It’s been two years since Congress approved legislation ordering increased civilian oversight over U.S. Special Operations Command. The goal was to strengthen the role of the Pentagon’s assistant secretary for special operations and low intensity conflict, and order DoD to beef up the office’s staff.

Lawmakers are apparently not happy with the progress they’ve seen so far, and continue to believe SOCOM’s explosive growth over the past two decades has far outstripped DoD’s ability to effectively administer it.

Language in this year’s Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act would order SOCOM to transfer at least 50 of its civilian personnel to the office of the assistant secretary for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict, along with millions of dollars in funding.

“The committee remains concerned that current civilian manpower within the ASD SOLIC is not sufficient to fulfill the ‘service secretary-like’ responsibilities for the advocacy and oversight of special operations forces,” Senators wrote.

In the 2017 NDAA, Congress reorganized the chain of command for special operations. It left operational matters in a chain that runs directly from SOCOM’s commander to the Secretary of Defense.

Meanwhile, the assistant secretary for SOLIC was supposed to begin performing many of the same leadership functions the secretaries of the military services do for the departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. These include, for example, administrative oversight over manning and training, and setting acquisition policies particular to special operations.

However, an independent analysis performed by the Army Manpower Analysis Agency and delivered to Congress earlier this year found that the assistant secretary has just 14 full-time staff to handle those “service secretary-like” functions. The agency estimated the office needs at least 64 people to competently carry out those responsibilities.

Indeed, manpower estimates conducted 30 years ago – when SOCOM was first created – pegged the assistant secretary’s required workforce for all of the office’s functions at between 95 and 110 people. The assistant secretary’s office had just 60 personnel as of 2016 while SOCOM has roughly 2,500 people assigned to its Tampa headquarters.

“The assistant secretary and that office has remained weak, compared to its portfolio of responsibilities,” James Locher, who served as the first Senate-confirmed assistant secretary for SOLIC in the early 1990s said in a recent interview with Federal News Radio. “Meanwhile, Special Operations Command went from being seen as a backwater, to now, in the view of many people, being the most important command in the Department of Defense.”

More responsibilities, more oversight

Lawmakers’ rationale for insisting on increased civilian oversight over SOCOM has largely to do with the increased responsibilities the command has taken on in the past decade.

Most recently, DoD gave SOCOM the lead responsibility for countering weapons of mass destruction, a task previously entrusted to U.S. Strategic Command. But SOCOM’s role in many other areas of warfare has gone far beyond what lawmakers first imagined when they created a dedicated command for special operations.

Since 2001, its budget has nearly tripled to $13.6 billion while its personnel have nearly doubled to 70,000. Its overseas deployments have nearly quadrupled.

Locher, who served as a senior Senate Armed Services Committee staffer at the time SOCOM’s enabling legislation — the Nunn-Cohen Amendment — was passed, said Congress always intended the assistant secretary to play a strong oversight role. But the recent legislation should serve to reinforce that intent.

“The reason this was done in the first place is that special operations forces are removed from the operational control of their services when they’re under Special Operations Command, so it was decided that if you’re going to do that, you need someone to play that service secretary-like role,” he said. “The reason the Congress emphasized this is because special operations forces undertake some of the most sensitive activities in the U.S. military around the world, and the develop some of the most sensitive capabilities. It was decided that we needed a civilian overseer, and that was going to be the assistant secretary of Defense.”

Apart from expressing concern about insufficient staffing levels in the assistant secretary’s office, the Senate report said DoD has not gone far enough to implement the organizational changes Congress ordered in 2017.

Those mandates included that the Pentagon ensure the assistant secretary for SOLIC operate independently from the undersecretary for policy when it comes to administrative decisions for special operations forces.

“The committee is concerned that despite passage of [the NDAA] nearly 18 months ago, the implementation of the reforms … remain incomplete,” according to the Senate report. “The deputy secretary of Defense directed the development of recommendations for implementation of these reforms, but no substantive actions have been taken since. Therefore, the committee directs the Secretary of Defense, beginning on July 1, 2018, and continuing on the first day of every month thereafter until full implementation of the ASD SOLIC reforms, to provide the congressional defense committees with monthly progress reports on specific actions taken to institutionalize the ASD SOLIC’s role.”

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Last fall, when the Army announced it was launching a direct commissioning program to attract civilian cyber experts into its officer corps, officials said they wanted to start small. The fast-track program, which is designed to attract software engineers, developers and security pros who might not otherwise consider military service, would only commission five officers in its first year.

As it turns out, five may have been too ambitious a goal. Earlier this month, the Army granted its first set of commissions under the new program. It selected just two out of more than 80 applicants, and both of them have previously served in uniform.

The low uptake rate is another potential indicator of a problem multiple senior military officials have already acknowledged: under current law, the services are only allowed to count applicants’ outside expertise for up to three years of “constructive credit” when assigning them their first military ranks.

In most cases, that’s meant the highest pay grade they can offer is first lieutenant, in the case of the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps, or lieutenant junior grade in the Navy. In other words, base pay of roughly $43,000 per year for people who are already trained in one of the most competitive career fields in the U.S. economy.

That may be about to change, however. The version of the annual Defense authorization bill currently making its way through the House of Representatives would boost the amount of credit the military can grant for private sector experience or advanced education, letting them grant cyber direct commissions up to the rank of O-6, an Army colonel or Navy captain.

A theoretical candidate starting as an O-6 would get approximately $80,000 per year in base pay. In a high-cost living area like Washington, D.C., the housing allowance included at that rank would provide an additional $40,000.

The provision, which was initially requested by the Pentagon, was inserted into the bill by the House Armed Services subcommittee on personnel. Thus far, no lawmakers have filed amendments in opposition to the proposal, making it likely that it will survive at least a vote of the full House.

The change would also make it easier for DoD to use the authority. Currently, the military services have to attest that they have a “critical shortage” of officers with cyber expertise before offering direct commissions to outsiders. The legislation would remove the word “critical.”

The Pentagon estimates the change would draw in roughly 85 new officers each year: 10 in the Army, 25 in the Navy and 50 in the Air Force.

Aside from making it easier for the military services to attract civilian experts, the Defense Department argues it the proposal would cost nothing to implement. In fact, because of the way the military’s pay scales work, it would most likely save a small amount of money — about $1 million per year.

That’s because federal law limits the number of officers that can be serving on active duty at any given time. Since the newly-commissioned officers’ salaries would be set at the within-grade pay scales for less than two years of service, they would be replacing slots the military services are currently using for officers who have more time in service, and whose base pay is higher. The difference amounts to about $48,000 per year for a theoretical O-6 with 22 years of service, compared to a new officer who’s just beginning their military career at that rank.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, who became the new commander of U.S. Cyber Command earlier this month, testified at his confirmation hearing in March that the rank limitations of the current program do seem to be a barrier.

“If you are a high-end big data or forensics malware analyst, being able to get more credit for that service to bring you in at a higher rank will allow us to probably bring in higher level of talent,” said Nakasone, who was then the commander of Army Cyber Command. “This is an early program, but that’s the early results that we’ve seen.”

Vice Adm. Robert Burke, the chief of naval personnel, expressed a similar sentiment during a panel discussion last month, saying the military can’t hope to compete with private sector IT salaries under the current program.

“However, the mission is a draw. People want to do this because service to the nation is important to them,” he said. “So we don’t have to pay dollar for dollar, but we do sort of have to be in the ballpark, maybe the right number of digits, for example. So a little more time in grade credit, and being able to lateral-enter as an officer for those kind of software engineering skills would be the right help that we would be seeking.”

If Congress does nothing, the military will lose its cyber direct commissioning program altogether. The existing authority was created as a pilot program, and is set to expire on Dec. 31.

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

In an executive order earlier this month, the president ordered federal agencies to step up their hiring of military spouses, mostly by using authorities they already have to prioritize them as job candidates.

But the Army may attempt to go further than that, and seek changes that would let it help solve the unemployment problem by hiring more of those spouses itself.

Mark Esper, the Army secretary, told Congress last week that it currently takes the government an average of 140 days to process employment applications for soldiers’ spouses. That’s a particular problem for families who have to relocate every two or three years, then start the cycle all over again.

“[The wait] is unacceptably high, and I’ve undertaken a series of initiatives that I can control myself within the Army to reduce the hiring time,” he told the Senate appropriations committee. “There are some things that I will eventually elevate to DoD. But then there are some things that I cannot fix, because it’s resident in [the Office of Personnel Management] and how OPM does it. So if it were possible to move that hiring authority either to DoD or the Department of the Army, we would be able to really accelerate our ability to hire spouses and civilians at large.”

According to a new report by the Council of Economic Advisors, military spouses are far less likely to be employed than demographically-comparable segments of the general population, and those that do work earn significantly less than the rest of the American labor force, despite having, on average, higher education levels.

The council, which based its findings mostly on Census data, found that 40 percent of military spouses have a college degree, compared to 30 percent in the rest of the working-age U.S. population. But only 57 percent of them are active labor market participants, compared to 76 percent for the rest of the country.

“Differences in age, sex, race, and ethnicity, cannot account for the gap between military spouses and their peers,” according to the report. “Indeed, accounting for these differences raises the labor force participation gap. And because labor force participation rises with education, controlling for education further increases the gap between participation for military spouses and what would be expected given their demographics.”

The CEA also cited a separate DoD study — largely confirmed by its own analysis of Census data — which found military spouses earn an average of $17,000 less per year than other demographically-similar workers in the broader U.S. economy. Even excluding part-time workers, the council found military spouses who work full-time suffer a 3.4 percent “earnings penalty” by virtue of frequent moves.

Gen. Mark Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, said the service is considering other policy changes that might have an impact on those figures, including by cutting down on the number of moves a military family might have to make during the course of a career.

“That’s a challenge for the Army, but that is probably the biggest impediment to stabilizing spousal employment in a local area,” he said. The constant churn of two or three year reassignments works against spousal employment. It’s very difficult. In the enlisted force, we think we can probably achieve longer than three year assignments. For the officers, it’s significantly more challenging because of the career development opportunities that we want for our officers.”

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

Senators and veterans groups have started signaling that they are receptive to President Donald Trump’s unexpected decision to nominate Robert Wilkie as the next secretary of the Veterans Affairs Department.

It is conceivable that Wilkie — whom the president appointed to lead VA on an interim basis after firing David Shulkin — will be confirmed as its permanent secretary in a matter of weeks.

If and when that happens, it will leave a gaping hole in the leadership of the Defense Department’s personnel shop, the organization which the Senate confirmed Wilkie to lead in March. The office of the undersecretary for personnel and readiness has five Senate-confirmable positions and up until now, Wilkie’s seat was the only one the Trump administration had managed to fill.

The Obama administration also had a great deal of trouble hiring and keeping political appointees in the P&R office: 11 different people served in the undersecretary job in either a permanent or acting capacity from 2009 though the end of last year.

Confirmation process not worth it?

The difficulty in staffing the office is wildly out of proportion with the Pentagon’s expenditures and stated priorities. About half of the department’s budget goes to personnel, and Defense Secretary James Mattis has prioritized the restoration of readiness as part of the administration’s first national defense strategy.

The easy explanation for that mismatch is that very few people are willing to endure a Senate confirmation process in order to take a job that has not proven itself to be especially influential within the Pentagon in recent years, said Mackenzie Eaglen, a national security fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The secretariat is too far gone to be saved at this point, absent a bold and dramatic leader empowered by the secretary of Defense, and backed with political ammunition to break glass inside the bureaucracy,” she said.

Candidates for those leadership positions, she argued, are much more likely to be drawn toward senior jobs that the Pentagon has clearly demonstrated that it cares about and whose views will inform decision making, such as the undersecretary for policy or the two separate undersecretariats that now make up DoD’s acquisition bureaucracy.

In an op-ed last fall, Eaglen and Todd Harrison, another of Washington’s most respected defense scholars, argued that it is time to eliminate P&R altogether.

They argued that the office has tended to serve as a bureaucratic bulwark against the sorts of personnel policy reforms the Pentagon needs in order to recruit and retain a 21^st century workforce, mostly finding reasons to say ‘no’ to proposals from the military services.

The one recent exception was Brad Carson, the Obama administration undersecretary who spearheaded then-Defense secretary Ash Carter’s “Force of the Future” initiative, but was ultimately forced to resign. This was mostly because DoD had failed to adequately consult with Congress before launching the project.

“Congress’ sharp reaction to Carson’s smart push for meaningful reforms is somewhat understandable given P&R’s history of banality,” Eaglen and Harrison wrote. “Lawmakers weren’t used to the office serving as a fount of fresh ideas. With the exception of Force of the Future, most of the major personnel policy changes in recent memory have come from outside the Pentagon, mainly from Congress and independent commissions.”

It is hard to say whether the Trump administration’s failure to fill the P&R office with appointees that might carry out its personnel policies spring from a general lack of attention to the personnel shop, or difficulties in recruiting qualified candidates who might be willing to go through the confirmation process.

It is, inherently, a political process, a lesson Dean Winslow learned at a confirmation hearing last November.

Winslow is a former Air Force combat surgeon whose service included six overseas deployments, and is now a professor of medicine at Stanford University. His nomination to be the assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs appeared to be on an easy glidepath.

But he doomed his chance to be confirmed when, in response to a question about the mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, last year he opined that civilians should be restricted from purchasing semiautomatic rifles.

“I’m very disappointed that I won’t be able to serve,” Winslow told Stanford’s newspaper, The Daily. “The fact is, I stand by what I said at the hearing.”

Since then, the Trump administration has nominated just one other official to serve in DoD’s personnel shop: James Stewart, who would serve as the department’s assistant secretary for manpower and reserve affairs.

In his own confirmation hearing on May 10, Stewart, a retired Air Force major general, appeared alongside several other nominees and did not commit any gaffes. If he is confirmed by the full Senate before Wilkie officially departs for VA, he will be the sole senate-confirmed official within DoD’s personnel and readiness office.

In the meantime, P&R still has all of the legal responsibilities Congress assigned it: to be the Defense secretary’s principal advisor for personnel matters. For the time being, it’s being led by highly-capable career civil servants with no particular political bent.

The obvious downside is that those officials, almost by definition, aren’t empowered to devise or implement anything particularly innovative: their main function is to faithfully maintain the personnel policies that are currently on the books.

I asked Eaglen: Isn’t this a nightmare scenario if you believe P&R ought to be disposed of altogether? After all, the bureaucracy is still intact, but the whole thing is being run by, well, actual bureaucrats instead of politically-appointed officials who are supposed to be responsive to the current administration’s priorities.

“This is a terrible state of affairs,” she said. “I should caveat it by saying, however, that the bureaucracy of P&R knows how to keep the trains running on time all too well actually without a person at the top. And that is part of the problem. In recent times, the office is regularly without a political appointee. It has had too many ‘acting’ officials leading it, which has its own deleterious effects that span changes in administrations.”

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

Despite months of protestations from industry, the Defense Department says it has no intention of budging from its plans to make just one award in its upcoming contract for commercial cloud computing services.

The Pentagon released a second draft request for proposals for the project, known as “JEDI,” on Monday, adding that the latest round of documentation “substantially” reflects the final solicitation it intends to publish in May.

The package also included responses to more than 1,000 questions vendors posed in response to DoD’s first draft solicitation last month. The majority were queries dealing with technical or narrow requirements issues. But dozens of others questioned DoD’s broader winner-take-all approach, implored the department to consider a multiple-award contract, or asked officials to at least publish their rationale for going the single-award route.

“The objective of achieving commercial parity seems contrary to the duration and single award aspects of this contract,” wrote one of the vendors, all of whose identities were made anonymous. “The single-award removes competition, which was the very impetus that drove the current cloud market. Also, the potential duration for this vehicle is 10 years, nearly equal to the age of the cloud market. This duration fails to recognize how fast this market is changing … the structure of this vehicle locks DoD into one vendor for the next decade.”

DoD’s contracting office said it still planned to press forward with a single award indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (ID/IQ) contract, one which officials have previously said will be worth billions of dollars, but added that different vendors were free to team together to combine multiple cloud offerings into a single bid.

In reply to most questions raising objections to the one-contract approach, the department said simply, “Your comment has been noted.”

Several other vendors pointed out that federal law explicitly requires the government to award its ID/IQ contracts to multiple vendors if at all possible. And when it doesn’t, the Federal Acquisition Regulation requires it to document its decision to opt for single-award.

“What is DoD’s rationale for a single award given that DoD anticipates multiple providers can meet the requirements in this RFP, and the department’s stated desires to innovate and leverage commercial companies?” another company asked. “A 10-year, single award contract does not seem to encourage the experimental, risk-taking culture and environment of innovation called out in [Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick] Shanahan’s memo.”

The department’s response: “This rationale is not going to be published at this time.”

Considering that the JEDI project is a high priority for Shanahan, and one that he personally launched, several other questions had to do with how the eventual services DoD buys under the contract will interact with the many other cloud efforts the department already has underway.

Some examples include the Defense Information Systems Agency’s MilCloud offering — the latest version of which will be operated entirely by a commercial provider — and a multiple-award Navy enterprise cloud contract that service hopes to award later this year.

DoD mostly sidestepped those questions, other than to say that the JEDI project won’t prohibit individual services and agencies from setting up their own contract vehicles for buying cloud services.

“JEDI Cloud is only the initial step to provide the underlying foundational technologies required to maximize the capabilities of weapon systems, business systems, and data-driven decision-making for the military,” Lt. Col. Kaight Meyers, the JEDI program manager wrote in a memo accompanying Monday’s package of documents. “JEDI Cloud is intended to be available enterprise-wide and complementary to other existing cloud initiatives. It will not preclude the release of future contracting actions. Please understand that the JEDI Cloud team is focused on developing a high quality RFP package for JEDI Cloud and will not comment on the intended use of other contracting vehicles as part of this draft solicitation process.”

However, DoD did make some substantive changes in Monday’s updated draft solicitation. Among them:

• A revised cybersecurity plan. In it, the department clarified that the winning vendor will not need to have earned the necessary “FedRAMP Plus” security approvals by the time the contract is awarded, and can do so after the fact. Currently, as one vendor pointed out, only one company (Amazon Web Services) has been certified for both classified and unclassified data.
• In an effort to maintain “commercial parity,” DoD’s previous draft solicitation said the department would only make an award to a cloud provider whose commercial business was already large enough that JEDI would not make up a majority of its services. The updated version clarifies that the winning vendor’s non-Defense services across the globe will have to stay above 50 percent of its overall business, a statistic it will have to report each month.
• Considering that DoD is insisting on one vendor that already has a massive commercial business, several vendors questioned how the department would meet its 30 percent small business contracting goal for JEDI. The updated solicitation says small businesses will only be able to provide “cloud support.”

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

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When the Defense Department decided not to ask Congress to authorize a round of base closures as part of this year’s budget, it was a recognition that doing so would be an exercise in futility. After all, lawmakers have rejected those requests each year since 2012.

But Defense officials say that doesn’t mean they’ve changed their minds about the need to get rid of some of the military’s excess real estate, either through the traditional base realignment and closure (BRAC) process, or some other means that Congress finds more palatable.

“We realize that we have asked for six years, and for six years, Congress has said no. We can’t keep doing that,” Lucian Niemeyer, the assistant secretary of Defense for energy, installations, and environment told the House Appropriations Committee last week. “We have to work with you on a common way forward that will allow us to make prudent reductions in our infrastructure. We must ensure that our basic infrastructure is ideally sized to increase the lethality of our forces while minimizing the costs of maintaining unneeded capacity.”

In a report to Congress last October, the Pentagon estimated that it would have 19 percent more base infrastructure than it can put to military use, even assuming it had a force that was as large as the one that existed in 2012, prior to the last military drawdown.

In addition to seeing that excess facility footprint as wasteful and inefficient, DoD believes it simply can’t afford to adequately maintain the buildings and other facilities throughout its $1 trillion real estate portfolio. Although Congress gave the department a significant plus-up in maintenance funding this year, it’s already accumulated a backlog of $116 billion in unfunded repair projects.

“This year’s funding will not fully restore the damage caused by years of sequestration,” Niemeyer said. “Many of our facilities have degraded significantly from reduced investments in all accounts. A lot of our facilities are in either failed or poor condition. This will ultimately result in DoD facing larger bills in the future to go ahead and restore or replace facilities that deteriorate prematurely, but the stark reality is that it may be too costly to buy or sell us out of this backlog.”

In the absence of an agreed-upon path forward to restructure its basing footprint, the department says it’s doing what it can within existing law, and within the gates of its existing bases.

For now, that means a major investment in demolishing failed or underutilized structures in order to eliminate costly repair bills. That’s a step Defense officials have previously been reluctant to take, since demolition also costs money. But the department’s 2019 budget would spend roughly half a billion dollars on demolition.

The Navy, for example, plans to spend $120 million on razing unused or crumbling facilities in 2019, after having not requested any funds for demolition the year before.

The other services described similar approaches.

The Army, which estimates it has 170 million square feet of excess infrastructure, has significantly increased the percentage of its facility maintenance funds that it uses for demolition since 2016, said Lt. Gen. Gwen Bingham, the service’s assistant chief of staff for installation management.

“We took on an initiative we call ‘reduce the footprint,’ where we’re able to consolidate our soldiers into our best facilities first, use conversion authority and then demo those facilities that were in poor and failing condition that we know we wouldn’t use again,” she said. “In 2018, we have about $100 million that’s going toward demolition. In FY ‘19, we more than doubled that, well over $200 million. So we are taking it seriously and we are trying to rid ourselves of that excess, because we know it’s costing dollars.”

Similarly, the Marine Corps expects to use existing authority within its facilities budgets to demolish roughly 11 million square feet of floor space over the next several years, as part of what it calls an “infrastructure reset.”

“It’s really a comprehensive program, and demolition’s a big part of it,” said Maj. Gen. Vincent Coglianese, the commander of Marine Corps Installations Command. “We want to reduce and optimize the infrastructure footprint, make our investments in facilities with lowest life-cycle cost. And it’s really a great return on investment, because it’s about $9.4 million of cost avoidance or ability to invest in another program. The low-hanging fruit’s easy right now as we get rid of that excess and do a better job of space management in our facilities. It will be harder to get after it in the the next round, but I think it’s a really important part of our strategy.”

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

When it comes to shortfalls in the U.S. government’s ability to meet its national security requirements at sea, the U.S. Navy is not the only organization that believes it has a capacity problem.

The U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) — the Department of Transportation component in charge of coordinating civilian ships and mariners to move military members and equipment during wartime — is woefully short of the numbers it believes it needs to meet its missions.

MARAD recently reported to Congress that its Ready Reserve Force, which draws from the U.S. shipping industry to provide the military with “surge” sealift capacity, would be able to do its job in the first few months of a major military operation. But it estimates its current force is roughly 1,800 people short of what would be needed if a conflict dragged on for much longer than that.

Currently, the U.S. has about 11,700 private sector mariners with credentials of the kind that would be need to be pressed into service during wartime, said Dr. Shashi Kumar, the MARAD deputy administrator who leads its education and training efforts.

“With normal operations, we’re OK. We’re in the green,” he said. “But when you activate the strategic sealift fleet, when they move from the reserve to full activation status, you need more mariners. You would have to pull them off of commercial ships, as well as people who are on leave or their annual vacation. So about three to four months into the activation of the strategic sealift, we would run into difficulties in crewing those vessels.”

The RRF’s capacity problem is a symptom of larger trends that have reduced America’s relative role in global commercial shipping over the decades. Those trends have also reduced the number of U.S.-flagged ships and U.S. civilian mariners that can be called upon to move military supplies and military personnel when DoD’s Transportation Command determines the Navy’s organic sealift forces aren’t sufficient.

“It’s difficult to have a base of mariners if you don’t have work for them to do in peacetime,” Mark Buzby, MARAD’s administrator said in an interview with Federal News Radio. “If those ships don’t exist, the mariners don’t exist. It all sort of works together. So the peacetime role is really critical in getting more of those U.S.-flagged ships.”

Buzby, who took over as the MARAD chief eight months ago, said he is trying to refocus his agency, which is part of the Department of Transportation, on its national security role. In his view, that includes advocating for policies that would increase the number of U.S.-flagged ships.

Among those are ones that would increase U.S. shipping companies’ role in exporting American goods, and defending the Jones Act, the sometimes-controversial statute that requires all ships carrying goods from one U.S. port to another be carried on U.S.-built ships, owned by American companies and staffed by American crews.

“It all comes back to cargo. Cargo is king,” he said. “You have to have something to carry to justify ships being there, which then requires a certain number of people. So in figuring out where we get our hands on more cargo, we’re about to become a net energy exporter. That’s a lot of product that should be carried on our ships, and currently, most of it is not. That’s a way to gain fleet size.”

Those oil and natural gas shipments could go a long way toward spurring demand for an additional 40-to-45 U.S.-flagged cargo ships. Buzby said that number of vessels would probably be enough to generate the workforce MARAD would need in in order to close its 1,800-mariner gap.

And assuring that there’s enough work for them to do over the course of a career is among his agency’s biggest challenges, he said. As of now, civilian maritime academies, including the MARAD-operated Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York, generate enough graduates to meet the nation’s current demand.

“The challenge is retaining those people,” Buzby said. “It’s having enough jobs for them to progress through the ranks and to stick around. When your ocean-going fleet is 81 ships involved in international trade, which is what it is today, that’s not a lot of billets.”

But those ships aren’t the only ones whose crewmembers who could contribute to wartime service.

There are an additional 100 whose main function is to transport goods between U.S. ports because of the Jones Act, which forbids foreign-flagged ships from performing that service.

The statute is sometimes criticized as a protectionist measure; one that routinely and artificially raises the price of goods in places like Hawaii and other U.S. locations that depend on sea delivery for everything from milk to furniture.

It came under renewed scrutiny this summer, when some members of Congress pointed out that Puerto Rico’s recovery efforts could be dramatically accelerated if deliveries of supplies weren’t encumbered by legal requirements that those goods be delivered by U.S. ships, originating from other U.S. ports.

Although the Trump administration issued some temporary waivers for Puerto Rico to relieve the Jones Act’s requirements, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the Puerto Rico disaster was a perfect example of why the law should be repealed.

“It is unacceptable to force the people of Puerto Rico to pay at least twice as much for food, clean drinking water, supplies and infrastructure due to Jones Act requirements as they work to recover from this disaster,” McCain said in a September statement. “Now, more than ever, it is time to realize the devastating effect of this policy and implement a full repeal of this archaic and burdensome act.”

Buzby said one of his main aims as MARAD’s administrator was to “educate” the public about what he believes is mistaken view of the military value of the Jones Act on the part of McCain and others.

“People say let’s get rid of it, because it costs too much. But if you took away those 100 ships, you’ve taken away the majority of people that are going to man my sealift forces in time of war,” he said. “That’s not to mention what it would do to ship building and repair, because all those ships get repaired in commercial yards. If you take that requirement away, the few remaining ship yards that build military vessels are now shouldering all of the overhead and burden.”

He suggested such a step would only serve to further reduce the competition among the handful of shipyards that are currently capable of building military vessels.

“If you’re worried about a $1.5 billion-dollar destroyer, try a $3.5-billion dollar destroyer if all of that cost has to get shifted,” he said. “It’s a big deal.”

Read more of the DoD Reporter’s Notebook.

The Army’s top acquisition official said the government has a lot of work to do when it comes to how it treats vendors’ intellectual property. Among his top concerns: The Army needs to find new ways to conduct fair and open competitions without forcing companies to expose their best ideas to potential competitors, and ensure that it’s clear which IP is owned by whom.

On the latter point, Bruce Jette, who was sworn in as the new assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology just last month, said both the government and industry have become “sloppy” in recent years.

He described a typical interaction over intellectual property rights this way:

“A vendor comes in and says, ‘You need to pick me for this project because I’m going to bring this intellectual property to the table that I paid to develop. And what [the government] will do is develop another piece, and then we got to integrate it,’” Jette said. “And then the next thing you know, we’re both locked together, and it’s messy. The government starts using your IP, you start using the government’s IP, and we cannot get extricated. And then we began having unpleasant conversations.”

Going forward, Jette said he wants to move the Army toward what he called a “more commercial” model in which each side of the negotiation has a clear understanding of who will own what before and after a contract is signed. It would include clear lines of demarcation between the portions of technology that have been paid for by the government and those over which the vendor will continue to hold exclusive rights.

“Show me the box. That’s your IP,” he said, describing the negotiation process. “Put that in the bid, show me what the limits of that is, and show me the functionality. I don’t want to know what’s in the box: that’s yours.  So tell me what you want to do for licensing. Do you maintain it? Do you want me to maintain it? Then, I’m going to design the box that goes next to it and interfaces with it. If I pay for it, I own it. If you pay for it, you own it.”

Two can play the IP game

But by the same token, those licensing arrangements can work in both directions, Jette said.

If the vendor discovers profitable commercial applications coming from the combination of its underlying technology and the government-funded integration work, the Army may be willing to license the IP behind its portion of the project.

“Most people don’t realize it, but the government can get paid for their intellectual property,” he said. “So I want to make sure that we both treat each other honestly and fairly.”

For the government’s part, Jette said he had begun discussions with the Army’s acquisition workforce on the need to respect industry’s IP – something he argued the government often does not do well during the acquisition process. He said private discussions in which vendors share their ideas and capabilities with the Army too often result in publicly-released bid solicitations that incorporate those same ideas, even when the vendor considers them to be proprietary.

Likewise, he said the government needs to improve the request for information (RFI) process by offering more discreet ways for vendors to ask questions and provide information.

“Right now, if you ask me a question after I put an RFI out, I take your question, publish it, and publish the answer,” he said. “I give away your insight, everybody else now sees what you saw. I’m working to try and find a way to fix that so that you can ask questions in a private manner and get answers, and it’s not seen as some sort of corruption of the acquisition process.”

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The 2018 omnibus appropriations bill Congress passed two weeks ago includes some significant plus-ups to what’s been one of the most neglected areas of the Defense Department budget in recent years: the funding lines that pay for maintenance and repair of the military services’ buildings, airfields and other facilities.

In some cases, it provides enough money to prevent the existing, multibillion dollar backlog in deferred maintenance projects from getting any worse. In others, it will only slow the rate at which the backlog is growing.

Among the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, the package provided $9.9 billion in facilities sustainment, restoration and modernization (FSRM) funding for 2018 — 58 percent more than the services received in 2017, and modestly higher than the amounts they requested for 2018.

Facilities Sustainment, Restoration, Modernization (FSRM) spending in 2017 and 2018
Service	2017 enacted	2018 requested	2018 enacted	Increase between ’17 enacted and ’18 enacted
Army	$2,259,546,000	$3,401,155,000	$3,521,155,000	56%
Navy	$1,667,742,000	$1,905,679,000	$2,105,679,000	26%
Air Force	$1,682,019,000	$3,292,553,000	$3,403,053,000	102%
Marines	$640,424,000	$785,264,000	$825,264,000	29%
Totals	$6,249,731,000	$9,384,651,000	$9,855,151,000	58%

Service-by-service, the amounts of the increases varied widely, but the biggest bump, by far, went to the Air Force, whose facility officials have previously described an FSRM funding approach that largely required it to “wait for things to break” instead of performing preventative maintenance. Its 2018 appropriation more than doubled over the year before, climbing from just under $1.7 billion to $3.4 billion.

The second-largest increase went to the Army, whose $3.5 billion funding line for FSRM represented a 56 percent boost over 2017. The Navy and Marine Corps each received smaller increases: 26 percent and 29 percent (with final budgets of $2.1 billion and $825 million, respectively).

In each case, the amounts Congress appropriated were not only higher than in 2017, but modestly more than the services had asked for in 2018. And each service except the Air Force proposed still-larger numbers in their 2019 budgets.

But even those amounts are far from sufficient to undo several consecutive years of underfunding the Defense Department has decided to accept for its facilities, which have a total plant replacement value of more than $1 trillion.

It has done so intentionally and openly, arguing that overall caps on Defense funding required it to make difficult tradeoffs in its operation and maintenance budgets, and that facilities represented the area in which it could “accept risk” with the least amount of short-term damage to military readiness. The persistent underfunding, however, is a significant contributor to the fact that between one-fifth and one-quarter of the military’s facilities are now rated as in “poor” or “failing” condition.

In their 2019 budgets, the services said the FSRM funding they were proposing would still only pay for 80 percent of what the Defense Department’s facility sustainment model calculates they should be spending in order to keep their facilities in good repair. While that’s an increase from the mid-70s range at which the services had been funding FSRM over the last several years, it’s far short of the 90 percent goal officials set when they established the model.

Buried within the services’ 2019 budget documents are acknowledgements that the spending levels they’re proposing are still not enough to make any meaningful headway against the military’s growing backlog of needed building repairs.

The Air Force was the one service that requested an FSRM budget ($2.9 billion) that was lower than its 2018 proposal, although it is still $1.2 billion higher than what it received last year.

Officials wrote that the proposal reflected “refocusing funding to other readiness priorities. …This funding level continues to increase the multi-billion dollar FSRM project backlog, increases long-term facilities costs, and increases risk of not meeting unanticipated readiness enabling requirements.”

The Navy, on the other hand, said its $2 billion facilities maintenance budget would represent a 6 percent increase over what it requested in 2018. The amount would be enough to gradually chip away at its backlog, partly because some of the funds ($120 million) would be used to entirely demolish buildings that are no longer worth saving.

But even assuming Congress funds the Navy’s request at the level its officials want, it would take another 48 years of sustained funding at the same level before the backlog is entirely eliminated.

“The Navy continues to take risk in infrastructure funding but mitigates this risk by focusing investments on capabilities directly supporting critical warfighting readiness and capabilities,” officials wrote. “The Navy’s facilities maintenance backlog is $14.3 billion, and will be reduced by $300 million per year based on similar future investment levels.”

Notably absent from DoD’s 2019 budget proposal was a request for another round of base realignments and closures (BRAC), a feature that had accompanied each of the department’s budgets since 2012. Defense experts widely agree that a BRAC round — which would eliminate at least some of DoD’s excess real estate inventory — would relieve pressure on not just its FSRM accounts, but the Defense budget as a whole.

Congress has steadfastly blocked the idea, despite Pentagon studies that show the military services have 19 percent more base infrastructure than they need, even assuming they’re funded at levels that allow the military to grow its force structure to the proportions that Defense Secretary James Mattis believes are necessary. The department had previously projected the savings from a BRAC round at $2 billion per year.

However, the 2018 omnibus bill did offer a small glimmer of hope that lawmakers will allow the department to dispose of at least some of its excess inventory.

One provision orders Ellen Lord, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition and sustainment, to work with the secretaries of the military departments to come up with a plan for selling some of its real estate by September.

But the report includes severe restrictions: DoD is only allowed to recommend the divestiture of property that’s already completely unoccupied and unused, and only if that’s been the case for five years in a row.

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There are a myriad of organizations in DoD that have a major interest in developing and using artificial intelligence, but until now, no coordinated strategy across the department to share lessons and avoid duplication of effort. That’s beginning to change, officials say.

The realization of the need for such a strategy set in last fall, when, as part of the process of developing the 2018 National Defense Strategy, DoD research leaders began to assess the specific AI and machine learning projects that were already underway throughout the department.

“We were surprised by the breadth that this area has expanded, because everybody has a way to use artificial intelligence — they can envision it,” Mary Miller, the acting assistant secretary of Defense for research and engineering told the House Armed Services Committee last week. “We started doing weekly meetings with people within the Department of Defense, over 40 organizations, over 150 people typically in any given week, that come to talk about what they are doing and how they are investing in what their needs are. Through this effort, we have been trying to shape an understanding of what we are spending our resources on and then to trying to organize those efforts into something that would apply to the National Defense Strategy and where we need to go.”

The unclassified version of the strategy describes offers few specifics about DoD’s precise ambitions for AI, other than to say the department plans to make more investments in the field “including rapid application of commercial breakthroughs, to gain competitive military advantages.” The spending is part of an overall $18 billion increase for science and technology spending DoD requested in its 2019 budget proposal.

But Miller said the development of the new AI roadmap is being organized along several lines of effort, including developing a workforce that understands AI, employing it to improve the military’s command and control systems, conduct intelligence analysis and find ways to team humans with machines in pursuit of a given mission.

She said the ultimate goal is to increase the military’s lethality, but that that doesn’t mean the strategy won’t consider ways to use AI in back-office business areas.

“The more we can save through our business reform, the more we can spend on achieving and attaining that lethality that he desires of the Department of Defense,” Miller said. “So we’re looking at, how do you apply AI to not only training and education, but finances, the medical field, and what we do in contracts acquisition and legal activities?”

The development of a new strategy for AI is far from the first time the department has publicly raised it as a major priority. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and “human-machine teaming” were major cornerstones of the “third offset” strategy DoD officials first embarked on in 2014 amid concerns that the U.S. military was at risk of losing its technological edge to potential adversaries, including Russia and China.

But military officials have been speaking in increasingly worried tones about the prospect of other nations making critical advances in AI before the U.S. does, and then applying them to warfighting.

“Simply put, I would characterize it as what you may roughly know as a revolution in military affairs,” Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, President Trump’s nominee to be the next commander of U.S. Cyber Command said at a confirmation hearing earlier this month. “I mean, this is a game changer for our adversaries if they get to artificial intelligence, if they get to quantum computing before we’re there. This is why it’s so critical that we continue our research, continue our work towards it.”

What’s especially worrisome is that China in particular does not have the same bureaucratic impediments the U.S. does when it comes to transitioning new technologies from the private sector or academia into military use, said Rear Adm. David Hahn, the chief of naval research. That’s a fact of life in all areas of technology development, not just when it comes to machine learning and AI, he said.

“There are no structural impediments. They’ve lubricated their system to a point where if a direction is given to move it, it goes,” Hahn said. “By design, we don’t enjoy that same kind of streamlined system, and I’m not saying we need to change our design in the manner China has. But we certainly do need to think through how we’re going to do this differently so that the great work that’s done on the S&T side of the business — and that we see every single day in our personal lives – when it comes time to apply it to naval warfighting or the joint fight, we’ve got good pathways to get it there. That’s the part that worries me: our ability or inability to move at speed.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the chairwoman of the House Emerging Threats and Capabilities subcommittee said she intends to introduce legislation later this week that’s meant to begin that thinking process, and force a new look at how the U.S. government is organized to “understand and leverage AI.”

“Russia has increased their basic research budget by nearly 25 percent, and the Chinese have national-level plans for science and technology, as well as an approach to lead the world in artificial intelligence by 2030,” she said. “All of these signs point to top-down, government-driven agendas that provide resources and roadmaps for strategic collaboration between industry, academia, and civil society. These efforts could propel Russia and China to continue to leap ahead in many technology sectors, but adversarial dominance is not a forgone conclusion.”