The Insider

U.S. Special Operations Command today asked for industry proposals aimed at beefing up the military's flying drones.

Unmanned aerial vehicles play a crucial role in Defense Department attempts to kill extremist leaders in Afghanistan. And SOCOM officials are seeking ideas for payloads capable of providing full-motion infrared video that would enable operators to "identify individuals and determine their intent from altitudes and slant range such that the aircraft platform is non-detectable," according to a notice published on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site.

Also sought are payloads enabling what officials call "tagging, tracking and locating," an uber-secretive process that involves discreetly placing some kind of hard-to-detect emitter on a person so the individual can be targeted with aerial weaponry at any time.

Additional technologies of interest to SOCOM are mapping and automated change detection, which officials have mentioned previously as a useful tool for finding buried improvised explosive devices.

Other payload technologies mentioned in the FBO notice have to do with precision-guided weapons, the employment of lasers, and communications.

Industry proposals must fulfill the requirements of technology readyness level 6, which means offerors should have prototypes that can be tested in a lab environment.

A draft White House executive order requiring a 20 percent cut in greenhouse-gas emissions from the federal government, currently circulating among federal agencies, could prompt the Defense Department to call for amending acquisition rules to allow for investments in costly energy efficiency and other low-emitting technologies, InsideEPA.com reported late last week. Specifically:

The draft order could also revive long-standing concerns from DOD over spending restrictions currently enshrined in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which generally require agencies to procure the most cost-effective goods and services.

DOD officials have long argued that such approaches hamper their ability to procure low-carbon technologies, which often have high upfront costs and do not achieve significant savings, making it difficult for the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) to approve under their current budget scoring approaches.

Brian Lally, DOD’s facility energy director, told InsideEPA recently that the department’s existing drive to increase its energy efficiency and reduce GHG emissions is hampered by the scoring procedures, which CBO and OMB use to calculate projects’ compliance with the federal acquisition rules.

The scoring should be revised, Lally said, to allow the military services to undertake projects -- such as constructing new, highly efficient buildings -- that have high up-front costs but could achieve significant savings that OMB and CBO do not currently consider. He added that he is building support within the department to push the Obama administration for such a change in the rules. . . .

Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief Ashton Carter also said May 26 that the Pentagon is working on ways to incorporate energy efficiency considerations into acquisition policy, in line with the department’s own expert recommendations. Carter told an audience of leading military policy experts that energy will be a key driver of military purchasing decisions under the current administration. Specifically, the department is working to incorporate the fully burdened cost of fuel -- the true cost of delivering fuel to the military end user -- into acquisition decisions, which would militate toward lower energy consumption in vehicles and systems.

That story got the attention of New Republic blogger Bradford Plumer, who writes in a post today:

To put this in context, the U.S. military is the world's single biggest oil buyer, and accounts for about 80 percent of the federal government's energy demand (and about 1 percent of all U.S. demand). And, for the past few years, the Pentagon has been contemplating an energy diet. It's easy to see the motivation here: In 2008, the military shelled out about $20 billion for energy, more than double the $10.9 spent in 2006, thanks to the spike in oil prices, and no one in the Pentagon sounded terribly thrilled with writing a $10 billion check to the Middle East.

The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program office today announced a deadline for foreign countries interested in participating in the initiative, which is seeking to provide a next-generation humvee.

As Inside the Army reported earlier this month, the program office, along with the Army’s defense exports and cooperation office, hosted an international conference July 16. The event was intended to provide attendees from 16 registered countries information on potential partnerships during the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the JLTV program, a joint Army-Marine Corps effort.

In a press release issued today, the program office said interested countries "must submit a Letter of Intent portraying interest and technical elements no later than September 17, 2009, which will formally indicate their desire to participate in the JLTV program."

The press release adds that international participation in the JLTV effort "will reduce program risk as the Joint Services prepare to meet the challenges of future operations."

JLTV program officials announced earlier this year a project arrangement with Australia that provides funding for additional vehicle prototypes from each contractor team. The program also has working groups with Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom.

Additionally, the document references the new Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicle program, now under way. The press release says "((j))oint collaboration and consistent communication between the Army's JLTV and MRAP program offices, under the same PEO, will only augment the Services' ability to develop survivable, fully capable and expeditionary tactical vehicle solutions to our joint Warfighters."

House lawmakers today sought to delete $80 million allocated to the Missile Defense Agency’s last week by the House Appropriations Committee to keep Kinetic Energy Interceptor-related technology development going until the Defense Department's renewed emphasis on “early intercept” efforts gets under way.

The committee’s report on the FY-10 defense appropriations bill states that MDA “is determining how to make the best use of the current technologies and their technical worth as well as the possible benefits of integrating these developments with other MDA programs.”

But this morning, during a House floor debate on the FY-10 defense appropriations bill, Reps. John Tierney (D-MA) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) submitted an amendment that would delete those funds.

A program that has been killed by the defense secretary and had no funding included for it in either the House or Senate authorization bills "no longer warrants Congress' support," Tierney said, adding:

It's never too late to do the right thing, and here's our opportunity to do the right thing. We have to at some point in time start looking at all of our budgets and that includes the defense budget to make sure that we're not putting money out that needs to be put towards other priorities. Here you have the Missile Defense Agency's director himself saying that this program should be terminated, you have the secretary of defense and two administrations saying the program should be terminated; you have from what i can hear from the silence of those who say they're against this amendment not arguing in fact that this is a program that should move forward.

For his part, Holt said:

I understand the desire of the distinguished Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee to get something of value from the billions of dollars already spent, but stringing this program along is not the answer. Even after removal of $80 million in funding for the KEI, the underlying bill still would provide $20.6 billion in R&D funding to learn from the mistakes of this program.

Mr. Chairman, even if the KEI were “successful,” it would never work well enough to change our strategy. Missile defense systems must be perfect to achieve their professed goals. But we can never count on their perfection. The fact is we don’t need them against our friends and they only encourage our enemies to build more offensive systems to get around the so-called shield.

The best this flawed system could provide us is a provocative yet permeable defense, creating an inherently destabilizing situation that would weaken the security of all Americans.

Rep. John Murtha (R-PA), the House Appropriations defense subcommittee chairman, opposed the amendment, but said House and Senate lawmakers "may need to adjust this in conference." Further, he said, "this program's already spent a billion dollars, we ought to get something out of it."

The House subsequently killed the amendment via voice vote.

The Army has conducted its first tropical environment testing of the Stryker vehicle, according to the latest issue of Army AL&T Magazine.

The tests were held in an unlikely place: Suriname, which the magazine notes is South America's smallest country and has a per capita income less than 10 percent that of the United States.

Though Yuma Proving Ground, AZ, where the Stryker has undergone extensive testing, "also maintains test facilities in Hawaii, Honduras, and Panama, none of the three were suitable for the unique requirements of testing the several dozen-ton vehicle," the article says.

But readying for testing in Suriname wasn't easy, it adds. The Army had to find living quarters for testers and quickly build a compound "with security fencing, wiring, and communications networks." A test vehicle operator staked out 30 miles of existing roads for the evaluation, while the test vehicle endured a four-week boat trip from Texas to Suriname, delayed by a hurricane and other bad weather.

The testing was insightful, the magazine says, noting, for example, that the vehicle often sank in clay saturated by tropical rains. Testers learned that keeping the tires inflated at highway pressures would prevent sinking while also ensuring jungle biomass did not "compromise the space between the wheel and the tire."

"These types of insights would not have been generated by testing the vehicle in a simulation chamber," the article says.

Ultimately, it adds, the testing was completed five weeks ahead of schedule.

In late October the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center will host a three-day leaders' workshop to look at COIN operations in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The title of the workshop: “What is counterinsurgency and how as a military, do we approach the problem.”

The Army’s Ft. Leavenworth, KS, will be the host site.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was asked by The Los Angeles Times yesterday if there was too much focus on counterterrorism in the Afghanistan operation.

“I think there hasn't been enough focus on counterinsurgency,” he said. “I am certainly not in a position to criticize counterterrorism. But at this point in the war, in Afghanistan, it is most important to focus on almost classic counterinsurgency.”

The COIN workshop gets under way on Oct. 27 with a counterinsurgency overview and presentations on the insurgent environment and cultural competencies. Day two leads off with a presentation on COIN lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.

Day three will feature Philadelphia Inquirer foreign affairs columnist Trudy Rubin speaking on “Regional Developments.” That day, and the workshop, concludes with a panel discussion.