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maintenance at its shipyards, including with a huge, multiyear and multibillion dollar program to modernize the yards’ outdated infrastructure.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.”

The Defense Department and its components are now into their fifth consecutive year of having their financial statements scrutinized by independent auditors. In the first few years, there were some very promising signs that DoD was on the path to eventually earning a clean opinion, as every other federal agency has already done.

But in the assessment of the department’s inspector general — the office with overall responsibility for auditing the financial statements — it’s getting more difficult to find clear signs of widespread financial improvement. To be sure, Defense components are still finding and fixing a lot of individual problems. But as of 2021, there was little to suggest the department was making significant headway against the systemic problems that are holding it back from a clean audit.

That’s at least one of the biggest takeaways from the latest edition of a plain-language summary the OIG publishes each year to summarize the billion dollar-per-year audit effort.

Marcus Gullett, the deputy assistant inspector general for audit, financial management and reporting, said the scale of the DoD audit effort is massive, and in the OIG’s view, still a completely worthwhile endeavor, but that DoD leadership needs to do more to ensure those efforts bear fruit.

“We’re talking about over $900 billion in appropriations. Fifty-four percent of total government assets are in the DoD, and this involves over 1,200 auditors across 26 standalone audits. So it’s worth commending the efforts that the audit teams and the components put in year in and year out,” he said in a wide-ranging interview discussing the results on Federal News Network’s On DoD. “But 17 of those 26 standalone audits have disclaimers of opinion, which basically just means that there’s not enough audit evidence available to conclude that the financial statements are fairly presented. So the theme for FY 2021, frankly, is that the progress has stalled.”

While the audit is a vast enterprise and DoD has had some successes, the overall statistics do tend to suggest the department is treading water.

This year’s financial statements showed the military departments and Defense agencies managed to solve 808 distinct problems — called notices of findings and recommendations (NFRs), in audit parlance. But auditors reissued another 2,678 NFRs that had already been identified in past years’ audits, and added another 690 to the pile this year.

Another way of looking at the problem is to measure DoD’s number material weaknesses: broad categories of problems that are so serious that they could lead to meaningful misstatements about, for example, the department’s spending in a particular area, the valuation of its assets, or the inventory it has on hand.

In 2021, there were 28 of them, two more than the previous year, and 25 were repeats from the 2020 audit. In 2020, there were 17 DoD components that hadn’t yet earned an individual clean opinion. The number was still the same as of 2021.

“One way to think about this is that when we issue NFRs, management agrees with us. We have over 90% concurrence rates, and they’re developing corrective action plans,” Gullett said. “There’s a cadence there of being willing to address a specific issue.”

The harder part seems to be getting DoD financial management leaders to see the forest for the trees — and take serious steps to resolve the much harder underlying challenges that many of those NFRs point toward.

“We’ve been pretty consistent in messaging over the last few years that this effort needs to lead to developing sustainable business processes,” he said. “What we might see, for example, is in the IT realm. One particular system may have an access control issue, so the auditor issues an NFR. And next year, the component addresses the issue in System A. But then, the auditor comes back and says, ‘Okay, the issue is fixed in System A, but System B has the same exact access control issue this year.’ So that’s the type of enterprisewide thinking we need to see before the components are able to move toward addressing the material weaknesses that flow from all of those NFRs.”

But the OIG thinks there’s reason for optimism on that front. During the first few years of audits, many of the politically-appointed leadership positions critical to that enterprisewide view were vacant or led by acting officials. That’s no longer the case. DoD’s top two financial management positions are now held by Senate-confirmed officials. The Army and Air Force also have Senate-confirmed leaders in their respective comptroller/CFO seats.

In the early days of the audit effort, DoD ordered each of its components to draw up credible “roadmaps” for how that component could achieve a clean opinion. Now that those positions are filled, there’s a good opportunity for the Pentagon to not just hold the components to their plans, but for DoD as a whole to draw up one of its own.

“The roadmaps are oftentimes inconsistent across components. They also have sort of vague measures of success,” Gullett said. “So one of the things we’re focused on in developing measurable goals is taking a top down approach from the DoD comptroller level: sort of pushing down their expectations for these roadmaps.”

And asked whether DoD’s “stalled” progress means it’s time to reassess the overall audit effort, Gullett said the answer is clearly no.

After all, most of the 800 NFRs the department managed to close over the past year really were financial management weaknesses that should have been solved anyway, even if the audit weren’t the driving factor behind them. And the more DoD can do to communicate the operational impact of fixing its finances, the better.

“Each year the auditors identify something tangible, it kind of highlights [that’s] important,” Gullett said. “This past year, the Navy highlighted that its inventory records showed [less than what it had]. At another Defense Logistics Agency site, DLA wasn’t measuring certain metals accurately. We have example after example, and the risk here is that if you don’t know what you have and where you have it, your ability to accomplish your mission can be hampered. I’d also point to contingencies. Ukraine, or COVID-19, or Afghanistan. Those things happen, if DoD doesn’t have the controls in place to pivot to support these contingencies, that’s going to have a bigger impact on the overall operating budget. So this is an opportunity to really hone in developing those sustainable solutions with clear goals, holding the components accountable, and kickstarting the audit progress again.”

For several years now, the Air Force, at its most senior levels, has recognized its policies and procedures have a strong tendency to force airmen to misspend their time on ancillary tasks instead of the ones they signed up for.

The service has had some success at reducing distractions like excessive computer-based training and performance evaluations, but it’s done less in the arena of bureaucratic administrivia. Things like paperwork.

Just like many other government agencies, the Air Force’s internal processes live and breathe via forms that have to be filled out manually, and each one takes time. How much? That was a difficult question to answer until the Virginia Air National Guard’s 192nd Wing saw a chance to do things differently.

“The information we were filling out on these forms was very repetitive: ‘Who’s your supervisor? What’s your social security number?’ And everything that they need to know on all these forms is already known about us. There’s technology out there that should be pre-populating this information,” said Chief Master Sgt. Joseph Young, who helped launch just such a technology solution while he served as the 192nd Operations Group’s senior enlisted leader. Young now serves as the senior enlisted leader for wing inspections, and has stayed involved in the process.

Early results from what the wing calls “HR Smart Weapon” are extremely promising. Its back-of-the-envelope math, based on a fair amount of real-world testing, suggests the Air Force could save about 156,000 person-hours per year if the approach they’re experimenting with was deployed across the whole service. And that’s for just one form.

The initial idea grew out of an Air Force initiative that tries to find “airmen-led” ideas that might cut costs, improve readiness, or give airmen back some of the time they waste on non-value-added tasks. Assisted by AFWERX, the service’s main innovation arm, the program allocates tens of millions of dollars each year to what the Air Force calls squadron innovation funds.

Young said the paperwork streamlining idea first came up during a training event in Las Vegas for how to spend those funds effectively. There, airmen were asked to pitch ideas, and the time suck surrounding manual form filling quickly emerged as the biggest pain point for the 192nd’s attendees.

“Even though they’re digital forms, it’s still paperwork,” he said during an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “We have a particularly difficult time with the onboarding process. It can take upwards of three months from the time a person shows up for them to get their initial paycheck, in particular, for people who are coming from different organizations that are already in the military. No particular office is the problem. It’s the paperwork and the disparate databases that are involved, and they don’t necessarily talk quickly to one another. So we were trying to solve that problem.”

AFWERX suggested using a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) solicitation to ask vendors for help, and after whiteboarding the problem with several of them, the wing settled on Tackle AI, an Illinois-based firm that focuses its work on exactly this issue but had never done government work before.

“They specialize in extracting data from unstructured documents, so they could take all of our legacy forms, ingest them into their AI algorithm, and then create profiles for each individual,” Young said. “So the next time somebody would bring up a form, this profile information is automatically populated. And whenever the database didn’t know something about you from the ingest process, it would ask the user for that information. And once a user provided that information, you wouldn’t need to provide it again in the future.”

But it took a fair amount of back-and-forth between the 192nd’s testing team and TackleAI’s engineers to get the concept working for the Air Force’s needs. That’s partly because the wing wanted the technology solution to not just help fill out the forms, but also track their progress through each office who needed to view, approve, and send them up the paperwork chain.

They pulled that off too, Young said, and it was important that they did. After all, the inefficiency of the current, paper-centric system isn’t just a pain for the airman who first fills out a given form. Supervisors and various other approving officials need to see and sign off on them, and right now, that’s mostly done via PDFs attached to emails.

“Email is a terrible place to track things. Things get lost all the time, you have to sort through what’s important and what’s not, and it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks, especially when you’re trying to route and coordinate things. HR Smart Weapon makes it easy by showing you, ‘Hey, it’s got to go to these five offices, and this is the person who approved it at the previous office,” Young said. “So it helps you not only save time, but you can do analytics and see clearly whether a certain office is getting backlogged. Then, the commander can make decisions to shift resources to plus-up that office with additional personnel so they can be more efficient, or we can look into other ways of continually improving that process.”

The wing’s initial tests, or what it called a “bake-off” between the current, manual paperwork process, and the AI-assisted one, appeared to show concrete time savings: 35 minutes versus 20 minutes per form, on average.

And the forms were more accurate, which is key too. A simple typo in a manually-entered field can cause the whole form to get kicked back to the last person who approved it. Those kinds of errors happened 12% of the time under the manual process, but 0% of the time with HR Smart Weapon.

Granted, the tests were extremely small scale. Only five forms were tested for each method, and it’s extremely likely the broader Air Force would want to see much more testing before scaling it up. HR Smart Weapon would also need to make its way through various other approval gauntlets, like earning an authority to operate on DoD networks, no small feat.

Young said his team understands all that. It’s just a proof-of-concept for now, but one that’s worth the Air Force’s attention. And he acknowledged that even if the approach gets approved for operational use, there are going to be cultural adaptations needed too, partly around the question of whether commanders will be willing to trust algorithms to fill in boxes that used be completed by highly-trained human beings, no matter how mundane those box-filling exercises really are.

“I fully expect people to be hesitant, he said. “Even myself, it’s going to take me a little bit longer initially, because I’ll want to double check everything before I hit ‘submit.’ But if we have a level of confidence that this does what it says it does, and it’s accurate, I mean the sky’s the limit. As soon as we add more forms to it, we’re going to have that level of trust that it is filling out accurate and current information. That will help reduce time and give it back to our airmen and our commanders to do what matters most, and that’s to be in front of your airmen and not be encumbered with all of this paperwork. We can get after the mission by doing less paperwork.”

Editor’s note: This article contains explicit language and references to sexual situations and abuse.

“It is simply too early in the goddamn morning for unsolicited dick pics.”

That tweet, sent around 8 a.m. on Dec. 30, 2021, was an impassioned stance from a woman working for the military who had reached her limit with online harassers, shortly after a Marine allegedly sent her a picture of his genitals without her consent. 

The tweet started a maelstrom of discussion about online harassment of and by military service members. Women service members quickly began talking about their experiences with cyberharassment from fellow troops. The picture is just a snippet of what many people in the military community, especially women service members, face every day when they pick up their phones or get on their computers. 

Social media and text messaging are now a way of life for people in the military — they use the services to keep in contact with friends, for recruiting, to do their jobs, to find like-minded people or just to show their mom what they did today. Those platforms are also wrought with sexual harassment, bullying, hazing and intimidation directed at troops and perpetrated by them.  

Sexual advances, crude jabs, attacks and even doxxing — a practice where a person’s personal information is leaked publicly on the internet — bombard service members, especially women, daily on the internet. 

The Defense Department and the military services promise to reinforce a positive command “free of misconduct or the appearance of condoning misconduct,” as one letter regarding social media signed by the top Army officials in 2017 explains. But in reality, as seen through Federal News Network’s years-long investigation, service members see a disconnected leadership bloc that only pays lip service to caring about internet intimidation. 

Meanwhile, troops are feeling the weight of attacks from peers, veterans and civilians through direct messages, texts, calls, video chats, public posts and internet forums. Equally, service members are harassing their peers, often without consequences, through those platforms, troops, veterans and advocacy organizations tell Federal News Network. Those attacks have an effect on recruitment, retention and the mental health of troops, according to studies funded by DoD, and private organizations following the issue.

However, the Pentagon does not have any active data on cyberharassment or who is doing it.

“A pattern of denigration”

Tammy Smith, who formerly served as the Army’s top military personnel official, said the online harassment women service members face is nearly endless.

“You are subject to a pattern of denigration of what it means to be a woman in the military, and a constant pattern of people who come in there specifically to put down or talk poorly about women in the military and minorities in the military,” she said. 

The Pentagon refused multiple requests to talk on-the-record with Federal News Network about online sexual harassment. Federal News Network then sent written questions to DoD and three more emails requesting information over a course of weeks, but the department did not respond. 

While the Biden administration recently signed an executive order making sexual harassment explicitly punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice  in the military, currently the Pentagon and military services keep very little data on online harassment such as how often it’s happening, in what ways, what ranks and services harass the most or even how many online forums there are sharing offensive material. Analysts familiar with the issue told Federal News Network that the military has minimal insight into who is committing online harassment and rarely goes after offenders of the military services’ social media policies.

What it took to sniff out the Marine who allegedly sent the picture of his penis and get his command’s attention was at least 30 women, the second highest military official in the Minnesota National Guard, along with contact from the Marine’s former command.

A painful bond between women

After the woman tweeted about the unsolicited picture, and named the Marine who sent it, other women — civilians, veterans, active duty military and even ROTC cadets — came forward with their own stories about the Marine.

Federal News Network tried multiple times through Twitter and Linkedin to contact the Marine for comment and received no response. 

“We decided to form this group chat,” said Sarah, one of the women in the chat. Federal News Network has changed her name to protect her identity due to the nature of online harassment. “We had, at one point, about 30 different women in this group chat, plus at least 10 others who had commented and expressed that he had either made them uncomfortable, that he had flirted with them or he had, in some way, tried to insert himself into their lives.”

The Marine Corps confirmed that the Marine in question  is under investigation and could not comment further due to privacy rights afforded to uniformed members. The Marine Corps refused an interview to talk generally about online harassment, but did send a statement.

“Harassment of any kind has no place in the Marine Corps. Incidents of harassment weaken trust within the ranks, erode unit cohesion, jeopardize combat readiness and mission accomplishment, and will not be tolerated, condoned, or ignored,” Capt. Ryan Bruce, a Marine Corps spokesman said.

The Marine, who went by the now defunct Twitter handle @usemcee, would frequently groom women by offering to be a mentor to them on military matters — giving tips, mental health support and other guidance, according to people who were in contact with him online. 

“It started with him presenting himself as a mentor and experienced staff sergeant, noncommissioned officer in the Marine Corps willing to offer advice, willing to listen to them and hear what was going on and give them a helping hand as they needed it,” Sarah said. “And then for every single one of these women, he then turns it into flirtation and making sexually aggressive comments toward them. The 18-, 19- and 20-year-old junior service women who are college ROTC cadets, those were the ones that were most concerning to me; to find out that he had pursued sexual relationships with them.”

@usemcee would offer to get “blackout drunk” with them, Sarah said. The woman who tweeted about the explicit picture also tweeted about his tendency to ask women to get overly intoxicated with him.

The cost of stepping forward

“Y’all have no idea how hard this was for me. It took me two days to finally post it, bc i hate confrontation,” the woman who received the picture tweeted. “I hate having to explain to men in their mid-30s that their predatory behavior isn’t okay, so.”

It’s especially hard when resources seem to be absent from the discussion around online harassment. While @usemcee’s command reached out to the women, they still needed to file a report, and that can be a scary and daunting task for women concerned about their status in the military.

There’s a stigma for women who come forward with sexual harassment and assault reports, Sarah said.

 “There were still several women who said, ‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t report this to my command because they already don’t like me, and they’re going to treat me like I’m creating a problem,’” Sarah said. “These younger, junior ranking women don’t have power in these situations. They don’t have the power to even get justice for themselves. The Department of Defense doesn’t seem to have a good answer for it.”

A RAND Corporation study published last year found that only 27% of sexual assault victims reported their assault. A total of 31% of men and 28% of women assaulted said they experienced retaliation even if they didn’t report what happened to them. For those who do report, 52% say they experienced retaliation. There are no retaliation numbers for harassment, let alone for online harassment. RAND said that DoD’s recordkeeping of retaliation for assault is dubious, and the numbers are likely higher than what is reported.

DoD has put a heavy emphasis on sexual assault and harassment in the past years. However, numbers remain high. A survey of active duty service members conducted by the Defense Department in 2018 — the last known count of harassments — found that about 119,000 individuals in the military experienced sexual harassment in the previous year. That is roughly 1 in every 10 active duty service members.

Despite the emphasis, congressional hearings, new policies and leadership’s promise to crack down, only one general out of the hundreds in the military attempted to step in to address an issue that was blowing up the Twittersphere known as #miltwitter, where leaders, service members, veterans and policy wonks frequently banter.

A day in the life online

On Jan. 1, Maj. Gen. Jo Clyborne, the assistant adjutant general of the Minnesota National Guard, tweeted about the @usemcee incident, “If you know the identity of the NCO who was DMing inappropriate pictures please DM me that individual’s information and unit if known.”

Clyborne told Federal News Network she was just doing her job in reaching out.

“I can’t say I’ve received any classes or training on social media harassment from the military, but you know what ‘right’ looks like, and you know what ‘wrong’ looks like,” she said. “I don’t worry about what other leaders do. I worry about doing what I’m supposed to do in order to lead the formations that I lead with my actions and reactions. At that time, I felt that was the best course of action. My job isn’t to go digging into the facts or to investigate. I’m a couple of levels removed from that. But we teach our junior people from the very day they enter our military, that if you see something, to say something.”

Clyborne is familiar with what wrong looks like; even in her high-ranking position she is harassed online.

Clyborne maintains three jobs: She runs a law firm; she’s the assistant adjutant general of Minnesota; and she’s the deputy commanding general of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence at Ft. Gordon, Georgia.

Recently, Clyborne had her nails done as part of an event she attended as a lawyer — something she rarely does — and sent out a tweet about how she was sad she had to take off the polish before she can get into uniform the next day because the color was not up to code.

Why the Army thinks a French Manicure is an “obnoxious” color compared to the civilian world which views it as an understated yet professional look is beyond me. But I have to be in uniform tomorrow, so here we are. It looked nice while it lasted. pic.twitter.com/GOxjDHbROR

— Maj. Gen. Jo Clyborne (@joclyborne) October 15, 2021

“I was absolutely drug through the mud for that tweet,” she said.

One commenter wrote, “At least 51% of the population believes Major General Jo Clyborne is an atrocity to the entire USA, with or without nail polish.”

Another wrote, “I bet your cookies are delicious!!!! How are your vacuuming skills?”

But Clyborne also knows that what she gets is light compared to the threats and harassment more junior service members, especially women, get every day and sometimes with nearly every post they put online.

“I don’t hear our male leaders having similar experiences,” she said. “They do get threats; they do get obvious comments that are inappropriate. But usually not to the extent that our female leaders do.”

A troubling trend

Federal News Network watched social media over a course of two years to see how women service members are treated by frequently checking #miltwitter, browsing forums maintained by service members for service members, sorting through comments on Facebook groups and monitoring TikToks service members created. Federal News Network also worked with military sexual trauma groups to review documented examples of online harassment and interviewed multiple service members about their experiences.

“If you’re a woman in any regard and you post in uniform, other service members will comment that you are a walking Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention case,” said Emily, an active duty service member who has more than 220,000 followers on TikTok. “There are statements about women only being in the service only to orally satisfy the male soldiers.”

After watching social media, speaking to victims and listening to experts, Federal News Network learned that the experience women service members have online can often be hostile. They are harassed daily about being pregnant, not being pregnant, being too pretty, not being pretty enough. They are talked down to, called sweetie. Women service members are explicitly threatened with rape, with murder and with torture. They are told to stay in the kitchen, to make sandwiches. They are called barrack bunnies. Their home addresses are posted online and people drive by their house. Forums and groups are created to share naked pictures, sexist memes and to gang up on women.

The service member who tweeted about receiving a lewd picture on Dec. 30, 2021, got a harassing comment on the very post where she called out the behavior. The commenter wrote, “You sure you don’t want some foreskin with your coffee? Lmao.”

“When it comes to degrading women online, it’s incredibly common,” said Don Christensen, president of Protect our Defenders and former chief prosecutor for the Air Force. “Any woman who identifies herself as either currently serving or as a veteran is opening themselves up to a barrage of harassment, things like — women shouldn’t be in the military, you’re not a real soldier, you haven’t deployed or if you have deployed then you haven’t seen combat. If you were to talk to women who have accounts that have a lot of followers, they would verify that that is an all too common problem with them being subjected to misogynistic attacks.”

Erin Kirk-Cuomo, co-founder of Not In My Marine Corps, former Marine and photographer to the commandant of the Marine Corps, said online harassment and retaliation are simply a fact of being a woman in the military.

“When I say 99.9% of women service members, or people who identify as women, have been sexually harassed online or inappropriately sexually contacted online by superior officers or enlisted members, that’s not an exaggeration,” she said. “Almost every single woman has had to go through this.”

And when they call it out, service members often do not come to their aid.

“Throughout that whole week of the @usemcee incident you still continued to see active duty members, men, coming to this guy’s defense saying ‘Oh, you’re just blowing this situation out of proportion. This is ridiculous. This is why women in the military have a bad name. This is why they don’t want women serving in the military. This is why you’re all drama.’” Kirk-Cuomo said. “Basically gaslighting every single one of those women and trying to make them feel that they were overreacting to their personal experiences of sexual harassment.”

The effects of harassment run deep

When it comes to the effects of online attacks, harassment in general can be devastating to those on the receiving end.

Another RAND study from 2021 found that women service members in environments with high sexual harassment had a 1.5 times higher risk of being sexual assaulted; it was 1.8 times higher for men who were harassed.

Terry Schell, lead author of the report, said it was already established that sexual harassment and assault in the military were closely linked, but that the study was the first to factor in environment as well.

The Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military said in its report to DoD that subcultures of misogyny thrive online.

According to an extensive compilation of multiple studies by the National Institutes of Health, cyber harassment has traumatic consequences for mental health, including depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation and panic attacks.

“For a lot of people it could definitely be what sends them off the edge,” Emily said. “Some people don’t even make it to the end of their end of service date. They just freaking kill themselves because it gets that bad. Women join the Army to be an asset to the country. They intend to be someone that contributes greatly, but being treated as someone who’s dispensable and not valuable at all.”

Finding tragedy in the midst of military harassment isn’t hard. One of the most high-profile cases is that of Spc. Vanessa Guillén. The military dismissed multiple reports of Guillén’s harasser before she went missing. At 20-years-old, she was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by a fellow service member, Spc. Aaron Robinson. Her body was moved off base, dismembered, burned and then buried at three different sites.

What DoD is doing, and what it isn’t

“Why wasn’t I talking about this?” former Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Robert Neller asked himself in front of the press at the Pentagon in March 2017. “I don’t have a Facebook page, OK? I don’t do social media, all right? And that’s maybe my mistake.”

Neller said that after it was discovered that more than 30,000 active duty and retired members of the Armed Forces were sharing nude photos of female service members online without their consent.

It was a wakeup call for the military, and the services rushed to put out social media policies that promised they were taking a tough stance on online harassment.

But, despite all the evidence that online harassment is still alive and well, DoD doesn’t have much to show for its policies when it comes to documenting the issue.

Data on online harassment, investigations, prosecutions and reprimands is not available. After being given more than a month to answer questions about online harassment and being asked to provide any data on it, the Pentagon has not answered Federal News Network’s request.

Still, according to the aforementioned sources’ testimony and evidence Federal News Network reviewed, online harassment is witnessed by commanders, service members, civilians and vets every day.

Kirk-Cuomo and Christensen confirmed that numbers on online sexual harassment in the military likely don’t exist. While DoD is capable of tracking nearly every object in orbit around the earth the size of a softball or larger, it is unable or unwilling to catalog cases of online harassment.  

In 2017, the personnel chiefs of each military service took questions for the record from lawmakers on how many people had been punished for violating social media policies. Each service answered by saying social media is an emergent issue and there is no centralized system of records or database that captures all allegations of misconduct of this nature, nor is there any system that captures the full range of judicial, non-judicial and administrative actions that may have been exercised by individual commanders, commanding officers and officers in charge. The Marine Corps did provide the number of troops under investigation for sharing photos at the time: at least 116.

There is no evidence of any updates or further attempts by DoD to improve its recordkeeping on the issue. The closest is a voluntary, self-reported survey of service members in which 30% of women who said they were sexually harassed noted that they had been specifically sexually harassed online. That excludes other types of harassment.

The independent commission on military sexual assault noted that cyber harassment is prone to underreporting because individuals do not trust that the system will meaningfully address their case.

“I don’t think DoD wants to keep statistics because it’s going make them look bad,” Kirk-Cuomo said. “There’s really no statistics on this. It’s been really hard to track, especially online. If you’ve lived it, you know that everybody goes through it.”

Not In My Marine Corps is forwarded links every day to whisper networks sharing nude photos without consent, just like in the Marines United case, plus instances of doxxing, physical threats, racist taunts and everything in between.

“I haven’t seen anything that indicates to me that any of the investigative agencies are proactively looking on the internet to try to find these things,” Christensen said.

Confusion at top levels

Part of the issue is that DoD and the military services’ guides just aren’t up to date with the constantly changing dynamics and trends of social media.

“There’s no real solid, clear definitions or policies around what service members should or shouldn’t, or can and can’t do with regards to online activity,” Kyleanne Hunter, a member of DoD’s independent review commission on sexual assault in the military. “The focus of social media training and online activity training is really focused on sharing classified information, don’t share things that are sensitive or classified, don’t get people in trouble.”

Before the executive order on sexual harassment in the military from President Joe Biden in January, harassment was lumped in with other charges like behavior unbecoming of an officer or failure to follow an order. Only unlawful distribution of photos had its own category. That makes it hard for data on harassment or online harassment to track.

Kirk-Cuomo, of Not in My Marine Corps, said if someone were to request records of all the general charges harassment might be prosecuted under, then they would have to sift through a landfill of other behaviors like DUIs and vaccine refusals. The article is legally broad and encompasses everything from cruel and immoral actions to being dishonest.

The new executive order brings some hope to sifting through prosecutorial data. Sean Timmons, a managing partner at the law firm Tully Rinckey, who specializes in military law, said the order creates a specific charge for sexual harassment.

“It’s just basically semantics, in all honesty, because sexual harassment has been criminalized in the military for more than 30 years, they just didn’t specifically identify it as an enumerated offense,” Timmons said.

The change could broaden the scope of what the military is willing to prosecute. The Pentagon has more violations to put on paper when charging someone and that puts the defense in more of a bind. Timmons said the new classification could be one way to increase online harassment prosecutions.

The independent commission on sexual assault noted in their recommendations that DoD needs to collect data to measure the problem of online harassment and its related harms.

“DoD and the services lack the ability to track the prevalence of cyberharassment, online stalking and retaliation, and other technology-facilitated abuse, such as the non-consensual distribution of intimate digital images,” the commission wrote. “Without a systematic, targeted approach to collecting data on harassing and harmful behaviors in the cyber domain, DoD and the services will lack information critical to informing prevention measures.”

Accountability is scarce

Outside of collecting the data, the Pentagon has to actually prosecute these cases and most signs, at this point without solid data, show that it’s not happening often. Of course, DoD can only prosecute service members who are harassing other service members due to the scope of its authority.

The commission authors state in their report that, “While DoD and the services address the online environment in their harassment policies, accountability remains scarce.”

Actually finding the harassers is one of the most complex issues for DoD, according to Christensen. Perpetrators can create anonymous burner accounts that make it hard to figure out who is behind the avatar.

“Who is this person that is doing these things? How do we find out who this person is?” Christensen said. 

Before the 2022 defense authorization act, investigations were handed off from a command to whoever had time to do the work, leading to shoddy detective work, Christensen said. That is changing now with the new law creating a special investigations unit for sexual assault and harassment in the military. That law will move that work out of the chain of command, where an officer who specializes in assault and harassment and has no ties to the command and people being investigated will handle the case. 

DoD set a timeline for some of its sexual assault reforms laid out by Congress and the review commission on sexual assault. Many won’t be finished until 2027, a schedule that is under scrutiny by lawmakers like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)

However, investigators also need the cooperation of the command. If the command isn’t willing to look into details of who the poster might be — like identifying factors in messages — the offender would be able to stay under the guise of anonymity. 

Outside of that, Christensen said, if the harasser doesn’t make it clear who they are, “I don’t know how you would ever identify them short of subpoenaing Twitter to find out who the person is, which can be problematic.”

Kirk-Cuomo described DoD as an ostrich with its head in the sand when it comes to online harassment, and often leadership is still causing controversy on how it’s handled.

A TikTok story of culture divide

One particular incident gained traction on MilTok, the section of TikTok used by service members, when an Army specialist at Ft. Hood, who goes by @dont_mindg, posted a video of a soldier’s fatigue pants around his ankles stating that a woman was trying to climb the ranks.

Emily, the active duty service member who has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, posted a response to the video, calling out the soldier for harassing women.

@savannahglembin happened to me while I was active and to so many other women I know, I’m so sorry @_the_joel_ #military#militarywomen#army#marine#feminist#strongwomen ♬ original sound – Savannah Glembin

“I said ‘Hey, if you have a female soldier working under you how protected and mentored and safe is she going to feel in a work environment where her boss is posting stuff like this? Or expecting stuff like this out of his female soldiers?’” Emily said.

A soldier from a completely different base saw Emily’s TikTok critiquing the TikTok and complained to her command about her videos; Emily’s videos do not violate any military codes or TikTok terms. While many other soldiers thought Emily’s post was constructive and added to the discussion of harassment, her leadership took the complaint to heart. Emily’s command made her take down all of her videos with her in uniform and forbade her from posting further in uniform.

“She did the right thing in calling him out. She kept it tactful and professional,” one post on the Army Reddit with hundreds of comments said. “She was told to take all her videos in uniform down and to not post in it anymore. All because she did the right thing. Is this the Army we are part of? How we supposed to trust our leaders when they do BS like this? This is not okay. We need to do better.”

While this was happening, @dont_mindg had not been reprimanded or investigated; the Army later said it began an investigation immediately after learning about the video on Jan. 7.

Eventually, Emily’s command reversed its decision.

Hunter, the member of the independent review on sexual assault, said most leaders are out of touch with the internet culture of their subordinates.

“There’s quite frequently a large generational divide as to how the more junior members, both enlisted and officers, view the digital world and how most of the senior leaders do,” Hunter said.

Since the Marines United incident, leaders are making more of an effort to engage online, but they are still largely insulated from what junior officers are doing.

“There is a lack of understanding about the social media realm by senior leaders,” Smith, the former Army major general, said. “We didn’t grow up in social media; some of us adopted it later on. We don’t understand the experiences of young people who grew up with it. Social media was the place that they went, that was as familiar as going to ballet lessons or going to the playground.”

Congress asked former Marine Corps Commandant Neller in the wake of the Marines United scandal how to hold offenders accountable. He said he didn’t have a good answer.

The sexual assault commission noted that senior leaders’ limited digital literacy keeps them from fully understanding their junior members and the impact of online harassment.

What DoD needs to change

The expectation from the Pentagon is to uphold the positive command structure it promises to keep service members from preying on each other, Kirk-Cuomo said. 

“What really needs to happen is now that we have this specific UCMJ article on harassment, they need to utilize it, these people need to be held accountable,” she said. “If you want to act like this, you want to destroy our morals and our values that we stand for and the good order and discipline, then you don’t belong in the military. Goodbye.” 

The independent review commission outlined three recommendations that DoD should follow to begin clamping down on online harassment. One of those is exactly what Kirk-Cuomo said: actually holding people accountable and an easy way for victims to report the issues. 

To get there though, the commission says DoD needs a systematic approach to actually combating cyberharassment. That includes collecting data on the size of the problem and its harms. 

“DoD and the services lack the ability to track the prevalence of cyberharassment, online stalking, retaliation and other technology-facilitated abuse, such as the non-consensual distribution of intimate digital images,” the commissioners wrote in the report. “Without a systematic, targeted approach to collecting data on harassing and harmful behaviors in the cyber domain, DoD and the service will lack information critical to informing prevention measures.”

The commission said DoD should develop its own cyberharassment survey to distribute to troops. 

Finally, the commission said leaders need to be better educated. Kirk-Cuomo agreed that digital literacy is still an issue within leadership. 

“The leadership has to realize that this is an issue that is impacting the daily lives of their service members and not turn a blind eye to it,” she said.  

Many critical tweeters questioned why people like Maj. Gen. Clyborne got involved in an “online squabble.”

“That’s the problem, because that’s how the majority of the leadership thinks at the moment,” Kirk-Cuomo said. “There’s got to be some kind of training for leadership for general officers to be like, ‘Hey, you have this tool in your toolbox to go after online harassment. Now you use it, and you need to address it when you see it.’”

What this means for women in the military

The military needs women. They have been serving since Deborah Sampson joined the Army in 1781 and sustained a saber wound to the head and a musket ball to the thigh.

DoD has made it abundantly clear it wants more women and more diversity in its ranks. In February, the Pentagon released its Women, Peace and Security Framework and Implementation Plan — a way for the department to encourage meaningful participation, development and employment in the joint force for all ranks and occupations in the defense and security sectors.

Elizabeth Phu, DoD’s principal director of cyber policy, stated upon the release of the strategy that DoD needs the top talent and bringing in all aspects of gender and race are key to developing that workforce.

“When you ignore any segment of the population, you run the risk of not grabbing the best talent available for critical missions. And so, in some sectors, the progress is a lot slower than others, but I do see progress overall,” she said.

Multiple studies from the RAND Corporation studies commissioned by DoD show women contributed to the military’s readiness and are beneficial to the services.

On top of that, DoD is pulling from a shrinking pool of potential recruits — about 25% of 17- to 24-year-olds are eligible to serve — to do more complex and skilled jobs relating to near-peer competition, space, cyber, data, artificial intelligence and coding.

Navy personnel chief Vice Adm. John Nowell recently told Congress that in the past three years the propensity of those eligible to serve dropped from 13% to 10%.

“Women are 51% of the population,” Clyborne, the assistant adjutant general of the Minnesota National Guard said. “Why would you exclude 51% of the talent pool? We know also from studies that diverse teams do better, they are more creative, and they provide better problem solving. We have women in our formation who need to know that they can achieve the greatest levels of success.”

Current service members, leaders, policy experts, retired generals and academics all told Federal News Network that online harassment is a major deterrent to women serving in the military. 

“There’s a huge recruitment and retention issue regarding online harassment,” Hunter said. Hunter recently published research in the Marine Corps University Press’ Journal of Advanced Military Studies connecting online misogyny to a decrease in recruitment and retention of women in the military.

“The net result is women leaving the service due to feeling a lack of belonging and a lack of belief that their concerns will be adequately addressed,” the study found. Women were two to one more likely to say they were planning on leaving the military as soon as possible and cited online harassment as a primary reason.

Hunter described online harassment as death by a thousand cuts.

“DoD has invested an exorbitant amount of money in studies to figure out how to retain more women,” Kirk-Cuomo said.

However, at least one of the answers has been under the military’s nose the whole time.

“The vast majority of women I know who served in the military and gotten out. All of them say, they would never tell their daughter to join,” Sarah, one of the 30 women in the chat about @usemcee said. “Every single female service member I know has experienced online harassment. I cannot imagine that does anything positive in terms of retaining the best and brightest in the military. These wonderful, strong, intelligent, brave women don’t feel like they’re being treated as human beings by their peers.”

When the Defense Department created the new position of Chief Software Officer early last year, it was DoD’s first attempt to get a single official to ride herd over a vast enterprise that ranges from mainframes still running COBOL to DevSecOps pipelines to classified weapons systems, and everything in between.

For Jason Weiss, DoD’s first-ever CSO, there are at least a couple of big takeaways from having accepted that challenge: One is that there are a lot of pockets of the department where world-class software engineering is happening. Another is that what’s holding DoD back isn’t a lack of skill or dedication within its workforce, but rather, a lot of bureaucratic structures and habits that just aren’t compatible with modern software development.

Weiss, who will step down from his DoD job on Apr. 15 in order to return to the private sector, said he’s concluded there are two main factors that lead to successful software projects inside the department. Both have to do with leadership.

In cases where the military services have managed to implement modern software design practices, they’ve involved senior-ranking leaders who both “speak software,” and have the organizational savvy to maintain political support for what they’re up to.

“They understand the nuances of software and things like containerization and orchestration of containers, and they can bridge the gap between the engineer who’s actually doing the work as an individual contributor and the various oversight communities,” Weiss said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “The second part is how suave that particular leader might be understanding that they need to create a groundswell of support, and fundamentally recognize when it’s time to compromise on something and add a little bit of overhead that might slow the process down in the name of moving things forward.”

But there are far too many programs that never even approach the point of compromising over small changes that lead to small delays.

Instead, they’re locked into acquisition mindsets that were originally designed for large hardware procurements: a list of requirements that must be met, and different colors of money for each phase of a system’s development.

Both of those concepts are terrible for software, which, unlike physical products, can be changed and updated in days or weeks.

“We have trouble reducing things into bite-sized tasks,” Weiss said. “We want to look at a set of requirements and say that all of these requirements need to be met, and as an organization, we’re not capable of effectively prioritizing them and recognizing that just because something has been deprioritized doesn’t mean that it’s not still a valid requirement. It just means that the warfighter has said, ‘Hey, I need this first and foremost, and I need this other thing second.’”

Congress has given DoD some room to experiment with using a single color of money for software development efforts. But lawmakers have only approved eight programs for what’s called the Software and Digital Technology Pilot Program; they declined DoD’s request to add several more in the 2022 appropriations bill.

Across the rest of the department, budgeteers, program managers and program executive officers still need to find ways to wedge software development into a funding system that was meant for carriers and tanks, with separate accounts for R&D, procurement and sustainment phases.

“When we look at the historical scaffolding that was put in place around the way the DoD procures systems, it was by and large hardware-centric, because you only want to create a keel on a ship once,” Weiss said. “But with software, it’s more like, ‘Oh gosh, that algorithm isn’t exactly what I need, I need to pivot that.’ That can be done in a two-week sprint. And I think that is fundamental to eliminating the color of money issue around software. And that conclusion was further codified with the ‘software is never done’ study from the Defense Innovation Board. Software is never done, so it never actually goes into sustainment.”

One of Weiss’s main tasks during his tenure as DoD CSO was to help develop what was originally supposed to be an update to the department’s cloud strategy, but was eventually renamed with a new moniker: the DoD Software Modernization Strategy.

Officials have said the new name reflects a realization that it needs to use cloud as a means to an end, rather than migrating systems just for the sake of migrating systems.

The new strategy makes a big deal out of the software factories that have started to permeate DoD, now 30 and counting, and aims to eventually reduce the policy barriers that are preventing the agile methodologies they’re using from just being the norm across the department.

Weiss said the quality of work he’s seen from those factories is top-notch.

“The ones I communicate with on a regular basis put out some amazing code — it’s state of the art, and it’ll rival anybody out there,” he said. “But I think it’s also important to recognize that in all of those cases, the industrial base plays a key role. This isn’t just government coders writing government code.”

In most cases, with the software factories — at least so far — contributions have tended to come from a lot of small businesses, with traditional Defense contractors playing a only supporting or coordinating role. Weiss said DoD will need to be careful about tailoring its relationships with vendors in ways that acknowledge that’s likely to continue to be the case, while also keeping the large prime contractors involved.

“With Platform One, there is no obvious prime contractor supporting it — it’s a large number of smaller vendors. And when they are onboarded, they’re actually paired with programmers from other organizations so that there is redundancy around that ecosystem,” Weiss said. “What’s important is understanding that we’re still going to need the hardware and the investments the large primes have made in highly-specialized labs, which justify their rates that they submit to the government. We still need that capability. So it’s going to be important for DoD and the industrial base to come together to find that correct balance between them, because we need both. It has to be a both-and conversation, not an either-or conversation.”

Weiss said another conclusion from his tenure is that his successors are going to need to have more authority in DoD’s organizational structure if they hope to make modern software practices more widespread.

He said Congress should seriously consider making the position a Senate-confirmed job, considering the amount of work that needs to be done to reform DoD’s practices.

“When you look at the amount of coordination that has to occur for something like a directive-type memorandum — and the time spent on that for something that’s relatively trivial — having an ‘honorable’ title to be able to go straight to a different organization and agree at that level is going to be vital,” he said. “I had very little influence in organizations outside of the DoD CIO, which is where my billet sat. That’s important, because the CIO can only give software a fractional bit of attention. They’re responsible for spectrum, they’re responsible for desktop services, they’re responsible for budget certification. That’s just the nature of the job.”

On this episode of On DoD, a bit of a logistics focus.

First, we talk with Tim Walton, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, about DoD’s somewhat surprising decision to close down its Red Hill fuel storage facility near Honolulu.

We’ll also talk with Al Thompson, the CEO of HomeSafe Alliance. That’s the company U.S. Transportation Command finally selected to reform the military’s household goods moving system. HomeSafe has a green light to get to work on the multibillion dollar contract, now that the Government Accountability Office has dismissed each of the bid protests that challenged it.

On this episode, an extended discussion with Danielle Metz, the deputy DoD chief information officer for information enterprise. Metz explains how Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle will actually compete for work under the up to $9 billion contract, in an approach that’s novel for government procurement.

Federal News Network reported on the key details of this interview in mid-December, when the coversation was first recorded. This episode of On DoD contains the full interview.

It’s fair to say there are a lot of institutions across government that are still figuring out what the future of work will look like. In this episode, we revisit one of the Army organizations that’s much further along than most when it comes to answering some of those questions.

John Willison, the deputy to the commanding general at Army Combat Capabilities Development Command makes a second appearance on On DoD. Last April, he talked with us about what was then just a concept paper for the future of work at DEVCOM. This time, he joins us to talk about what the command has done to turn that paper into reality, including by giving supervisors “maximum flexibility” to decide when and where their employees work.

U.S. Transportation Command has long thought that the best way to improve the military’s household goods moving system is to put the entire sprawling apparatus under the management of a single contracted managed service provider.

But from the perspective of the latest company to win the new Global Household Goods contract (GHC), the cures for what ails the moving system lie at least as much in the adoption of modern technology as they do in centralization.

HomeSafe Alliance won the estimated $6.2 billion contract earlier this month after having lost an earlier competition that was later overturned by a bid protest. Assuming the latest award survives any possible further legal challenges, the company could take charge of the moving system by late calendar year 2022.

In an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD, Al Thompson, HomeSafe’s CEO, said the company believes a wide range of problems — from an insufficient supply of moving trucks, drivers and packers during the peak summer months to a cumbersome damage claims process — can be solved by bringing the moving system into the 21^st Century.

“We’re going to deliver a very modern technology solution that will be much more customer-focused, with constant communication with the military service member, the DoD civilian, the customer,” he said. “At the same time, we’ll also provide a new capability to the more than 2,500 movers. Because many of them are small businesses, they are not able to invest in an information technology solution that helps them most efficiently and effectively manage their business. We’re going to provide that.”

According to a DoD inspector general review released last year, 41% of military household goods shipments arrived late, and 21% had at least some damage. The problem is most acute during the peak summer months — May through August — when the military services, the moving industry’s single largest customer, schedule the bulk of their permanent change of station orders.

Thompson said HomeSafe believes one reason the system’s capacity is so strained during those peak months is that existing fleets of long-distance moving trucks are utilized inefficiently, since the military currently contracts for moves one-by-one, without a global view of which shipments might be departing from and headed to the same metro area. The plan is to start using AI algorithms to more efficiently plan pickups and deliveries and route moving vans across the country.

“For example, between a military concentration area of Hampton Roads, Virginia, and San Diego, there’s a tremendous volume of household goods shipments. But if you were to go out on the interstates and track these moving vans, many of them are chasing each other half-full,” he said. “Through the use of our technology solution, we believe that more of those trucks are going to be full. That’s going to significantly reduce cost for the movers and increase their bottom line performance, because instead of driving half-empty vans coast to coast, they’re going to be much more close to 100% full. That leverages capacity that’s kind of hidden today. It’s out there, but we can’t get at it, because we don’t have this global system integrator.”

In a similar vein, HomeSafe — a new joint venture owned by KBR and Tier One Relocation — thinks it can help moving companies better forecast their workforce needs, helping to solve the problem of an insufficient labor force of packers during those peak months.

“It goes back to the visibility of workload. A local mover might need 100 people on Tuesday and 20 people on Thursday, but they oftentimes don’t become aware of that soon enough. So when they need to peak their workforce, they’re scrambling, and perhaps can’t get the people on board,” Thompson said. “So I think through this integrated solution, they’re going to know with appropriate lead time what their workload requirements are, and I think that’s going to really help them have the appropriate staffing on the day at the location where it’s required.”

TRANSCOM is still in the process of debriefing bidders and answering their written questions, and the command hasn’t yet told HomeSafe to begin official work on the contract. Under the Government Accountability Office’s bid protest rules, losing bidders generally have 10 days after the debriefing process to lodge a challenge.

Once any protest hurdles have been cleared, TRANSCOM officials have said their first step with HomeSafe will be to start integrating the company’s technology platform with the government’s systems.

The platform, which the company calls “HomeSafe Connect,” will extend to individual military members who are undergoing moves as well. A smartphone app by the same name will be the primary way members plan their moves, replacing the creaky and often-broken Defense Personal Property System website.

“If they’d prefer a more manual experience, we can do it that way as well. But for those that are comfortable using an app, it means that from essentially the beginning of the process through the very end, they’re going to have a very modern app-based ability to communicate with HomeSafe,” Thompson said. “That begins with the initial survey of what needs to be moved, to the actual execution of the packing and loading, to near real-time updates on location of their household goods. And in the rare cases where there’s any damage done, there will be an app-based online claim process that is going to very much speed up the claims process.”

Beyond an infusion of new technology, Thompson said his company thinks it can also improve the moving system by introducing new performance measures for individual moving companies — along with new incentives. Companies with a track record of good performance will be rewarded with more work, including guarantees of a certain baseline level of business during the off-season.

“We will be managing what we call a ‘carrier quality index,’ and the higher your evaluated score, the more workload you will get. And we’re going to couple with that, for those that aren’t meeting our standards, a very robust outreach effort to assist them getting up to our standard,” he said. “[The index] certainly has a customer satisfaction element, but it also has things like timeliness and a few other factors, so it’s not purely a survey.”

Across the sprawling Defense bureaucracy, it’s not a stretch to say there are dozens of different organizations who each see themselves at the forefront of buying or building innovative technologies. So it makes a certain degree of sense for the Pentagon’s top technology official to start her tenure by asking who’s working on what.

Heidi Shyu, the undersecretary of Defense for research and engineering, says one of her top priorities since being sworn in three months ago has been to build a better understanding of what’s actually happening across DoD’s vast innovation ecosystem — not just for the benefit of her own office, but for those working inside the military services and DoD’s various innovation organizations.

To the greatest extent possible, she said, she wants to limit the number of Defense R&D dollars and time that go toward reinventing the wheel.

“We’re looking across the entire DoD to look at all the different innovation activity that’s ongoing. I’d like to get my arms around just how many innovation organizations that we have,” she said during an interview with Federal News Network at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference. “We’re asking questions like, ‘What is your mission? What have you procured? What capabilities do these products have? What have you transitioned into the hands of the warfighter, and which company are you buying these products from?’ The second piece I would like to understand is what the best practices are in each organization. If we can share those across the board, that would be valuable.”

The discovery process is happening under the auspices of DoD’s Innovation Steering Group, which Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks established earlier this year. Hicks appointed Shyu to lead the group after she took the post as undersecretary and chief technology officer in June.

In a related effort, Shyu said she has also begun asking the military services for specific prototype technologies that could fill “capability gaps” that have already been identified as joint requirements for the Pentagon.

After working with the Joint Staff and DoD’s global combatant commands to identify which requirements needed to be met most urgently, Shyu said the steering group got 203 white papers from the military services over the course of just five weeks, identifying prototypes they’d already started developing that could fill those gaps. Her office has recommended that 32 of them be funded and tested in joint exercises next fiscal year.

“We’ve briefed what we’re planning to do, and we were given the thumbs up. So one of the key things we’re doing now is going through the detailed planning. All the details of planning will be done in Fiscal 2022 to enable the execution in FY 23,” she said. “But the thing that’s exciting is three of those projects are actually joint projects with our allies. We definitely want to partner with allies and partner nations to be able to deliver capabilities much quicker.”

Ultimately, Shyu wants the outcome of those efforts to be a much easier discovery process for anyone in the Defense Department who’s looking for a particular capability. As of now, there’s no easy way for a program office to find out whether one of its counterparts is working on — or has already solved — an individual technology problem.

“R&E looks across every service. We’ve already gone to the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines, the Army, the [Defense Innovation Unit] and the [Strategic Capabilities Office] to try to understand what process they utilize and what companies they have gone out to,” she said. “So all of those things will be pulled together. We’d like to create a database we can tap into so that I can basically Google for a specific capability or product. Right now, you’re making a zillion phone calls.”

To the extent the department’s technology efforts are disjointed and decentralized, that’s not just a problem for DoD itself — but also for the sorts of nontraditional companies DoD said it wants to attract into its science and technology ecosystem. For small businesses, getting through the Pentagon’s front door has always been hard. Creating dozens of new and different doors doesn’t necessarily help, unless they’re well-marked.

Shyu, who previously served as assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology during the Obama administration, said she learned that lesson directly during an interlude in private industry during the past four years.

“Having worked with a number of small companies on the outside, it made me really realize how difficult it is to work with the Pentagon,” she said. “You don’t know who to talk to, and there’s no focal point. You talk to Person A, who will refer you to Person B and then Person C, and vendors go around and around and around before they find someone to go talk to and who’s interested in what they have.”

Starting to catalogue the department’s capability gaps and innovation activities should help with that problem, Shyu said, even if DoD can’t always share the precise details of its most urgent capability gaps. The needs statements the Innovation Steering Group sent to the military services earlier this year, for example, were entirely classified.

“But once we get all of that information together, we can go the next step. Figuring out what we already have — pulling a database together to share across the board will speak volumes,” she said. “Then, we need to figure out if there is a specific entry point we need to highlight even more to the small businesses. It’s a stepwise process we’re going through.”

Last October, when the Navy began its latest effort to examine its vast supply and logistics enterprise, officials realized they had what was, in essence, a too-many-cooks-in-the-galley problem.

Key decisions like what types and how many parts to order and stock were being made in a fairly disconnected and uncoordinated way. And it was hard to know whether any of those decisions was particularly wise, since there was no real mechanism to measure the return on investment for any one of those spending decisions.

In the span of less than a year, a new initiative called Naval Sustainment System-Supply (NSS-S) has made a measurable dent in those problems. So far, officials believe the total cost savings and avoidances they’ve gained from NSS-S is about $400 million, largely by realigning the service’s maintenance spending in ways that reduce unneeded orders and putting those dollars toward things that can be empirically shown to increase Navy readiness.

As one way to gather that empirical evidence, the Navy assigned cash values to what it’s worth to have a fully-capable weapons system — an F/A-18, for example — compared to having it stuck on the ground. With that as a starting point, officials can “monetize” the value of readiness — compared against the actual supply chain costs that went into getting a particular airplane ready to fly.

“What it allows us to do is make very deliberate decisions, and understand that if we put another dollar into the force generation side of the equation, what we’re going to see on the value of the readiness side,” Rear Adm. Peter Stamatopoulos, the commander of Naval Supply Systems Command (NAVSUP) said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “In the past, that was very difficult for us to analyze. Everybody would often say, ‘What’s the return on investment?’ But we really didn’t have a formula to help us do that. That’s exactly what our Supply Effectiveness Figure of Merit (SEFoM) does.”

Stamatopoulos said the current goal is to increase that SEFoM figure by about 5 cents per dollar invested in the Navy’s supply chain over the next five years — and those nickels add up quickly in a supply enterprise that spends billions of dollars each year.

When the project started in October, the Navy set a stretch goal of saving $400 million on unproductive readiness spending over the subsequent two years. NSS-S has already yielded $418 million in savings and cost avoidances.

Stamatopoulos said the inputs NSS-S considers when it measures the bang the Navy is getting for its readiness bucks goes well beyond parts ordering, and tries to take account of the end-to-end supply chain.

“We incorporated what we call a cost of goods sold into our formula — commercial work where we merely stroke a check to do a repair or do procurements for the parts that we need. We also looked at the organic costs … in our fleet readiness centers,” he said. “How many people do they need, and what are all the costs that go into organic repair? We also put into the equation the value of our inventory for that particular weapon system, and computed a capital charge for that. Because there are costs affiliated with holding that inventory.”

But simply gathering the data wasn’t enough to influence how the Navy actually spends its readiness dollars. To do that, the service needed a new governance structure that could take a more corporate view of its spending decisions.

So one of the first of the six “pillars” of the broader Naval Sustainment System effort has been to establish a “C-suite” forum to oversee supply chain decisions that had previously been made in a much more fragmented way. For NSS-S purposes, the C-suite is populated by the vice chief of naval operations — the Navy’s second highest-ranking officer — and other senior military and civilian leaders.

“We go through Naval Sustainment System battle rhythm events on a monthly basis with four-stars and three-stars, which is quite phenomenal considering how valuable their time is,” Stamatopoulos said. “So we have our whole of Navy, all levels of leadership — those in uniform and those within the secretariat engaged in a more coordinated, deliberate fashion to dissect these issues, to remove barriers, and to make well informed decisions, based on the data.”

The overall NSS-S project still has a long way to go, Stamatopoulos said. It’s being implemented over the course of 15 “waves” over the next five years, and only the first wave has been completed. Wave two is starting now.

Beyond the $418 million cost savings, he said NAVSUP saw a 48% improvement in the turnaround time for 400 of the most important parts needed for ship repair, partly by giving industry clearer demand signals. There were similar gains for aviation parts: the 568 most important items saw a 37% reduction in turnaround time.

Stamatopoulos said NAVSUP is actively looking for more areas where lead times are long.

“We’ve actually inculcated across the whole of Navy the idea that we need to embrace the red — don’t shy away from the red — find the problems, and then let’s go out together and solve them,” he said. “Think about an end-to-end supply chain. If you have a repair turnaround time that in some cases exceeds 300 days before a unit turns the broken part into the system, the system has to go out and send it to a commercial vendor to repair. And if that repair turnaround time is 300-plus days, you see how we need more inventory in the system, because we have ships and aircraft squadrons operating across planet Earth. So if we can reduce that turnaround time from a 300 days down to 100 days, now that requires me to have less inventory in the system, because I have a much higher velocity.”

This edition of On DoD features a long discussion on the subject of Defense reform. Our guest is retired Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, who’s just written a new book: The Ever Shrinking Fighting Force.

What’s shrinking isn’t the Defense budget. In inflation-adjusted terms, the DoD budget is bigger now than it was during the peak of the Reagan era, but dollar-for-dollar, the nation is getting a lot less defense capability for that spending.

In his discussion with Jared Serbu, Punaro, a former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, amongst numerous other titles, argues there are three main drivers for the change in DoD’s “tooth-to-tail” ratio: Growth in fully-burdened military personnel expenses, a steady accumulation of “overhead” in the Defense bureaucracy, and a decreasingly efficient acquisition system.

A partial transcript of the show follows:

Jared Serbu: General, thanks for being with us. And let’s talk about the book. Just to set this up for our listeners, this is almost a compendium or distillation of various other pieces of advice and observations that you’ve made to defense policymakers and leaders over the years – some in official and some in unofficial capacities. So start us off, if you would, by talking a bit about the experiences that you’ve had over the decades that formed the basis for this book.

Arnold Punaro: Jared, it’s always a privilege to be with you and your listeners. And it really got started for me when I graduated in 1968, which was the peak year of the draft. And I ended up being a United States Marine and an infantry platoon commander in Vietnam, and served with a lot of young Marines that were drafted and did everything that country asked them to do. And it weighed in on me quite heavily that we always need to be prepared for our national security and to make sure our troops have everything they need. During the Vietnam War, we didn’t have a lot of things that we needed to have on the battlefield.

And I fortunately went to work in the U.S. Senate, for Senator Sam Nunn, and was there 24 years. For most of my career, we were working to try to make sure we had what we needed for national defense, including in the very grim decade of the 70s, when there was such an anti-war sentiment, trying to save the volunteer force. So most of my career, and then in industry, has been trying to make sure we have a strong national defense. When I looked at it and kind of looked back over a 45 to 50 year career, both in uniform and government and industry, working as a formal and informal adviser to the Congress and to the Pentagon, and I looked at the amount of money that we were spending. I looked at the fact that in my judgment, we were not getting the bang for the buck we should for the dollars we’re spending. And we are in exact same situation.

When I was on the Quế Sơn mountains in Vietnam, my troops didn’t have hot chow, they didn’t have enough food, they didn’t have dry socks. Some days, we didn’t have the ammunition that we needed. Here we are going up against the pacing threat of China, that’s dramatically improved their military, they’ve improved their technology, they’re on the march economically and diplomatically.

We are spending in constant dollars more than we spent at the peak of the Reagan build up, and yet the force is 50% smaller in terms of active duty: 1 million less active duty personnel, the warfighting units, we have 35 to 40% fewer than we had at the peak of the Reagan build up. I’ve written a lot about this over the years, and I’ve tried very, very hard in a lot of venues to try to improve and reform the processes that we have in the Pentagon and the Congress, which are flat broke, they’re just broken.

And it’s not the people — the people that come to work in the Pentagon, on the hill and in industry come to work every day doing the absolute best job they can for our warfighters and the taxpayers. Former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry told me once bad processes beat good people every day, and we have a proliferation of broken processes in the Pentagon in the Congress. And I said enough is enough. I’ve got nine — soon to have 10 — grandkids. When I look at what China is doing, when I hear what General Milley and General Dunford say, when I hear what people that are on the China commission say, and I realize how far we’re falling behind, I just felt compelled to put it all in in a book and get it out there.

Jared Serbu: One of the reasons I wanted to start with some of that historical context is one of the striking things in the book is that even if the problems are extremely difficult to solve it when you put them all together, they’re at least well understood, right? You mention a few times that a lot of these blue ribbon panels and defense reform commissions over the years have reached pretty similar conclusions.

Arnold Punaro: That’s correct. The great Louisiana senator, head of the Finance Committee, Russell Long, once told my boss Senator Nunn, ‘Sam, don’t solve a problem for people before they know they have one.’

But everybody knows what the problems are in defense. It’s the acquisition process, where we spend close to $400 billion a year and about all you can say is it spends more, takes longer and gets less. It’s DoD’s massive overhead and support structure, which has gone from 5% of the budget to almost 20%. If you add in all the things that really belong to the Defense-wide budget, it’s probably another 10% higher, and you could go on and on. So people know the problems, they agree with the problems. There’s a bipartisan agreement that we’ve got to deal with China. So we’ve just got to kind of tighten our belts and take a deep breath and get on with the reforms that are necessary so that we can get the capabilities that we need for our warfighters to both deter our adversaries, but also if we get into a shooting war, which we never can predict, and we never want to be in again. But unfortunately, history doesn’t give us that luxury, and we’ve got to be ready to win on the battlefield.

Jared Serbu: And you break down the problems into what I think is a pretty useful rubric — those three things that you alluded to: overhead growth, fully-burdened personnel costs and the acquisition system.

Let’s start with overhead. And as you acknowledge, there’s really no commonly accepted definition of what overhead is, but you make a pretty good case and arrive at some estimates, at least, of what the department is spending on overhead. Talk with us just a couple minutes about how you define overhead, and how big you think it is.

Arnold Punaro: You’re right, there isn’t agreement, and people argue about it and want to fine tune it. But look, I come from the business world now. And you’re either on direct or you’re on indirect. If you’re on direct, that means you’re billing somebody for your time, if you’re indirect, that means you’re overhead. And so for me, if you’re not on the warfighting side of the Department of Defense – if you’re not on the tip of the spear, then you’re in the rear with the gear – you’re overhead; you’re support.

It’s pretty fundamental, and even by DoD’s own definition, they would argue that 43%, or over $300 billion of the annual budget is kind of in the support, not forces. And so to me, anything that’s not on the warfighting side at the tip of the spear is overhead and support. And if you just take their own definition and look at the headquarters, and you look at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, you look at the Joint Staff, you look at the defense agencies  — they’ve from one defense agency, the National Security Agency – we now have 28. And those are massive, massive organizations like the Defense Logistics Agency.

Jared, we have over 300,000 active duty military, which are our most expensive personnel, our most highly trained and our most valuable, that are working in positions that are inherently non-governmental. That means those jobs can be done by a defense civilian or defense contractor and frankly, many of them probably don’t even need to be done. That’s a lot of people that we can move from the back offices to the warfighting side of the military. I define warfighting [as] if you’re a cyber warrior, if you’re operating a lethal drone, you’re a warfighter. The Business Executives for National Security, when they look at this, they are a lot less charitable about the 60/40 split — they think the back office stuff is much closer to over 50% of everything DoD does.

Jared Serbu: One of the things that the book does a nice job of is giving a lot of historical context and pointing out that, for example, the Joint Staff did not always have 5,000 employees. There were not always 40,000 people assigned to combatant commands. Give us your best sense of how that kind of accretion happens over time. And it’s not because of malice – it’s not because people are trying to waste money. How does it happen?

Arnold Punaro: Well, you know, that’s a terrific observation. And I struggle with this, because these these are a lot of warfighters. And I say about the warfighters out in the field that they’re magnificent warriors. When they get back in the rear, they become magnificent bureaucrats.

And it’s a lot like a vine in my own home state of Georgia we call kudzu. Decades ago, the Soil and Erosion Service brought this vine in to stop erosion of the soil. Then it became one of the most noxious weeds ever produced, and then they banned it completely. We called it the vine that ate the south, and it would swallow up buildings and telephone poles and roads.

[Former Defense Secretary James] Forrestal, when he first started OSD, he had maybe 40 people, not the over 5000 they have today. It just is like kudzu, it starts growing, it starts encumbering, it starts smothering everything. They add a little bit at a time, they don’t add it all at one time. And so it’s just this inexorable climb of overhead. Layers of management – the over 30 layers of management from a junior action officer in the military departments to the top of the Pentagon. The Pentagon is so hierarchical, if you have a three-star, he’s going to have two two-stars working for him, each two-star is going to have two one-stars, each one-star is going to have two colonels, and so on – you have this pyramid.

So the bureaucracy, like kudzu, just grows over time until it just suffocates the organization. I think we need to just clean all that out. If you look at the acquisition area, we’ve got over 154,000 people now working in acquisition, and we’ve got rules and regulations of 50,000 and 75,000 pages. We think that we’re going to be able to move with speed and innovation with that kind of regulation and bureaucracy?

For example, in the old days, if you look at the time from contract to operational for our tactical jet fighters, it took about five years. It now takes 30 years. Guess who’s now doing it in five years? China. Guess what commercial industry does when they have a new airplane? It’s under five years. A new automobile, it’s under five years. And so our Department of Defense has allowed itself to get out of sync with the world that we live in.

They focus on inputs: everybody’s yelling and screaming about how the top line’s got to go up, we need another 3% we need another 5%. My argument is we need to focus more on what we get for what we spend, not how much we spend. We’ve got to change the output focus in the Department of Defense so that we do everything better, faster and cheaper than China.

Jared Serbu: Let’s stick with acquisition for a bit since you brought it up. It’s also a very well-studied problem. And there have been actually some reforms in various NDAAs over the past five years. How far have those gone toward fixing the more systemic problems that you see in the acquisition system, and how much more needs to be done?

Arnold Punaro: Well, certainly there’s been no lack of trying in the Congress and in the Pentagon to try to reform the acquisition process. It’s a life’s work, and you’ll never you’ll never get it done. Bill Perry tackled it when he was Secretary of Defense, Carl Levin and John McCain tackled it, John McCain and Mac Thornberry tackled it, Jack Reed and [James] Inhofe. And the last couple of administrations, between Ash Carter, Frank Kendall and Ellen Lord, they made a lot of good progress, like you said, but the point is not how far we’ve come, but how far we still have to go.

If you look at the big picture output, for example, in Navy shipbuilding, the shipbuilding budget has gone up 70% and the number of ships we buy has gone down 70%. I remember when Norm Augustine wrote Augustine’s Laws — he predicted decades ago that the cost of weapon systems is going up so rapidly that we’re going to get to the point where we can only afford one tank, one ship, one plane, one truck, and people just laughed. Well guess what? We’re pretty close to that right now.

One of my other hats is chairman of the National Defense industrial Association. We’re getting ready to kick off and launch an emerging technologies Institute, which is going to be an independent objective organization. We’re going to make a huge financial investment, because we think these technologies are so important to our country’s economic future, not just our military future. And so we want to push the government, push our industry, push our economy, that’s the future. And by the way, in these emerging technologies, if you go to Silicon Valley, if you can’t get it turned around in under a year, you’re not going to survive. And so that’s the kind of cycle time that we need to basically put into our government procurement system.

Jared Serbu: Just one more question on acquisition reform, because it seems to me there’s kind of two schools of thought on this. One is, you do need to do continuous improvement and continue to refine the system and get inefficiencies out. On the other hand, if you’re reforming the entire system, or big chunks of the system, in every single NDAA, it leads to reform fatigue after a while. And so the thinking along those lines would be maybe give people a few years to have a stable system to work within and learn how to use and learn how to optimize. Do you see a tension there?

Arnold Punaro: Well, I do, and I think I lean on the side of reform fatigue. I don’t think we need to change the whole system. I don’t think we need to have massive reform, I think we need to attack the four or five key nodes.

First, it’s a requirements process, get rid of the iron majors in the Army that develop requirements, I say, facetiously that if the Army could get away with it, they’d want a nuclear powered tank that can fly itself to the battlefield. The requirements people gold plate the requirements without any regard for technical feasibility or cost affordability. You’ve got to reform the way they do requests for proposals. They always are just looking at the upfront cost, they’re not weighing the sustainability costs. Why do people buy reliable automobiles? They cost a little bit more upfront, but guess what, they save fortunes on the maintenance because they never need maintenance. DoD needs to adopt that model. And there’s so many things they can do. You don’t need to change the wiring diagrams or break up R&E and put it back together. And we’ve got good people. I mean, Heidi Shyu, who’s been nominated for Research and Engineering, you couldn’t get a better person to kick some butts in the Pentagon and push people on technology, and others.

So again, it’s not the people, it’s the processes. We’ve got to get better contracting procedures and quicker contracting procedures. The Ford Class carrier, which is not even technically operational yet, has been in process for over 15 years with massive cost overruns. I mean, you can fix that kind of thing. You don’t need to reorganize the Pentagon or the Congress.

And guess, what Congress is broken. It’s as broken is the acquisition process. They never get their work done on time. We’re going to start in a continuing resolution again this year, we’ll be lucky to get the defense and appropriation bills done by Christmas. And you know, when’s the last time we had all 12 of the annual appropriation bills done on 1 October? It’s been 25-plus years. And so these things can be fixed. We don’t have to reorganize anything. We just have to get people with some backbone, you know, to tackle these tough issues.

(This is a partial transcript. To hear the full conversation, click the audio link at the top of this page). 

On this edition of On DoD, Jared Serbu speaks with Maj. Gen. (ret.) Arnold Punaro, who’s just released a new book, The Ever-Shrinking Fighting Force.

Punaro, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee who’s advised Defense secretaries of both parties on reform issues, argues there are three main categories of cost growth that have steadily decreased the military’s tooth-to-tail ratio over the last several decades, and offers several ideas for how to begin to move the balance in the other direction.

For the better part of a decade, the Pentagon’s IT leadership has struggled with how to persuade the military services and Defense agencies to consolidate their email and office tools into something that resembled a single, unified enterprise. It took a global pandemic to make it happen, but the Defense Department now appears to have achieved that goal.

There’s little question that the biggest catalyst for change was a project called Commercial Virtual Remote (CVR), the implementation of Microsoft Teams that DoD launched in March 2020 as an emergency measure to let millions of employees do their jobs from home. The wildly-successful service finally went dark on June 15, after having been extended several times.

At its peak, CVR, hosted in a commercial cloud, handled online meetings and collaboration services for 2.3 million users throughout the department. It’s the first real example of the entire Defense Department converging around a single enterprise IT solution — and it likely would not have happened except for the time crunch the pandemic imposed.

“There was a feeling that we can only do this once, instead of each one of us trying to figure out how to do it for ourselves,” Danielle Metz, DoD’s deputy CIO for information enterprise said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “Typically, when we have the luxury of time, that’s our default. But the experience of CVR has shown that working together as an enterprise really does work.”

And that lesson in behaving like an enterprise wasn’t purely an academic one. Once a widespread user base adopted and grew to like CVR, it became apparent to IT leaders throughout the department that the demand for cloud-based collaboration wasn’t going to subside. So Defense components dramatically accelerated their plans to migrate users to more permanent cloud offerings that offer the full suite of Microsoft 365 tools.

Metz said 80% of the department’s workforce had already made the transition by the time of the June 15 CVR shutdown. And some DoD components are ahead of others. The Air Force, for example, was ready to enable its version — Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) — right away, for its entire workforce. The Navy, meanwhile, was only prepared to onboard a smaller subset of existing CVR users to its version — Operation Flank Speed — and plans to transition the rest of its workforce throughout the remainder of this calendar year.

The long-term replacements differ from their predecessor in several important respects. For instance, CVR was only authorized for the lowest levels of unclassified data: what DoD’s cloud security requirements guide classifies as “Impact Level 2.” Its successors will be authorized up to Impact Level 5, DoD’s designation for the most sensitive types of unclassified data.

“CVR was a standalone capability — it was just Microsoft Teams, and it had limitations, by design, because it fit a very specific need,” Metz said. “The 365 cloud environment covers the totality of our controlled unclassified information, and it integrates all of the Office suite productivity — Teams, Outlook, all the Microsoft applications. And it will have the additional security that we didn’t have in CVR, just because it was an extraordinary circumstance.”

Another major difference: The full-fledged cloud productivity suites Defense employees will use from now on aren’t strictly an enterprise service in the same way CVR was; they’ll operate in a federated model, with each military department running their own Office 365 “tenants,” and the Defense Information Systems Agency running a separate tenant to serve employees at various DoD agencies.

But Metz said the federated environment should still operate more-or-less like a unified enterprise. The department intends to build on lessons it learned from securing CVR, when it used a single cybersecurity services provider — the Army’s C5ISR Center — to secure the commercial cloud platform. And the various cloud tenants will be tied together by a central identity service the DoD CIO’s office constructed prior to the pandemic.

“That’s really how we’re able to stitch together all the tenants to create that interoperability. That’s what we enjoyed in CVR, and now it’s what we’re trying to replicate with this federated approach,” she said.

At least for the time being, the department will give up some of the economy-of-scale pricing advantage it might have achieved by negotiating a single agreement for CVR directly with Microsoft.

But Metz said DoD’s components will still use a relatively small number of consolidated contract vehicles to purchase their Microsoft licenses. The department is strongly encouraging them to buy the services through the $7.6 billion Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract DoD and the General Services Administration awarded to Leidos in 2019. The Navy, for now, will continue to use an enterprise license agreement it negotiated separately.

Ultimately, the department also wants to reduce the total number of Microsoft 365 tenants it will have to stitch together in the new federated environment. As of now, there are 13.

“We really have to work hard to manufacture the ability to have seamless interoperability and collaboration. That was easier [in CVR],” Metz said. “I think over time, we’ll be able to optimize to a more reasonable number. But there is a commitment from the military services and DISA, realizing that now that we’re in the cloud, this is shared space. Even though you have your own individual tenants, a risk to one is a risk to all.”

Another key legacy of CVR is a restructuring of the Defense Department’s connectivity to the public internet.

When the pandemic started, DoD’s networks were architected with the assumption that almost all of its employees would be working inside of government buildings with direct connections to government networks.

For that reason, in the early days, CVR — hosted in a cloud outside the DoD Information Network (DoDIN) — was easy for employees to access if they were working from home. But users who were still on government networks had nowhere near the bandwidth they needed to bridge the divide between themselves and their work-from-home colleagues, so the Defense Information Systems Agency had to quickly upgrade the circuits that connect the DoDIN to the public internet.

Those pandemic-related capacity upgrades will play an ongoing role in the new federated environment, Metz said.

“Many DoD leaders are looking at how we’re going to bring people back to work. If we’re going to have a hybrid model, [we’ll need] robust networks and bandwidth, government-furnished equipment, the ability to do the full complement of our work regardless of where you are,” she said. “That affords DoD leadership the ability to be able to make those types of decisions, because we have the footprint now. It should not matter where your workforce is located, they will be able to execute their mission safely and securely.”

One reason the Defense Department’s use of other transaction agreements has become controversial in recent years is the military’s widespread use of third-party consortiums to help manage the acquisition process. Compared to more traditional procurements, few aspects of the government’s solicitation and award are visible to the public, making consortium-based OTAs something of a black box to researchers, journalists and outside watchdogs.

But a new audit by the DoD inspector general indicates that not even the Pentagon itself has a clear understanding of the billions of dollars it spends each year via OTAs, partly because of policy weaknesses, and partly because of technical shortcomings in the government’s central procurement database.

The difficulties in tracking the transactions were part of a wide range of problems the IG found in a new examination of consortium-based OTA spending, including inadequate controls over sensitive information DoD releases to consortium members.

“With the Congress giving the department more authority to use this type of contracting vehicle, we were seeing an uptick in the use of OTAs,” Theresa Hull, the OIG’s lead auditor for acquisition issues said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “OTAs awarded through consortiums present a much higher risk than some of the others because of the lack of visibility that the government has on a lot of information. So this, to us, was ripe for additional oversight.”

Part of the of visibility problem comes down to a shortcoming in the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), which was never designed to handle the way DoD interacts with consortiums, and still hasn’t been updated even after government spending through those consortiums has ballooned into tens of billions of dollars per year.

In many instances, government procurers have come to favor the consortium approach because it gives them access to a wide range of traditional and nontraditional vendors with expertise in a particular technology area — some of whom aren’t especially comfortable with doing business directly with the government.

So, instead of going through a traditional solicitation process, the government can ask for white papers to solve a particular technology problem with the consortium serving as an intermediary, and make streamlined awards for individual projects.

But in those instances, the contractual relationship — as far as FPDS is concerned — is between the government and the consortium, not the company performing the work. Consequently, official spending records only reflect the large, initial award to the consortium. Data on the actual tasks being done by consortium members is stored on individual spreadsheets, scattered across contracting offices around the country.

“There isn’t really a clear picture to know if services are duplicating efforts, and it really creates a blind spot for DoD,” Hull said. “They’re unable to determine the specific projects that contracting personnel are awarding under these consortiums, how much the government’s spending on a particular project or area, and even more important: Who’s performing that work? It’s really just the base award information that is visible to DoD right now, not those individual project awards that are made to the consortium members once that base agreement is in place.”

For its audit, the OIG looked at a sample of those base awards. According to FPDS, they were made to 13 different recipients – all consortiums – valued at $24.6 billion. But when auditors examined those non-public spreadsheets and agreement files, they found they were actually 718 different agreements with a value of $8.7 billion.

Although that sort of project-level data doesn’t exist in any central government database, some outside groups have attempted to track the dollar value of DoD’s spending through consortiums.

Bloomberg Government, for example, built its own database based on the award information some consortiums post on their own websites, and estimated DoD obligated $8.2 billion in 2020 — up from $3.4 billion the year before. But BGOV analysts said out of the 28 consortiums they examined, only 13 published enough data to determine the actual award recipients and amounts.

And apart from visibility issues over individual transactions, the OIG found DoD isn’t doing nearly enough to vet consortium members or maintain oversight over what types of information is released to them.

Those tasks are typically left up to the third-party consortium management organizations (CMOs), and the audit found numerous instances of security oversight weaknesses, Hull said.

“Just to highlight one, we identified solicitations and bid data that were subject to certain restrictions, such as U.S. contractors only. And there are certain DoD directives that require certain forms and vetting to qualify as a U.S. contractor in order to obtain access to restricted data and bid information,” she said. “But DoD is relying on CMOs to ensure that those security requirements are in place before providing the information to the consortium members.”

That doesn’t always happen. The audit found two instances in which un-vetted foreign contractors not only had access to U.S.-only information, but received awards. According to the OIG, that’s partly because DoD’s OTA guidance doesn’t address the need for vendors to register themselves in the System for Award Management, the government’s central database of contractors. Because of that, it’s conceivable that contractors who’ve been suspended or debarred could be getting OT awards too.

And Hull said DoD’s lack of oversight presents another security concern: The combined intelligence value of all of the information those un-vetted companies could assemble by virtue of their membership in a consortium.

“Each project is reviewed individually, but the consortium gets hundreds of projects within a specific technical area. And those consortium members are receiving all solicitation and supplementary guidance for each of them,” she said. “So the aggregate of that information can often provide a clear picture into the government’s interests with regard to military critical technologies, for example. And since DoD is relying on the CMOs to vet consortium members, there’s no true way for DoD to know what consortium members are even receiving the data.”

Another issue is bid protests. Hull said there is still no legal consensus as to whether OTA awards are protestable at all, and if so, in what venues and at which stages. But at a minimum, DoD could include standard language in its OTAs that makes clear when it will and won’t entertain an agency-level protest.

“The guidance is not clear, and in our report, we highlighted some examples that demonstrated this confusion,” she said. “We made a recommendation for DoD to determine whether it will require the inclusion of that basic protest language in OTA solicitations and to establish processes or best practices to address protests. Our intent was to help clarify the protest process, and to ensure that the process is fair regarding scrutiny of awards, while not limiting the flexibility allowed through the use of the OTAs.”

In all, the OIG made 13 recommendations to fix DoD’s approach to OTAs via consortiums, and John Tegnalia, the department’s principal director for pricing and contracting has agreed to fully-implement 12 of them; he partially concurred with the remaining one.

That’s the good news, Hull said: all of the problems the audit found are fixable with additional oversight, training and policy formulation on the government side, and the findings are not an indictment of consortiums per se.

“The intent of OTs is to allow flexibility, but DoD needs consistent procedures for awarding and tracking them for more accurate reporting. That data-rich information is important for leadership to be able to make the appropriate decisions on policy and guidance to know what these OTAs are being used for,” she said. “Implementing these additional controls for how to award and how to report the OTs is not going to impact the flexibilities for the use of OTs as they were intended.”