After a period of several months in which James Mattis was the Trump Administration’s sole political appointee in the Pentagon, the nomination and confirmation process for Defense Department nominees finally appears to be picking up a bit of steam, and Mattis says more nominations are on the way.

As of this time a month ago, only five prospective Defense officials were even in the confirmation process. But since then, the Senate has confirmed David Norquist as the DoD comptroller and chief financial officer, Elaine McCusker as his principal deputy, Heather Wilson as the secretary of the Air Force, Kari Bingen as the principal deputy undersecretary for intelligence, Kenneth Rapuano as assistant secretary for homeland defense, and Robert Story Karem as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

And this week, the Senate will hold confirmation hearings for Richard Spencer, Trump’s latest pick for secretary of the Navy and Patrick Shanahan, the nominee for deputy secretary of Defense. Shanahan’s confirmation would pave the way for the belated retirement of the current deputy, Bob Work, one of only a handful of holdovers from the Obama administration.

Also, on Friday, the president announced his intent to nominate John H. Gibson as DoD’s deputy chief management officer, a job that’s due to be elevated to the new position of chief management officer under legislation that takes effect next February. Gibson is the former president and CEO of XCOR Aerospace, a firm that makes space launch systems.

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For more than two years, the Defense Department has had procedures in place that, at least on paper, allow its sensitive data be housed in commercial cloud computing facilities. But migrations to the cloud have been relatively few and far between for anything besides public, unclassified data.

That’s partially because for impact levels 4 and above, not only do providers have to earn authorizations that go above-and-beyond the governmentwide FedRAMP process, any data they process also has to make its way through a DoD-provided Cloud Access Point (CAP).

The department is taking a fresh look at that latter point, saying its current CAP policies may be creating an unnecessary roadblock to DoD’s cloud ambitions. As of now, there are only two access points in existence – one run by the Defense Information Systems Agency and one by the Navy.

Dr. John Zangardi, the department’s acting chief information officer said he’s asked his office to revisit the policy with an eye toward letting commercial cloud vendors provide a CAP-like capability on their own.

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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.

The Navy’s focus on maintenance is part of a broader plan to increase the readiness of the force in 2018 before it releases plans to begin building up the size of the fleet in 2019.

The workforce growth at the Navy’s four public shipyards would continue a hiring trend that began in 2017. By the end of next year, the service plans to increase its depot maintenance staff from 33,850 to 34,988, and eventually to 36,100 over the next few years.

Vice Adm. Thomas Moore, the commander of Naval Sea Systems Command said the 2018 maintenance budget – $9.7 billion – is an unprecedented amount, and although he welcomes it, money alone won’t solve the Navy’s maintenance challenges. He said the public shipyards’ workforce needs to get more efficient, and new hires need to be able to get to the point where they can perform productive work more quickly than they can today.

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The new administration’s extended transition process has led to an unusual circumstance in which there are literally zero politically-appointed acquisition officials anywhere in the Defense Department. Such a scenario might seem like an unlikely time for DoD to make major changes to the way it buys information technology, but that’s exactly what the career civil servant who’s currently leading the department’s vast acquisition apparatus hopes to do over the next year.

James MacStravic, who’s currently performing the duties of undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics says he plans to spend the next year trying to drive out what he calls “the stupid” from DoD’s IT buying practices. By that, he mostly means the department’s tendency to apply processes that were designed for complex weapons systems – including massive, slow delivery increments and exhaustive testing procedures – to commercial IT.

“We do not have instructions, we do not have governance mechanisms that are informed by the current state of practice — never mind the current state of the art,” he told a conference hosted by AFCEA’s northern Virginia chapter last week. “What we’re going to try to do over the next year, hopefully with the assistance of industry, is change those models.”

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The Navy is in the middle of a major ramp-up in the investments it’s making to the IT systems that handle personnel and pay matters. The amount of funding it’s putting toward the task rose from $13 million last year to $30 million in 2017; in 2018, it’s asking Congress for $53 million and expects the number to rise to $75 million by 2020.

The increase is mostly explained by the ongoing rollout of an initiative called Sailor 2025, a sweeping effort that’s meant to help put the service in a better position to compete for talent with the private sector, including by better matching sailors’ talents with jobs and letting them map their own career paths through what Navy hopes will be a more flexible personnel system.

Sailor 2025’s big picture is laid out in an interview we aired last week with Vice Adm. Robert Burke, the chief of naval personnel, but suffice to say much of what the Navy’s aiming for depends on consolidating and modernizing dozens of HR systems that are both stovepiped and, in many cases, more than 30 years old.

“So far, we’re keeping a lot of these initiatives alive through brute force and sheer willpower,” Burke said. “We needed to transform our IT systems and everything else about how we conduct business in the personnel world.”

On the IT side, this summer, the Navy will finally launch the first element of its Integrated Personnel and Pay System online at a pilot site – Great Lakes – its main boot camp facility. The new system will gradually replace a hodgepodge of legacy IT that’s collectively called the Navy Standard Integrated Personnel System (NSIPS).

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The tentative budget agreement lawmakers reached over the weekend was welcome news at the Pentagon, where senior leaders had become so worried about the prospect of a full-year continuing resolution that some had come to the point of imploring Congress to just pass a bill — any bill — regardless of the top-line amount, in order to stave off several drastic cuts to flying and training hours, military moves and troop bonus payments.

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. On the military side, the raise is in line with the inflation-indexed cost-of-living increases troops are generally supposed to get, and above the 1.6 percent the Obama administration requested when it proposed the 2017 budget more than a year ago.

Interestingly though, on the civilian side, appropriators are telling the department that they want employees to receive the raise, even though the bill doesn’t explicitly include any money to fund it. That’s because, in part, the civilian hiring freeze enacted at the start of the Trump administration helped to pay for it. Lawmakers said the freeze had left enough money in DoD’s operating and maintenance accounts to fully fund the raise for civilian workers, at least for the remainder of 2017.

The budget would also pay for some plus-ups in the overall size of the military. Most notably, it would stop the previously-planned drawdown of the Army and Marine Corps.

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When President Trump signed his “Buy American” executive order two weeks ago, it wasn’t exactly a revolution in procurement policy: domestic sourcing preferences have been enshrined in federal law since the Great Depression, alongside numerous exemptions that have evolved over the years to let acquisition officials accomplish their jobs.

As agencies begin to implement the EO over the next eight months, the potential elimination of those 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.

“The acquisition community always has a bias toward getting the best possible item for the best possible price,” Peter Levine, a former DoD deputy chief management officer and longtime senior staff member for the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Congress last week. “As long as Buy American provisions are in the neighborhood they are now, the acquisition community’s been able to work around them. But there’s concern that if you ramp it up too much, it might impede their ability to do what they need to do.”

As a general matter, Buy American laws tell federal agencies to give preferential treatment to U.S. suppliers for all supplies, manufactured goods and construction materials, and Congress routinely tries to update them in various ways. There was, for example, a (since-defeated) provision in last year’s Defense authorization bill that would have effectively restricted all military purchases of athletic shoes to New Balance — the only going concern that can credibly claim all of its sneakers are made from domestic components.

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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.

The Navy’s most recent force structure assessment, issued in December, calls for a fleet of 355 ships, on par with what President Donald Trump has proposed, and 80 more than it has today. Officials have acknowledged that number was “unconstrained” by budget realities.

But last week, the Congressional Budget Office released a detailed assessment of what a fleet of that size would actually cost. The Navy would need to spend $26.6 billion per year for the next 30 years, 60 percent more than its average annual shipbuilding budget over the last three decades. The personnel, fuel and supply costs involved in maintaining a fleet of that size would also be 67 percent higher than they are now, according to CBO.

Speaking just a few days after the CBO assessment, Adm. Jonathan Richardson, the chief of Naval operations, said the Navy will publish an article in the coming weeks laying out its current views on exactly how big it needs to be, and that it will be “mindful of the available resources.”

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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, saying the U.S. “cannot kill its way out of” problems like global extremism.

During a budget-focused speech at the Air Force Association Thursday, Gen. Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not directly reference the Trump administration’s budget proposal for State, which would cut the department’s budget by $10 billion (28 percent) in 2018. But when asked about the cuts, he made clear he believes it would be unwise to underestimate the value of “soft power” in national security matters.

“I’m concerned, and I’ve expressed that concern,” he said. “If we make hard power the way the United States is perceived worldwide, our soft power will atrophy and we’ll actually have to rebuild the institutions we’ve spent so much time building in order to do the work we need to do.”

Selva, who, we should note, has some experience in the State Department after having served a three-year detail there during the Bush and Obama administrations, said concerns about diplomatic power are especially relevant to the fights in Iraq and Syria the U.S. is engaged in.

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For the third year in a row, members of the House and Senate are trying to undo an unpopular 2014 Defense Department policy change that drastically cut reimbursement rates for military members and civilians on long-term travel.

The legislation, introduced by Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), would prohibit the department from paying lower per-diem rates based solely on how long an employee or service member is on temporary duty. Reps. Derek Kilmer (D-Wash.) and Walter Jones (R-N.C.) introduced a similar bill in the House.

The lawmakers object to a November 2014 regulation in which DoD, as part of a larger move to cut travel costs, decided government travelers who were in one place for more than a month at a time should be reimbursed for lodging, meals and incidental expenses at a lower rate: 75 percent of the the usual per-diem for employees on TDY for between 30 and 180 days, and 55 percent the normal rate for those on assignment for 180 days or longer.

The regulation allowed for waivers, but only if DoD’s commercial travel office determined there was no way for the reduced rate to cover actual lodging expenses for an employee’s trip away from home; the cuts to meals and incidental expenses were non-negotiable, though.

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