Evaluating Better Buying and building DoD’s cyber workforce

Frank Kendall, undersecretary of defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, discusses which elements of the Better Buying Power Initiative have been suc...

Two years ago this month the Pentagon put out new guidance designed to shake up the way its acquisition professionals go about their business of buying products and services. Better Buying Power was branded by then-Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter as a way to get better value for defense dollars without targeting industry profits.

Our guest for most of the hour in this week’s edition of On DoD is Frank Kendall. He was principal deputy undersecretary of defense at the time Better Buying Power was signed two years ago and moved up to the position of undersecretary upon his Senate confirmation in May. He discussed which elements of Better Buying Power have served their purpose and which ones haven’t.

Later in the show, we shift our focus to the training of the DoD cyber workforce. Henry Sienkiewicz, vice chief information assurance executive at the Defense Information Systems Agency and Roger Greenwell, DISA’s director for field security operations join us to talk about the agency’s plan to build on its track record of information assurance training and develop modular, DoD-wide training for specific cyber roles across the military services.

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