Inside the DoD Reporter’s Notebook – Army tells commanders to move out of and mothball older facilities

“Inside the DoD Reporter’s Notebook” is a biweekly feature focused on news about the Defense Department and defense community, as gathered by Federal News Radio DoD Reporter Jared Serbu. Submit your ideas, suggestions and news tips to Jared via email.

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Army tells commanders to move out of and mothball older facilities

With the odds dim that Congress will allow the Army to shrink its footprint of bases in line with its shrinking force, the service is implementing one of the few alternatives it has to a base realignment and closure (BRAC) round: moving soldiers and civilians out of its oldest buildings and shuttering them.

Lt. Gen. David Halverson, the commander of Army Installation Management Command has just signed an execution order telling base commanders to consolidate their personnel into the newest buildings they have and do everything they can to clear out of older, half-empty facilities. The measures are being undertaken mostly to save scarce maintenance dollars, partially because older buildings tend to be more costly to run. Some, officials said, will be placed in a long-term mothball status, others will be tagged for eventual demolition.

“But it takes money to do demolition, and that’s part of our challenge,” Katherine Hammack, the assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and the environment told reporters last week. “We don’t want to demo something that’s still in functional condition, we want to demo the failing structures. But when you have reduced funding you can’t even do that, so you’re going to have abandoned buildings that are of no use to anyone that are still standing up.”

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Pentagon orders broad initiative to drive cybersecurity compliance, change cyber ‘culture’

The Defense Department is spending tens of millions of dollars per year to clean up after cybersecurity breaches – about 80 percent of which are caused by defensive lapses like poor user behavior and failure to apply software patches. So Pentagon leaders say it’s time to ratchet up the pressure on senior leaders to comply with existing security policies and better train their personnel on cyber hygiene.

The DoD Cybersecurity Culture and Compliance Initiative (DC3I) – billed as an effort to “transform DoD cybersecurity culture” – will include a new regime of no-notice inspections, mandates for commanders to incorporate real-world cyber scenarios into all of their unit training and a yet-to-be-determined amount of spending to make military networks more defensible, based on the premise that every dollar spent on up-front security prevents $7 of costs in fixing a breach after the fact.

A memo signed end of September by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey gives U.S. Cyber Command and the DoD Chief Information Officer 120 days to complete a series of 11 tasks to lay the groundwork for the initiative, beginning with training for senior leaders and for users, with an emphasis on showing them real-world things that can go wrong when cyber policies aren’t heeded.

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Navy, Marine Corps see NGEN as gateway to commercial IT

The Navy and Marine Corps are still in the early planning stages of a potential revamp of their Next Generation Enterprise Network contract. But both services say they hope to use the recompetition of NGEN to give commercial industry more of a hand in the IT services they’re providing to sailors and marines.

The Navy department released its request for information just a month ago – an early step in developing the acquisition strategy which could finally allow 34 different enterprise services to be competitively bid to different vendors, one of the key selling points all along of retaking government ownership of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet after a decade of full-outsourcing to HP. (That firm still handles day-to-day operation of Navy’s networks under the NGEN contract’s first round, but with much more say-so from the government customers who now own the infrastructure).

Among the Navy’s long-term objectives, according to deputy CIO Janice Haith, is to migrate at least 75 percent of its data from government-controlled data centers to commercially-operated cloud platforms.

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