Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. military should prioritize new capabilities over additional forces to maintain dominance amid modernization of adversaries, National Defense Magazine reported Wednesday. He said defense officials should avoid over expanding forces, which could affect how the military acquires high-tech capabilities.

“When you have to make a choice between capacity and capability, I would go with capability,” Dunford said during a conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “I would make sure every unit that we have actually has the level of readiness to meet its requirements. And I wouldn’t grow the force in a way that exceeds what we predict is going to be sustainable.”

The Navy and Air Force are planning to grow their forces. Naval forces are expected to get a 355-ship fleet by 2034, while the Air Force seeks to increase its squadrons by nearly 25 percent before 2030. Meanwhile, a joint study by the Pentagon and intelligence community suggests the military needs to invest in space, cyber and electronic warfare, among other technologies, to stay ahead of adversaries.

Dunford will retire from service and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in October.

The Department of Defense is implementing a multi-vendor approach to its 2018 Enterprise Cloud Strategy focused on simplifying agency operations, the Defense Information Systems Agency said Wednesday. Kevin Tate, a management analyst at the Office of the DoD Chief Information Officer, said at an AFCEA symposium in Baltimore, Md. that the department seeks to transition away from hardware-dependent infrastructures that lack flexibility and pose problems for equipment maintenance. 

“The intent is to outsource the DoD enterprise commercial cloud service solutions – software as a service – when it comes to certain capabilities,” said Karl Kurz, program manager for DISA’s unified capabilities portfolio. Kurz noted that an enterprise cloud environment will help consolidate cybersecurity operations while cutting system maintenance costs. 

DoD CIO Dana Deasy, a 2019 Wash100 award winner, added that the government intends to accelerate the delivery of capabilities to warfighters by cutting time for testing, certification and achieving an authority to operate on DoD networks. DISA supports the Pentagon’s cloud strategy through efforts like the Enterprise Collaboration and Productivity Services initiative, which will cover three capability sets and offer a range of services to all defense entities. 

The U.S. Navy will accept the lead ship of its Zumwalt destroyer program before the end of 2019 but testing will continue to enhance the ship’s combat capability, USNI News reported Tuesday.

The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) may undergo combat system testing through 2020, according to DDG-1000 program manager Capt. Kevin Smith. Smith said once testing is complete on Paul F. Foster, the Navy may move to USS Zumwalt to conduct live-fire capability demonstration.

The Navy is testing the SM-2 system aboard the ex-Paul F. Foster (DD-964) ship, which previously conducted tracking exercises and test fires. The lead ship is expected for final delivery in September. Zumwalt is already equipped with its combat system and is being tested in Alaska, California and Hawaii.

Meanwhile, the second of the Zumwalt class ships, the USS Michael Monsoor (DDG-1001), entered its combat system installation period. Smith said the ship should be out of the yard and ready for testing by the end of the year. Construction of the new Navy ships take place at the yards of General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in Maine and BAE Systems in San Diego. 

The U.S. Air Force wants to utilize a classified network for a data platform that officials expect to help the service enhance its cybersecurity, FCW reported Tuesday. Sherri Hanson, director of operations for the Air Force’s Chief Data Office, announced at a recent event hosted by AFCEA DC that the service branch aims to place the platform in the classified Secret Internet Protocol Router Network by the end of the summer. 

“We’re not going to have a simple repository for data, we just need to know where it is so that we can do that [data extraction] process, bring it in and do the analytics,” she said.  

Hanson added that access, placing analytic tools in a common environment and managing vast data are among the major challenges facing her office in establishing the platform. Aside from cybersecurity, the Air Force’s data lead said the platform would also help determine the service’s readiness. 

The Department of Defense is expanding opportunities for startups to enter the defense contracting market. Rcently, DoD hosted an industry day where nontraditional companies pitched new artificial intelligence tools to support the military, National Defense Magazine reported Tuesday. The National Security Innovation Network within the Pentagon led the event at 10 Hudson Yards in New York City in support of the agency’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. 

Air Force Lt. Gen. John N.T. Shanahan, director of JAIC and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said the event highlighted DoD’s interest in working with startups and efforts to cut acquisition-related bureaucratic red tape. He noted the Pentagon held the industry event outside Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley as both areas have most major companies and contractors.

Greg Ingram, director of business development at Massachusetts-based startup Forge.AI, said DoD is making an effort to work with nontraditional companies. Forge.AI is among the companies that proposed their technology to DoD officials during the New York event, which included Kyndi, Virtualitics, Slingshot Aerospace, Omelas and EpiSys Science.

“Everything I heard today has some applicability to what we’re trying to do in the department and the Joint AI Center,” Shanahan told National Defense. “This was the beginning of I would say many, many engagements where it really shows a level of collaboration and integration with a much broader community.”

The National Commission on Military, National and Public Service recommends that the federal government optimize its hiring processes and modernize civil service preferences to sustain the information technology workforce, Fedscoop reported Tuesday. The commission advised that the government needs to develop technical skill standards, create a civilian group comprised of former government IT employees and grow the Federal Cyber Reskilling Academy.

Additionally, the agency noted that the government may offer a 12-month noncompetitive eligibility to federal internship graduates and assess around 35 percent of general schedule and senior executive service performance on recruitment, personnel management and human capital roles.

The memorandum was released during a recently concluded hearing for critical skills on May 15. The agency intends to host 13 more hearings before it delivers a final report to Congress in March 2020. The commission has also encouraged the public to send their suggestions in light of the report.

Legal challenges and implementation problems could emerge as a result of the potential merger of the Office of Personnel Management with the General Services Administration, Nextgov reported Tuesday. Recently, the White House submitted a legislative proposal to Congress to reorganize OPM into GSA and establish a new office of federal workforce policy within the Office of Management and Budget. The office will be headed by a non-Senate confirmed appointee with the rulemaking authority.

“A search on the Code of Federal Regulations for ‘Office of Personnel Management’ reveals [more than 700 references] across 41 titles. So the question of the rulemaking fix required to attend to the administration’s proposal is huge,” said Donald Kettl, professor and academic director at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Kettl also cited legal issues that could surface from regulations that could be introduced by the workforce policy director.

“Any effort to do so seems certain to generate legal challenges, which could well tie up the reorganization in court,” he said. “The simplest answer is [retaining an] OPM director as a figurehead. But that, in turn, raises the question of why go through all of this, without defining the basic problem to be solved and devising a strategy that seems most likely to solve it.”