Jared Serbu Reports 
Top News
- DoD to pursue commercial alternative to VA's VistA
- FedRAMP achieves another cloud security milestone
- OMB reworking financial systems to focus on outcomes, not inputs
- PHOTOS: Meet the 2013 Service to America Medal Finalists
- Causey: Today, everybody's a Sooner
- Star witness to stay mum for House hearing on IRS
- OMB director taps VanRoekel to lead management team
- Lew taps government retiree pension fund
- SBA starting new lending program for veterans
- New Apple devices cleared to join DoD IT networks
- Army prioritizes access to data in fight over intelligence IT system
- DoD upends slow approval process for mobile devices
- Senior execs' bonuses under fire at agencies
- Gould moves the needle on many of VA's toughest challenges
Jared Serbu covers the Department of Defense for Federal News Radio. Jared's reports can be heard Monday - Friday on the Federal Drive and In Depth.
DoD's Wennergren works to drive business process changes
The Defense Department's new strategic management plan includes changes to the department's previous business goals, as well as new areas DoD plans to focus on in the coming year.
Senate wants new legal deadline for DoD audits
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has told DoD he wants it to be ready for a partial audit by 2014. The Senate this week is considering taking that goal and making it law.
VA delivering 9 out of 10 IT projects on time
In the Department of Veterans Affairs, it took two years and a big culture change to raise the rate of on-time deliveries of IT projects from below 30 percent to just shy of 90 percent. But according to VA's CIO, those changes amount to his department giving itself its own budget increase.
DARPA challenge unshreds destroyed documents
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wanted to know how quickly people could put shredded documents together again. The answer: pretty quickly.
National Guard makes case to keep citizen-soldiers operational, relevant
After a decade in which it has been built up to parity with the active Army and Air Force components, the National Guard should not be allowed to backslide to a point where it is no longer usable, the National Guard chief said Friday.
Leadership from the top, well-trained workforce are key to DoD audits, experts say
The Pentagon faces an uphill climb in getting ready for an audit of its consolidated financial statements by 2017, outside experts said Thursday. Nonetheless, the goal is achievable if the push is sustained by future secretaries of Defense.
OFPP warns against cuts to acquisition workforce
Progress has been made in better recruiting and training the acquisition workforce, but budget cuts could threaten years of progress, outgoing OFPP administrator Dan Gordon said at a House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.
DISA website back up after five-day outage
The Defense Information Systems Agency's website had been offline since Saturday. Agency officials blamed a hardware problem.
DCMA leads acquisition 'revolution'
The Defense Department said it intends to not just rebuild its acquisition workforce in numbers, but also make sure those employees have access to new tools that will give them the insight they need to make good decisions.
DoD learns important lesson in developing coalition network
NATO and its members say a network they constructed to tie together the national networks of the various militaries operating in Afghanistan is a success story — except for the fact that the network took eight years to get up and running. But U.S. Defense officials said they have a better understanding for future coalition operations for how best to build such a network.
Joint Chiefs argue against National Guard representation
For the first time in the memory of any currently-serving member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified at a single hearing Thursday. Their message: Don't add a seventh.
Air Force adding new IT stovepipes every day, general says
The new leader of the Air Force's major information technology acquisition command said the service still is operating in a mode that lets individual programs design and build their own IT infrastructure.
DoD wants cheaper, faster satellite capabilities
The Defense Department needs fast, reliable, resilient satellite networking capabilities across the globe. It's wrestling with how to provide those capabilities in the face of dropping budgets.
VA's mobile strategy aims for flexibility, multiple devices
The Veterans Affairs Department wants to hedge its bets when it comes to its planned rollout of up to 100,000 tablet devices. IT leaders worry about the unpredictability of the mobile technology landscape, and don't want to spend millions to develop apps for a platform that risks being superseded by a competitor.
DoD to create map of defense industry
The Pentagon said it needs a much clearer picture of the subcontractors beneath the top tier of prime vendors it works with every day. DoD is trying to create a comprehensive map of the entire defense industry so it can keep critical suppliers healthy during an expected period of industry consolidation.
Air Force aims for one network by end of 2012
The Air Force intends to migrate most of its localized and non-standardized IT networks into a single system known as AFNET by the end of next year. The migration should enable enterprise services across the Air Force, but who will host and operate those services over the long term remains undecided.
DoD personnel miss out on absentee ballots
A Pentagon report found that more than a quarter of active-duty military personnel who requested absentee ballots for the 2010 election never received them. DoD is examining the reasons and looking to technological solutions.
Military retirement costs are affordable, DoD says
Amid calls for military retirement reform, Pentagon officials say the system that's in place right now is not the main driver of the department's escalating personnel costs and is affordable . Their remarks Tuesday before a Congressional subcommittee run counter to a Defense Business Board report that suggested retirement costs may eventually crowd out warfighting capability.
Intel CIOs finding common ground in shared services
Chief information officers in the intelligence community said despite cultural challenges, it makes sense to treat the IC as one IT enterprise. They owe an implementation plan to IC agency heads by the end of this year.
DoD almost ready to hand out $30M in clean energy grants
The Pentagon will soon announce winners of its latest round of grant funding to try out new energy technologies at its U.S. bases. The response from industry and other government agencies has been overwhelming, officials said.
