DoD Reporter's Notebook
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The Senate Armed Services Committee's version of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act cuts funding for several software programs the panel sees as underperforming, and implements what congressional officials say are corrective measures to DoD's IT buying habits.
July 05, 2017 -
House and Senate committees are looking to permanently fix a program for military widows by hiking prescription fees for TRICARE beneficiaries.
July 05, 2017 -
The Senate has confirmed six officials to serve in Pentagon leadership positions within the past month. But for 35 of DoD's 53 politically-appointed jobs, there still is no nominee.
June 20, 2017 -
The Defense Department is taking a new look at the rules it applies to contracts with commercial cloud computing providers. The Pentagon's acting CIO wants staff to examine whether vendors' own security controls could replace DoD's requirement for government-operated cloud access points.
June 20, 2017 -
The Navy’s 2018 budget request includes a billion more dollars and a thousand new employees to help the service dig out of an ongoing ship maintenance backlog. Trouble is, the Navy’s current training regimen for new depot maintenance workers takes about five years before they’re ready to work, and officials say they need to find ways to speed that process up.
June 06, 2017 -
James MacStravic, who's performing the duties of undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics plans to spend the next year driving DoD toward better performance in IT acquisition, including by reducing the number of departmentwide policies on the topic.
June 06, 2017 -
Navy's personnel IT budget rises by 77 percent in 2018 and is expected to more than double by 2020 to support a "transformation" of the personnel system dubbed Sailor 2025.
June 06, 2017 -
Besides proportioning DoD’s appropriations into roughly the same accounts officials had asked for, the plan includes a 2.1 percent pay raise for both military members and civilians.
May 02, 2017 -
As agencies begin to implement the EO over the next eight months, the potential elimination of various carve-outs is going to be the most interesting thing to watch — and the thing that most worries the folks who pay close attention to Defense technology procurement.
May 02, 2017 -
The Navy’s top officer says he remains convinced that the global security landscape will demand “more Navy,” over the next few decades, but his service appears to be tempering its appetite for exactly how much more, at least when measured in numbers of ships and people.
May 02, 2017 -
The nation’s number-two military officer added himself to the list of Defense officials who’ve expressed unease about taking funds away from the State Department as one way to pay for a $54 billion plus-up in military spending.
April 18, 2017 -
For the third year in a row, members of the House and Senate are trying to undo an unpopular 2014 DoD policy change that drastically cut reimbursement rates for military members and civilians on long-term travel.
April 18, 2017 -
After years of work inventorying its legacy business information technology systems and building more modern ones to replace them, the Army says it has an aggressive plan in place to cut its number of business IT systems in half.
April 18, 2017 -
Army officials are in the midst of rethinking everything from how they plan and budget for facility sustainment, to which services truly need to be offered on each post, camp and station.
April 03, 2017 -
The chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps are all taking time from their day jobs this week to testify about why it’s important that Congress actually pass a budget for 2017, now that five months of the fiscal year have elapsed.
April 03, 2017