the ship as it was docked for maintenance.

Adm. Daryl Caudle, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, directed Rear Adm. John Meier, commander of Naval Air Force Atlantic, to start an investigation into the deaths of the sailors and correlations, command climate, cultural issues and the systemic relationship between them, Naval Air Force Atlantic spokesman Cmdr. Robert Myers told Federal News Network.

“Meier directed Rear Adm. Brad Dunham, deputy commander of Naval Air Force Atlantic, to lead a larger team to assess various quality of life considerations for aircraft carriers currently undergoing maintenance,” Myers said. “This team will review areas such as command climate, safety, habitability, personnel/manning, mental health, security, human factors, Navy policy regarding sailors residing aboard the ship during extended maintenance availabilities, and disciplinary and administrative procedures.”

The Navy is already taking some steps to address mental health concerns. It has embossed a 13-person special psychiatric rapid intervention team to provide services from April 16-19. The ship also added an additional clinical psychologist and social worker. Sailors are being given expedited appointments with mental health services on shore in Hampton Roads. Telehealth options are also available.

There were 400 sailors living on the ship during the overhaul. On May 2, the captain offered to bring 260 sailors ashore.

“Quality of life such concerns such as cell phone repeaters in the skin of the ship, WiFi, and better morale, welfare and recreation support for off-duty sailors, are being pursued as well,” Myers said. “The ship is installing cell phone repeaters to allow all cell phone carriers to have service in select areas aboard the ship, to include the mess decks.”

NBC News reported Thursday that the Navy is offering other morale boosting activities like a video game competition and soccer tournament.

However, sailors told NBC that morale remains low and some feel that the efforts are too little, too late.

The USS George Washington is not expected to complete its maintenance until March next year. Sailors have reported poor living conditions like noise, garbage aboard the ship, sickening smells and long commutes.

Late last month, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) sent a letter to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday asking for answers on conditions and climate aboard the ship.

“I am calling on the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, and CNO Gilday to provide the House Armed Services Committee and members of Congress with a full accounting of what steps are being taken to address command climate, safety concerns, mental health, and other issues that may have contributed to this tragic loss of life on USS George Washington,” she said. “Every member of our armed forces must be treated with respect, and we have an obligation to ensure that our active-duty personnel on USS George Washington and around the world are being heard and supported while serving our country.”

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

In the fourth installment of interviews from the Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, we explored two futuristic systems. Neither is ready for mounting on the deck of a Navy ship, but both work in advanced laboratory test beds. Adam Jones, head of advanced hypersonics and guided munitions, and Ben Tritt, the chief of Dahlgren’s high energy laser weapons systems, spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin‘s, after demonstrating a laser cutting a big hole in a thick piece of steel.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: So is your purpose making two-inch holes and half inch steel?

Ben Tritt: Sometimes it is, but it’s all part of a larger effort. So we have a laser weapon systems division here, a major part of which is this lethality lab in which we do testing on materials and subcomponents and components in order to understand the effect that a laser weapon has on threats, basically. So we can help our designers and engineers and scientists who put together the entire laser weapon system, do it correctly, and then be also capable of predicting how our laser will do in the field against threats. And we also share that information with our partners, other services, other labs, we work closely with the Army and the Air Force, we share results with industry and academia. It’s a total team effort to really develop these cutting edge technologies that we’re developing here.

Tom Temin: What about international partners?

Ben Tritt: So our international partnership is very limited.

Tom Temin: And what is the nature of the workforce? What kind of skills and talents do you need to do this kind of work?

Ben Tritt: That’s a great question. So we have four branches here. We have one branch of about 30 people who focused on laser sources, and also lethality testing. And those are made up of physicists, optomechanical engineers, optical specialists. The second branch we have really gets into the optics and beam control. When the laser leaves its fiber, it needs to be controlled in order to put the right size spot on the target at a great distance. So physicists, electrical engineers, optomechanical engineers, mechanical engineers all work together in a team in order to design a system that can put that laser spot on a target at great distances. And we put these systems on platforms, ships, trucks, you name it. And those platforms like the ships when it’s out at sea, it’s moving. So we have to design systems that compensate for the up and down and left and right movement of the ship at sea, as well as for the tiny vibrations that occur from let’s say, the ship hull, mechanical systems, the engines, the propeller, all of which can really disturb these precise optical systems and cause the laser beam to expand in an unwanted fashion so that we don’t get the right power on the target where we want it. And then our targets are also moving. So we have other engineers and scientists who are working with advanced systems from industry with cameras and tracking systems to be able to track and pick an exact aim point and keep the laser on that aim point until we get the desired effect. That kind of brings us back to this lethality testing that we do in this lab is we work with the military, we work with the warfighter to identify the threats. And then we figure out well what is the material or the subsystem or the system that we want to test. A lot of preparation goes into planning a test. So all of that intel, combined with setting up the laser at the right power, combined with putting the target in its correct configuration, and then figuring out what the desired effect is. You saw an example of just melting through a piece of steel, but we do other materials also. And sometimes it’s not melting. If you think about putting your phone next to a fireplace, it’s gonna get hot, right, and at some point, stop working. Well maybe that’s what we want to happen with whatever this target is. We just want something to stop functioning. That’s another type of lethality test that we can do.

Tom Temin: And just as Dahlgren has a range for shells downriver, you also have a laser range here, too, correct?

Ben Tritt: Yes, so depending upon the size of what we’re testing, and how we’re testing, we might do tests in this building. We might use our 380-foot-long tunnel to do extended range testing indoors. But then if we’re testing a large enough item, let’s say a complete system is what we’re aiming at, we can’t do that in here. We’ll take our lasers and our equipment or an actual laser weapon system that we’ve built out to the range. We can fire across the river over into the experimental explosive area. If we go beyond that we take our systems on the road and go to other locations where we partner, let’s say with the Army, Air Force or academia, to do tests at their locations also.

Tom Temin: And by the way, that tunnel you mentioned that has a history too, doesn’t it?

Ben Tritt: Yeah, it’s an interesting history. It dates back to at least World War II when it was used for people to walk down safely while machine gunfire continued outside. They’ve replaced the targets quickly and go back into the tunnel to allow the firing to resume quickly and not waste the time to walk down 382 feet without firing.

Tom Temin: And every time you test the laser, does it go dark or brown out in King George County?

Ben Tritt: No. Fortunately, the base has done a great job investing into upgrades like this building, connecting it to the tunnel, and then providing us with the power we need to operate these lasers.

Tom Temin: And fair to say one of the operational or deployment challenges aboard a ship will be power I imagine.

Ben Tritt: So that’s another part of our team. I mentioned, we have the laser experts, the beam control experts, the optical experts, but we also have mechanical and electrical and systems engineers who know how to tie the entire system together. So it’s not just the power to it, but also the heat rejection, cooling of the entire system to allow it to operate. And the final piece of our team is also software because all weapon systems are software controlled. And we have a whole team that designs the software that the warfighters use. So the operator interface, and then also we team with other parts of Dahlgren to do fire control software and integrate our laser weapon systems into the combat system, for example, of the ships that we’re putting these weapons on.

Tom Temin: I’ve got a whole box of old computers I have to dispose off. If I brought them down here could they all get zapped as part of your tests?

Ben Tritt: You’d have to pay us, yeah.

Tom Temin: That was Ben Tritt, the chief of Dahlgren’s high energy laser weapons systems. Next I spoke with Adam Jones, head of advanced hypersonics and guided munitions. You focus on the hypersonic question as a system more than as a bullet that goes fast or launch system, correct?

Adam Jones: That’s right. It’s all part of a bigger weapon system integration effort in my mind. We develop weapons here, NSWC Dahlgren. Part of our job is to ensure that these new advanced weapons are integrated properly aboard our platforms.

Tom Temin: And right now we’re standing next to a railgun. And it’s quite long, and there’s a whole room full of gear here. Clearly, this could not go on a ship. So tell us about the facility that you have here and what it is you do with it.

Adam Jones: So this facility is part of our effort here at NSWC Dahlgren to kind of reinvent the range, relook at new technologies that are coming up, hypersonics being one of those, and this facility deemed high rise, a hypersonic research and integration for surface engagement facility is intended to look at a number of different challenges in hypersonics flight. Some S&T pieces, like weather impact, lethality impact, there’s also some neurosciences, aerothermal things that we’d like to learn out of this facility to the be all, end all is look at the integration and the weapon system integration of these weapons aboard our platforms where we’ll have hardware in the loop capabilities. And we’ll have some instrumentation and T&E things down on the other end of the site. Now the railgun’s part of our T&E piece here because we have a long history of working electromagnetic launch, aka railgun here at Dalhgren, and we’re repurposing these assets for testing purposes to be able to achieve cheap hypersonic flight. We can fire routinely here at Dahlgren, 10 shots a day here on the range at hypersonic speeds. So the ability to fire 30-pound projectiles downrange and collect data on those is what we’re going to use this for.

Tom Temin: And the collection of data takes place in the cone-shape projectile you developed here. So that’s not a weapons platform, but it’s a hypersonic data gathering type of platform, correct?

Adam Jones: That’s correct. Yeah so we develop electronics, and we develop sensors, and packages that go into slugs or aerodynamic shaped projectiles to gather pertinent data for the hypersonics community. And they’re modeling and simulation and design tools.

Tom Temin: And hypersonics is not new, is it? I mean, it’s in the news a lot and Russia said they have it and China says they have it. So all of a sudden, everybody’s talking hypersonics. Dahlgren has a history of hypersonics that goes back decades, correct?

Adam Jones: That’s correct. Hypersonics is not new to Dahlgren. We have 70-plus years of working in that regime. Hypersonics to us, is an adjective. It’s not a noun. You know, we have a history of working in that flight regime. It’s defined as Mach 5 and above. So submarine launched ballistic missiles re-entry vehicles, standard missile, projectiles, railgun – we have a long history of working in that flight regime.

Tom Temin: And railgun is one methodology. Are you also working on the engine type of accelerator, too?

Adam Jones: Right now the railgun is definitely a big piece of that. As far as data and instrumentation perspective, we have worked efforts in the past that look at ramjet/scramjet technology. We were working with industry partners on some testing of those technologies currently.

Tom Temin: And with the data gathering hyper cone, you recently did a kind of record launch. Tell us about that one.

Adam Jones: Yeah, we’re really proud of that effort. It’s a good hands-on effort for our engineers here at Dahlgren. We were able to leverage our hypervelocity projectile experience that we have here at Dahlgren and design a new, what we call the hyper cone, a little simpler version of the hypervelocity projectile. We designed, instrumented, built several, fabricated several of these within a six-month timeframe. Using our junior and senior engineers here on the base. Took those projectiles down to White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and fired these out of our railgun that we have out there at that test site and fired at 209 nautical miles of range, which is a world record for most projectiles.

Tom Temin: And that range already is to the point of where it would be tactically important when the deployment days finally come.

Adam Jones: Those ranges certainly could be depending on what type of system what you’re looking at, what type of mission that you’re looking at that range could definitely be a relevant range.

Tom Temin: And if you put a wedge under that railgun that you launch that from, how far do you think it could have gone?

Adam Jones: Well, that gun out there is elevatable. We have this gun here, which is obviously fixed elevation. That gun at White Sands Missile Range, we are able to elevate the gun.

Tom Temin: All right, and what is the big challenge? What’s the one grand challenge between what we’re seeing here on the floor and all the pieces in the testbed and a shipboard, reliable hypersonic that we could scare the bad guys with?

Adam Jones: I think there are a number of challenges. But I think the key one that we’re trying to solve here is, we know there have been a number of successes demonstrating hypersonic technology here in the United States, with our industry partners, and our DoD partners. But the key piece here is to ensure that we have the end state in mind when we design these systems. So we have to really consider the platform integration pieces of hypersonics. We have to be able to have the system work within our combat systems. It has to work on the right platform. We have to have the right level of integration expertise and ensure all the interfaces are correct so that we make the right acquisition decisions moving forward down the road.

Tom Temin: But in the meantime, NAVSEA really wants this.

Adam Jones: Oh absolutely. Hypersonics is an enabler. Speed, better lethality and impact, more range, quicker time to range, more maneuverability. There are a whole host of reasons why we wouldn’t want to explore hypersonics for our weapons here for the Navy.