The Insider

The National Guard Association of the United States, which believes it is closer than ever to its long-sought goal of a Guard seat on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is not happy about the Pentagon's recent decision to choose an active-duty general, and not a Guard officer, to head a key command. According to NGAUS, it's one more piece of evidence backing its claim that the Guard Bureau needs more clout:

This week's nomination of an active-component Army general to lead U.S. Northern Command over two qualified National Guard officers underscores the need for National Guard empowerment at the Pentagon.

Lt. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby Jr., the nominee to head NORTHCOM, is obviously a talented officer deserving of a four-star command, and the Guard community looks forward to meeting him and working with him.

But he was selected over two senior Guard officers who are far more experienced with the NORTHCOM mission of coordinating the defense of the U.S. homeland.

Gen. Craig R. McKinley, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, is a former commander of the Continental U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command. Lt. Gen. Frank J. Grass is currently the deputy commander at NORTHCOM. Obviously, both are thoroughly familiar with the Guard, which supplies the bulk of forces available to NORTHCOM. And both know first-hand the complexity of interagency collaboration, which is so vital to operations here at home.

For the last three years, Defense Department officials have spoken publicly of putting a National Guard officer at the helm of NORTHCOM. The reasons are obvious: Domestic operations are a uniquely Guard mission. But twice now, uniquely qualified Guard candidates have been passed over.

Much has changed in the U.S. military over the last few years. Unfortunately, much remains the same. The Guard may have more of a voice at the Pentagon, but a voice without a vote in final decisions is far too often a voice in the wilderness.

This is another Pentagon decision that shows why the National Guard needs both a seat and a vote at the table. The U.S. House of Representatives and 43 U.S. senators and counting all support legislation that would provide the NGB chief with both a seat and a vote.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning for his confirmation hearing as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says he would be open to having a larger role for the service chiefs in acquisition matters.

“It would be impossible for me to justify the current process,” Dempsey told Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). “We absolutely have to seek acquisition reform.”

Dempsey said it would be “reasonable to consider a different role for the four service chiefs in acquisition.”

He noted that service chiefs now mostly concern themselves with the requirements process whereas service secretaries are more responsible for acquisition.

Dempsey's statement came after McCain once again cited the Decker-Wagner Army acquisition study, which states that the service has spent approximately $3.8 billion a year in canceled programs since 2004. McCain has cited the shocking statistic numerous times in Senate hearings. Inside the Army first broke the Decker-Wagner story in February.

Just last week, McCain suggested that service chiefs should have a larger role in acquisition. In the July 21 confirmation hearing of Gen. Raymond Odierno, who is slated to replace Dempsey as Army chief, McCain asked, “Doesn't it have to be one of your highest priorities of trying to get this procurement situation under control, and wouldn't it be helpful if we gave legislative authority to the service chiefs to be more involved in the whole acquisition process?”

Odierno requested more time to answer the question and said he would get back to McCain, but promised -- if confirmed -- to work closely with Army Secretary John McHugh.

A story published in Friday's New York Times highlights a "blast chimney" technology designed to vent an underbody explosive through a channel in the middle of a humvee and out the roof:

The Humvee fell out of favor in Iraq and Afghanistan as homemade bombs, the biggest killer of American troops, ripped through its light armor and turned it into a death trap.

But recent blast tests show that Humvees built with the new chimney could provide as much protection as some of the heavier, and more costly, mine-resistant vehicles that have replaced them in many uses.

And if the final tests go well, the invention could save billions in new vehicle costs and restore much of the maneuverability that the Army and the Marines have lacked in the rugged terrain in Afghanistan, military officials say. Engineers say the chimney, which rises through the passenger cabin, releases some of the explosive gases — traveling at twice the speed of a fighter jet — that have mangled and flipped many of the vehicles.

Inside the Army had the story on this earlier this month, however:

The Pentagon's chief weapons tester said earlier this year that he wanted to put the brakes on an effort to rush so-called "blast chimney" vehicle technology to the field in U.S. humvees this summer, stating in his initial assessment that the design failed to provide a significant boost in protection against improvised explosive devices and could expose a vehicle gunner to blast damage, according to an internal memo obtained by Inside the Army.

The chimney technology -- designed to vent an underbody explosive through a channel in the middle of the vehicle and out the roof -- is still in testing and is being offered as a potential solution to a planned humvee recapitalization program by AM General, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Hardwire LLC.

The Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, Michael Gilmore, questioned the push to field the technology in a February memo. At the time, the chimney had undergone three tests.

George Tunis, the chairman of Hardwire, said in a July 8 interview that content of the memo does not accurately reflect where the program is today. Tunis said he was unaware of the memo before being questioned about it by ITA, but was aware of the criticisms raised in it. "It is inaccurate and not current," he said.

But a Defense Department spokeswoman said July 8 that Gilmore has not updated his assessment of the chimney since February and is following test results as they become available.

"To date, DARPA has conducted three test events with the [blast mitigation system] installed on a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle," Gilmore wrote in his Feb. 14 memo to acquisition executive Ashton Carter. "The data from these tests do not demonstrate Hardwire provides Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) levels of protection. . . . Unresolved issues remain regarding the protection to crew provided by Hardwire against underbody attacks, as well as other ballistic threats, and the effects on operational effectiveness and suitability of Hardwire's increased weight and reduced space for mission equipment and passengers."

Gilmore also noted that it could not be determined if the humvee gunner would be protected by such a design. "The protection (if any) provided to the gunner is unknown because of a lack of instrumentation (the gunner stands in a position subject to the blast energy transmitted up the chimney)," he wrote.

Tunis, however, said Hardwire had since found a way to instrument the gunner area and asserted that the gunner was protected from the blast. He declined to lay out specific steps to that effect, citing sensitivities surrounding the issue.

"The gunner is not subjected to blast energy transmitted up the chimney," he said. "We use the standard instrumentation setup. The first three [did] not. It would be kind of silly to subject the gunner to blast energy."

In addition, Gilmore's memo noted that "these tests demonstrated the potential for a Hardwire-equipped HMMWV to meet the MRAP threshold for under wheel mine blasts, but did not provide sufficient data for conclusions to be reached regarding Hardwire's performance against the MRAP threshold for underbody blast."

Gilmore also noted that the design of the chimney-equipped vehicle was modified as the first three tests proceeded. "Data were insufficient to identify the particular aspect's of Hardwire's design that contribute most to blast mitigation (i.e. the chimney itself, the structural beam connecting floor and roof, or the underbody shovel plates)," he wrote.

In the memo, Gilmore warned Carter that he might be asked to authorize the purchases of long-lead items so the chimney could fielded this summer. Gilmore recommended that the chimney undergo at least nine more live-fire tests.

Army Gen. Raymond Odierno, President Obama's choice to become the service's next chief of staff, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning and answered questions from panel members about his plans for the Army. In his answers to "advance policy questions" submitted prior to the hearing, Odierno was asked what he thought would be the major challenges the next Army chief of staff would confront. His response:

In a potentially resource constrained environment, we must:

1) Continue to provide trained and ready forces to meet current wartime requirements and other world-wide contingencies;

2) Continue to reset the Army to meet future challenges;

3) Continue to adapt and develop a more effective and efficient force to meet our nation's future challenges;

4) Right-size the Army and sustain the All Volunteer Army by ensuring programs are in place to care for and develop our Soldiers and their families.

When asked what he would do to address those challenges, Odierno writes:

If confirmed, I will continue to work closely with Congress to address these challenges. We will continue to refine and update our training programs to ensure all our Soldiers are fully prepared to deploy to combat. We will continue to review our reset, force modernization and acquisition programs in order to more efficiently meet the needs and requirements of today and the future. I will work closely with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, and Combatant Commanders to identify the capabilities needed to provide depth and versatility to the Joint Force in order to provide more effective and flexible forces for employment. I will continue to adjust our leader development programs in order to develop thinking, adaptable decision makers necessary to operate in an increasingly complex and unpredictable environment. I will review our Soldier and family programs to ensure we are meeting their needs.

It may be a coincidence, or maybe not, but just days after Inside the Army spoke to a former service acquisition executive who called for making an internal study of the Army's buying process public, the service is hosting a roundtable session with reporters tomorrow to discuss its acquisition-reform efforts.

The meetup, featuring acting Army acquisition chief Heidi Shyu, is expected to cover the Army's response to that internal study. As Inside the Army reports this week:

Gil Decker, a former Army acquisition chief and the co-author of an internal study criticizing the Army's acquisition process, said last week that the service should make the review public, and he questioned whether recent high-level leadership turnover had caused a "hiccup" in implementing the study's recommendations.

"I feel, we all feel, they should publicize it," Decker said in a July 14 interview with Inside the Army, referring to a report he and former Army Materiel Command chief Gen. Lou Wagner were chartered to craft by Army Secretary John McHugh. "I mean, if they think it's a pile of crap, they should say so. They won't hurt our feelings. But if they say, 'No, this has got value; we've got to do some of these things,' we felt they should publicize it," Decker said.

"Because the Army needs some rational, honest, good publicity," he added.

The results of the Decker-Wagner report, first reported by ITA in February, caused a stir on Capitol Hill early this year, and Army officials have been asked about it at nearly every hearing before lawmakers since then. According to Decker, the study delivered 56 recommendations to improve the way service officials spend funds on anything from pistols to tanks. (The study also acknowledged being one of 80-some such efforts.)

The Decker-Wagner study stood out for the shock value of its arithmetic, delivering the news that the Army spends between $3.3 billion and $3.8 billion annually on programs that ultimately get canceled. "We tried to call a spade a spade, with the data to back it up," said Decker.

The service has never disputed the numbers.

After the story broke, service officials vowed to embrace the study and make the recommended changes. In a May hearing, McHugh called it "long overdue," singling out former Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey as the driving force behind its inception. The study's authors "came back with 76 recommendations, some of which were revelatory," McHugh told members of the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee. Out of those, the Army had singled out 63 for implementation, he added.

But the service has remained silent over specifics, not even communicating its leanings to the study's authors, according to Decker. Service leaders also did not take up team members on their offer to assist in seeing the proposals through, Decker added, noting carefully that the Army is under no obligation to do so.

"So far we haven't been called on -- and that's not a criticism. It's their study. We're available . . . if they want us to come in and look at what they're doing," he said.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has determined the date to consider President Obama's nomination of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey to become the next chairman of the joint chiefs.

The hearing will take place on Tuesday, July 26 at 9:30 a.m., according to a committee statement.

Todd Harrison, budget expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, argues in a new report published today that the spike in U.S. defense spending over the last decade produced "hollow growth."

Harrison, in an 86-page assessment of the Pentagon's fiscal year 2012 budget request, states rising expenditures for weapons acquisition, personnel and peacetime operations did not necessarily buy the Defense Department more:

Overall, nearly half of the growth in defense spending over the past decade is unrelated to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- personnel costs grew while end strength remained relatively flat, the cost of peacetime operations grew while the pace of peacetime operations declined, and acquisition costs increased while the inventory of equipment grew smaller and older. The base budget now supports a force with essentially the same size, force structure, and capabilities as in FY 2001 but at a 35 percent higher cost. The Department is spending more but not getting more.

Much more, including a review of current proposals to reduce defense spending and "key levers" to control military spending can be found in the full report.