Sunday, November 16, 2025
Assuming the Senate confirms CIA chief Leon Panetta as Defense Secretary Robert Gates' replacement, the White House's plan is for Gates to step down June 30 and Panetta to take over at the Pentagon July 1, a senior administration official told reporters today.
Multibillion-dollar efforts to build nuclear ballistic missile submarines, Army vehicles and F-35 Joint Strike Fighters will spearhead a new Defense Department initiative challenging program managers to deliver weapons under budget.
The upcoming Pentagon assessment aimed at cutting hundreds of billions of dollars in defense spending will likely start with the same threat scenarios that informed the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, but will use a different process to reconsider the need for longstanding missions, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today.
Tired of reading lengthy, uninformative program strategies and systems engineering plans, Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's No. 2 acquisition official, has just issued new guidance that streamlines the templates for these key documents.
The Defense Department is very early in the planning process for the upcoming military roles and missions review announced by the president last week, Frank Kendall, the Pentagon's No. 2 acquisition official, said today.
James Thomson, the president and CEO of the nonprofit RAND Corp. for more than two decades, announced today he will step down this fall.
The Defense Department might eliminate some of its missions during the Obama administration’s upcoming round of defense cuts, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos said today at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and Tufts University's Fletcher School.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is opposed to the idea of purchasing a dozen nuclear ballistic missile submarines outside the Navy's shipbuilding account, Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter said Wednesday.
President Obama's call today for a new review to find more savings in the defense budget will require careful attention to "managing risk" and determining which missions "the country is willing to have the military forgo," Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said.
The Defense Department is “still going through the details” of House appropriators’ 459-page continuing resolution (H.R. 1473) for fiscal year 2011, DOD spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said late Tuesday.
President Obama's decision to assign U.S. Northern Command the lead role for the Arctic in the 2011 edition of the Unified Command Plan will simplify command and control in the region, a senior defense official said today.
If the federal government shuts down, what will happen to the Defense Department's acquisition workforce?
President Obama signed the new 2011 version Unified Command Plan on Wednesday, making several major changes to the roles of combatant commanders.
NATO today issued an update on its military intervention in Libya.
U.S. Joint Forces Command chief Gen. Raymond Odierno today defended plans to disestablish JFCOM, noting key functions would move to the Joint Staff's J-7, J-3 and J-8 directorates.
Pentagon spokesman Capt. Darryn James yesterday provided an update on the number of strikes and sorties in the U.S. and coalition military operations against Libya's government (as of 6:00 a.m. EST March 30).
The military's multimillion-dollar joint test and evaluation program escaped a cut in the Defense Department's fiscal year 2012 budget process because U.S. Pacific Command and the department's cost analysis and program evaluation shop fought plans to slash the program's funding.
U.S. military operations in Libya have cost roughly $550 million to date, Pentagon spokeswoman Cmdr. Kathleen Kesler said today.
The Navy expects to issue the results of its VXX presidential helicopter analysis of alternatives (AOA) in the second quarter of 2011 and seems to be on track to capitalize on lessons learned from the previous VH-71 program, the Government Accountability Office writes in a report issued today.
The possibility that Libyan ruler Col. Moammar Gadhafi might use surrogates to launch terrorist attacks in the United States or elsewhere in retribution for U.S. and allied airstrikes against his military is a "very, very legitimate concern," Gen. Carter Ham, the head of U.S. Africa Command, told Pentagon reporters today via satellite from AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.