If all goes according to plan, the Defense Department is a few weeks away from releasing new guidance on how it buys and builds business IT systems.

Those systems — think logistics, pay and personnel and medical IT  — often have costs ranging into the billions of dollars, have been a frequent target of criticism from Capitol Hill and are on the Government Accountability Office’s current list of high-risk federal programs. In last year’s Defense authorization bill, lawmakers told the Defense secretary to prioritize off-the-shelf software, reduce the use of customized code and streamline the department’s own business processes before it makes new IT investments.

Guidance to that effect is now headed toward Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall’s desk after a study group spent nearly a year drawing up the recommended practices, said Jane Rathbun, Kendall’s deputy director for Defense business systems.

“What I’ve discovered since taking this position in January is that the department has a long history in weapons system acquisition, but we haven’t focused on IT acquisition with the same fervor,” she told the Federal IT Acquisition Summit in Washington last week.

The draft plan of attack will include an insistence that the Defense communities who develop requirements for business systems and the acquisition professionals in charge of buying them work much more closely together, Rathbun said.

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It may or may not have been the intent of the Pentagon’s World War II-era designers, but the mostly concrete structure of world’s most famous five-sided building makes it a black hole for radio frequencies, including cell signals, making it hard to achieve the kind of mobile work and communication that’s commonplace in most 21^st century offices.

That’s changed in just the last couple months. DoD now has a fully-functional Wi-Fi network throughout much of the building, something that was unimaginable to the Pentagon’s own IT experts as recently as a few years ago because of cybersecurity concerns. The current implementation gives DoD employees secure wireless access to the military’s NIPRNet and also lets guests access the public internet.

For end users, the Wi-Fi project is one of the earliest and most visible results of DoD’s decision to consolidate its IT services under a single organization known as the Joint Service Provider, the shared services organization that’s operationally controlled by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

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The Air Force made a bit of history last week: For the first time since it became a separate service in 1947, enlisted pilots strapped into cockpits and flew solo missions.

The two airmen in question flew the single-engine DA-20, a trainer aircraft based at Pueblo, Colorado last Thursday. They’re among the first trainees in an Air Force program to begin relieving crisis-level pilot shortages by using enlisted personnel to operate the unarmed Global Hawk drone, but per Air Force regulations, even the pilots of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) need to earn their wings in manned aircraft first.

“It’s a great opportunity that we’re getting enlisted pilots back into the full force,” said an Air Force master sergeant the Air Force identified only as Mike (another Air Force policy bans publicizing the full names of RPA pilots).

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Rumors of the death of Army Knowledge Online — the web portal soldiers and Army civilians have used for everything from training to email since the 1990s — were evidently premature.

The Army has settled on a long-term vision that will keep at least some key AKO functions alive for the foreseeable future. That’s after officials shut down its email and collaboration services last year following the move to the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Enterprise Email and Defense Online Portal Service.

Tom Neff, the project director for enterprise services in the Army’s program executive office for enterprise information systems, said officials are mapping out a strategy that would continue to use AKO as a place where soldiers can dump their files, access various online training materials and sign onto various Army websites that aren’t visible to the public.

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As we’ve reported before, the Army is playing catch-up after letting its electronic warfare capabilities atrophy during a decade in which it was largely preoccupied with counterinsurgency warfare and while potential adversaries — notably Russia — have made significant advances in their ability to attack the communications and computer systems that are vital to modern warfare.

As one way to deal with that, the Army is currently experimenting with a concept it calls cyber support to corps and below (CSCB) — the notion that individual tactical units need to deploy with their own offensive and defensive cyber and electronic warfare capabilities and be prepared for an enemy that can and will use electronic attacks on the battlefield.

As a pilot project, the Army inserted some of its cyber experts into a Stryker battalion during one of its rotations through the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, earlier this year, and there were several interesting takeaways, not all which we can detail in this space. But one worth mentioning is that officials are worried about their units’ ability to adequately train for enemy jamming of their signals — a circumstance which they assume will occur in any future conflict against a sophisticated enemy — because it’s not an easy scenario to replicate in most training environments.

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The Pentagon last week made contract awards in its promised expansion of federal government’s first-ever bug bounty — the “Hack the Pentagon” challenge which would up finding and closing 138 separate cybersecurity vulnerabilities in DoD’s public-facing websites earlier this year.

The new contracts — $3 million to HackerOne and $4 million to Synack — will fund roughly 14 more such challenges in which “white hat” hackers earn payments for discovering security flaws. Each company won single-award indefinite-delivery/indefinite quantity contracts, and the Pentagon is inviting individual military services and agencies to submit their own systems to crowdsourced vulnerability testing; individual projects will be awarded as task orders under the ID/IQs.

Importantly though, the award to Synack is specifically meant to test the bug bounty concept against systems that are much more sensitive than public web portals. For the first task order, worth $350,000, DoD is asking the firm to pit the experienced security researchers it recruits against a half-million lines of sensitive source code developed by one of its contractors, plus one live application that’s only accessible via a military intranet.

“The contractor will be required to maintain a private community of skilled and trusted researchers, diverse in skillset, and able to conduct both deep binary hacking, web-based attacks, reverse engineering, and network and system exploitation,” the department wrote in a performance of work statement. “The challenge phase itself will last three weeks, and the total period of performance of the task order will not exceed four months.”

In the first bug bounty, DoD invited essentially anyone to participate, provided they could pass a basic background check. Winners ranged from high school students to experienced white-hat hackers with hundreds of bounties under their belts.

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The U.S. military’s program to privatize the living quarters on its bases — contentious and controversial at its inception 1996 — is now universally regarded as a great idea. Of on-base homes, 94 percent meet the Defense Department’s housing standards, compared to 22 percent when the government was in charge.

But Congress and the Government Accountability Office are asking new questions about the long-term viability of the Military Privatized Housing Initiative (MHPI), particularly with regard to how it’s financed: Developers and investors were promised a steady income stream from each home they built, tied directly to military members’ basic allowances for housing (BAH) which are calculated to match leasing and utility rates in a given community. But Congress has since gone along with a DoD proposal which cuts those allowances by 5 percent, and occupancy rates are falling as the military shrinks in size.

“There are a couple of clouds on the horizon,” said Brian Lepore, GAO’s director of Defense infrastructure issues, last week at a defense infrastructure forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “As we see reductions in the force structure, there’s the potential for reductions in the rate of occupancy, and we’re already seeing that at some locations. And to the extent housing allowances get reduced, there’s the potential that service members start looking at other off-base housing options depending on competition in that particular market.”

Lepore said GAO will soon begin work on a new audit of each military service’s privatized housing projects, based on language the Senate suggested in its version of the 2017 Defense authorization bill.

Although that bill has not yet passed, it tasks GAO to assess the financial solvency of each project because, in the Senate’s words, the BAH reductions “were implemented without an appropriate level of consideration on the impact such changes would have on the military housing privatization initiative.”

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This Army-centric edition of Inside the DoD Reporter’s Notebook is part of our coverage of last week’s Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington, D.C. 

In recent weeks, we’ve written about a couple of Air Force initiatives intended to scale back on ancillary tasks that have questionable connections to the core business of warfighting, and now it appears the Army is doing much the same — looking for ways to stretch declining budgets by ceasing at least some activities that have been layered onto units over the years.

Eric Fanning, the secretary of the Army (who, perhaps not uncoincidentally was previously the undersecretary of the Air Force), said last week that he’s ordered a new initiative designed to reduce time-consuming requirements directed by Department of the Army headquarters, particularly with regard to training.

“We essentially made a decision that if it’s Army-directed — which, unfortunately, a lot of it is — then we’re going to leave it up to the commanders to figure out how to get their soldiers trained, rather than have them walk through the mandatory PowerPoints we create at headquarters and send out to you in the field,” Fanning said last week at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington. “We need to do that, because we have a number of new warfighting requirements. The continuing resolution that was just signed extends a budget we submitted two years ago, before everything was happening with Russia, before ISIL emerged, before the Chinese became more provocative. So there are a lot of new stressors on the force, and we need to push more authorities and flexibility down to the garrison commanders.”

Gen. Mark Milley, the Army chief of staff, said the problem of excessive tasking isn’t just a Pentagon problem, but rather a cumulative one generated by each echelon of the Army’s leadership structure, down to the level of an Army company.

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The Army closed out the fiscal year that ended a little over a week ago having met its recruiting goals for the first time in five years: 62,500 new accessions in the active Army and 15,400 in the Army Reserve.

The overall accomplishment is largely due to improvements in the Army Reserve. While the Army Recruiting Command and its 9,000 recruiters have had no trouble meeting their goals for the regular Army, they struggled to fill Reserve spots for years. In 2013, for example, the Reserve fell short by about 4,600 recruits, meeting only 77 percent of its goal. By 2015, it was still short 2,300 recruits out of a goal of 17,300.

Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Snow, the commander of Army Recruiting Command, said Reserve positions have historically been tougher to fill since recruiters need to draw new soldiers from a relatively small geographic radius near an Army Reserve drilling site. But setting more “realistic” goals has helped. Last year’s target for Reserve recruiting was 15,400, the lowest number in six years.

He said recruiters and the Army Reserve’s leadership also worked more collaboratively than has been the case in past years.

“They provided me with their deputy commanding general for support, and a big part of his portfolio was to build the relationship with our troop program units,” Snow said in an interview for On DoD with Jared Serbu. “We do recruiting reserve partnership events all over the United States, but we weren’t getting the right people at those forums. So he really reached out to the local reserve commanders and emphasized  that this is a shared mission, and that they have a responsibility to communicate to us the kinds of people that they really need. We saw much better participation from troop program units at these meetings.”

For 2017, the Army will need to recruit about the same number of soldiers as it did in the past year even as the service continues its drawdown to about 450,000 active duty personnel.

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The Army, having seen an “exponential” growth in its reliance on software to run its critical combat systems over the past decade-and-a-half of warfare, is taking a fresh look at how much of the development and sustainment of computer code ought to be left to contractors and whether it’s time to bring some of that work in-house.

Maj. Gen. Bruce Crawford, the commander of the Army Communications-Electronics Command, told reporters last week that his service relies on service contracts for about 85 percent of the workload involved in writing and sustaining software. The question, he said, is whether that ratio is right.

“Is that a good number? And how do we know that’s a good number? We’re undertaking work right now to try to get after that problem,” he said. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that there are 10 skill sets we need. Which ones of those are important enough to the Army and the joint team that we should invest in developing government capacity so that they’re government-owned, government-trained? If we go that route in the end, I think industry gets a better deal, because all the rest of those skill sets will be left to industry to compete for.”

Crawford said part of the Army’s concern is that its traditional structures and institutional knowledge for the long-term sustainment of weapons systems are extremely hardware-centric, and, of course, sustainment makes up about 70 percent of the lifecycle cost of any given platform.

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