WASHINGTON: Congress hates base closures, known as BRAC. But it turns out you don’t need a Base Realignment And Closure round to hurt homestate economies. If you cut the Army by 120,000 (from a wartime peak of 570,000 to 450,000), and prohibit the Pentagon from closing bases, what you get — instead of wholesale shutdowns…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Enterprise-wide training: the Army’s $3.5B program for multi-service combat readiness
The competition for Warfighter Training and Readiness Solutions will bring together training networks, combat training centers and live ranges across the DoD enterprise.
PENTAGON CITY: We’ve all heard about social media and its influence on international affairs and national security. The Arab Spring blossomed when a Tunisian man’s self-immolation was shared online and sparked uprisings that have yet to subside. But you don’t really think of social media as a useful tool for detecting weapons and their use. After…
By Colin Clark
PENTAGON: When Iran hacked the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet in fall 2013, it shook up the sea services’ approach to cybersecurity. Thanks to that new vigilance, their networks have fended off every subsequent attack, the head of Navy Cyber Command said today. That doesn’t mean no one breached any portion of any Navy or Marine Corps…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: The first Future Vertical Lift Aircraft won’t fly until the 2030s but the Army, Navy, and industry are already at work on software standards. Those include a new “model-based” approach to software architectures that will require a culture change among programmers and defense bureaucrats alike. Why take on so much so early? Because FVL will…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
ARLINGTON: “Big data” is big business nowadays. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin, for example, boasts their analytical tools have successfully predicted everything from Arab Spring uprisings to the onset of sepsis in hospital patients. But big data can also go wrong in big ways. If you set a powerful program loose on a large enough data…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: “One of the things I try to tell the work force out there is this is not what is going to define us,” said Adm. Mike Rogers, new head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command. After two months in the job — and halfway through this morning’s Q&A at a Bloomberg Government…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
A new approach to speed, scale and efficiency for the industrial base
Radars, EW, EO/IR, space imagery, and microelectronics are brought under one roof for a streamlined approach to common people and factories.
WASHINGTON: Spurred by the Navy Yard shootings, the Pentagon has effectively gone back to 1999 and is again considering slashing the number of people who get Secret and Top Secret clearances. The Defense Department also may engage in persistent monitoring of all cleared employees to make it harder for those with family or money troubles,…
By Colin Clark
[UPDATED 2:15 pm]WASHINGTON: Between sequestration, shutdown, and the Continuing Resolution, it’s been a brutal year for the federal government, especially the Army. Alongside training, maintenance, and morale, most of the service’s conferences have been hammered: “I’m surprised any of us is here,” Army Secretary John McHugh said this morning in his opening remarks to the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
THE PENTAGON: That question is what America’s allies asked Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and other senior national security leaders over the last few weeks as they watched agog as the world’s biggest economy and military came perilously close to systemic failure. “Our allies are asking questions: Can we rely on our partnership with America? Will…
By Colin Clark
So how hard is the federal shutdown hitting the US military? “Walking around the building, I would say we’re probably at about a third of our staff right now,” said one military officer. (About half the Defense Department’s civil servants have been furloughed, but military personnel are still on duty). Of 26 people in…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: This summer’s unpaid leave for federal workers was unpleasant enough. If the government shuts down October 1st, though, this fall’s furloughs are just going to be crazy. A patchwork of legal exceptions and grey areas will not only prevent most federal civilians from getting work done but, indirectly, keep many military servicemembers from getting…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
How will the Defense Department handle the all-but-inevitable government shutdown on October 1st? In a few minutes, Pentagon comptroller Robert Hale will lay out the answers for the media — and for hundreds of thousands of anxious civil service employees, many of whom will be watching via webcast. What he’ll be briefing people on is…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: Instead of trying to cram a $500 billion force into a $450 billion budget and hoping Congress passes sequester relief, the Defense Department needs to go back to the drawing board. That’s the consensus of two top defense experts from either side of the government-industry gap — former Obama and Clinton appointee Michele Flournoy…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
