The Insider

The White House today announced plans to send about 100 troops to Africa as part of an effort to support allies battling Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army.

InsideDefense.com first reported U.S. Africa Command's plans to provide security assistance for this effort in late July.

U.S. Africa Command is set to begin a new security assistance program in East Africa that aims to bolster the ability of Uganda's military to fight the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group that for more than 20 years has terrorized civilians.

Congress has lifted a hold it placed earlier this month on a Defense Department proposal to begin a new program to provide Ugandan defense forces with counterterrorism training and equipment, according to Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory.

The project, part of a second batch of so-called Section 1206 security assistance programs drawn up by the Defense and State departments, is designed to "provide communications and intelligence training as well as communications and engineering equipment to improve Uganda's ability to remove LRA leadership and fighters from the battlefield," according to Gregory. The project has a price tag of $4.4 million, he said.

The House Armed Services Committee plans to send a letter to the supercommittee tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in savings urging the panel to leave the defense budget intact. The letter reiterates the committee's position that any more cuts to the Defense Department would seriously and irreparably impact U.S. national security.

“We believe that additional reductions in the base budget of the Department of Defense (DOD) will compound deep reductions Congress has already imposed and critically compromise national security,” states the letter, signed by committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA).

During a press conference today with 10 other committee members, McKeon said almost all Republicans on the authorization committee had signed the letter, which is still being circulated. A distributed version of the letter has Friday's date on it.

The Budget Control Act of 2011, which formed the supercommittee, called for all congressional committees to submit recommendations to the panel by Friday.

Earlier today, the committee's top Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), released a supplemental letter stating that further DOD cuts could undermine national security. However, Smith also called for the supercommittee to include “significant revenue increases.”

McKeon said he and his colleagues are opposed to tax increases. Last month, McKeon said at an American Enterprise Institute event that he would rather raise taxes than allow further defense cuts. Today, McKeon said that he believes that's a “false choice.”

“I want to work night and day to make sure we don't have that choice,” McKeon said.

If the supercommittee fails to find at least $1.2 trillion in savings, it triggers a sequestration measure, which would take half of those cuts from the Defense Department. If that happens, McKeon said, "it's all over.”

House authorizers are working to make sure the supercommittee understands the importance of preserving the Pentagon's spending, McKeon said. He recently spoke with Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), who is co-chairing the supercommittee. McKeon added that Congress has already stripped nearly $469 billion out of defense coffers over the next decade and should not go any further.

“I personally, and I think many members of the committee, feel that we've gone overboard on the cuts,” McKeon said. “We have made the cuts. Now it's up to the supercommittee to find the rest of the $1.2 trillion out of the other side, the entitlements.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said today the Pentagon would accelerate its plans to be ready for a full budget audit from 2017 to 2014. The Defense Department has made “significant progress” toward meeting the congressional deadline for audit-ready financial statements by 2017, he said, focusing first on improving the categories of information that are most relevant to managing the budget, but it must do better.

“Today I am announcing that I have directed the Department to cut in half the time it will take to achieve audit readiness for the Statement of Budgetary Resources, so that by 2014 we will have the ability to conduct a full budget audit,” he said. “This focused approach prioritizes the information that we use in managing the department, and will give our financial managers the key tools they need to track spending, identify waste, and improve the way the Pentagon does business as soon as possible.”

He said he has directed the DOD Comptroller “to revise the current plan within 60 days to meet these new goals, and still achieve the requirement of overall audit readiness by 2017.” This plan will move the department closer to fulfilling its responsibility to be transparent and accountable for how its spend taxpayer dollars, he said.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee late last month rejected a $170 million appropriations reprogramming request the Navy sought to help pay for a joint initiative with the Energy and Agriculture departments that is aimed at jump-starting biofuels manufacturing, Defense Environment Alert reports this week:

The three departments' top officials publicly announced the biofuels initiative Aug. 16, a project meant to help fulfill goals under President Obama's Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future. Under the plan, the three departments pledged to invest up to $510 million in the private sector over the next three years to produce advanced drop-in aviation and marine biofuels for the military and commercial transportation, according to a press release from the three departments. The effort was lauded as providing energy independence benefits -- considered key to the military and national security -- and as a way to boost economic prospects in rural communities.

"These efforts will accelerate advanced technologies to produce infrastructure-compatible biofuels that will replace imported crude oil with secure, renewable fuels made here in the U.S.," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in announcing the initiative.

Mainly, the objective "is the construction or retrofit of several domestic commercial or pre-commercial scale advanced drop-in biofuel refineries," the press release says. Each department is to provide $170 million under the project.

But now that effort could be slowed if funding is not provided, one source familiar with the funding issue says. And a biofuels industry source says the Navy's funding is key because it is the impetus for manufacturing the fuel.

The project requires all three departments to move together, the source says, noting that the Navy's funding is "the linchpin" because the Navy is the justification for producing drop-in biofuels.

But this source also notes: "It wasn't so much the money itself, it was the coordination of efforts by these three [departments]." The Agriculture Department was to solve feedstock issues, the Department of Energy (DOE) was to solve technology issues, and the Navy was to create the market pull. The coordinated effort was a way to speed the process of getting biorefineries built, the source says. The idea is to demonstrate viability to private and institutional investors providing financing for additional biorefineries, the source says.

To advance the program, the Navy had asked Congress to transfer existing fiscal year 2011 appropriations into the biorefinery initiative. The Navy's justification for the request came under the Defense Production Act, a law passed in 1950 that authorizes the president to offer incentives to developing or expanding a domestic industry if the product is essential to meeting the U.S. national security strategy, according to an Air Force notice seeking information on advanced drop-in biofuels production.

Such a request from the Defense Department requires approval by the Senate and House Armed Services committees and Senate and House Defense Appropriations subcommittees. But in this case, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon (R-CA) denied the request -- the only one of the three committees to reject it -- sources say.

In an email response dated Sept. 23, a House Armed Services Committee spokesman said the committee was still reviewing the request, and that a decision would be made in the next few days. The spokesman did not reply to subsequent requests for information on the decision. But the source familiar with the funding issue says McKeon rejected the request despite appeals by several House Republicans, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), the ranking member on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Cochran signed onto a Sept. 7 letter from Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-HI) supporting the funding transfer. Cochran's office did not respond by press time to questions on the issue.

The source says McKeon indicated in a letter that he is not philosophically opposed to biofuels, but wants the president to propose the initiative in the FY13 budget request. That means "we'd lose two years before we could start building biorefineries with the proposed government's 50 percent share," the source says in an e-mail response. Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, Navy assistant secretary for energy, installations and environment, said on a Sept. 21 conference call with reporters that while the $510 million investment is not expected "to create an entire biofuels industry," she expected to see private matching investments of at least 50 percent of that, if not significantly greater. She said the Navy sees itself as both an investor and long-term customer -- which she said will help create the industry.

There is an opportunity to try to include the funding in the FY12 Defense appropriations bill, should that eventually pass Congress, according to sources familiar with the issue. The Defense Department is currently operating under a stop-gap spending measure. . . .

A DOD spokeswoman and Navy spokesman did not respond to questions on the reprogramming request by press time.

An Arizona-based research firm today released an aerospace and defense industry "benchmarking metric" report for 2011.

The report by CAPS Research "contains key supply management performance measures on topics including organizational structure, financial information, and supplier relationships," according to a statement issued this morning. Further:

New this year is a matrix that looks at what is included in each of the participating Aerospace and Defense companies' supply management operating expense as well as a deeper look at spend for direct and indirect goods.  It is interesting to note that less than half of the participants (44%) reported they do not include in their supply management operating expense the costs related to IT infrastructure and desktop support and/or business systems.

This report establishes a composite standard or benchmarking comparison of supply management peer performance in the industry.  To conduct this and all industry benchmarking studies, CAPS Research forms an Industry Advisory Committee of industry executives to determine the specific data to be collected. Three criteria are used: usefulness of the resultant benchmark, availability of needed data within the supply management organization, and comparability of data among companies.

Click here (registration required) to view the report.

The Pentagon itself has been conducting its own industrial base studies for some time now. As InsideDefense.com reports this week:

Early results of a not-yet-complete Pentagon assessment of the defense industrial base reveal "some fragility" among lower-tier companies that -- in select cases -- provide components critical to major weapons, a finding that will influence the Defense Department's investment blueprint, according to a senior DOD official.

Brett Lambert, deputy assistant secretary of defense for manufacturing and industrial base policy, said a review directed in March by Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn is prompting the Pentagon to "keep a mindful watch" on companies in the lower tiers of the industrial base to ensure the supply of parts and modules necessary to produce new combat systems.

"Early indications are that the defense industrial base is more global, more commercial and more financially complex" than previously understood, Lambert told InsideDefense.com in an Oct. 4 interview. He said information gleaned to date through the new review -- the "Sector-by-Sector, Tier-by-Tier Assessment of the Defense Industrial Base" -- suggests there is no "single" defense industrial base and that there is "some fragility in some sub-tiers."

The effort, dubbed S2T2, is intended to eventually yield a new map of the defense industrial base derived from a more comprehensive and "fact-based" approach than prior Pentagon assessments of the private sector enterprise that designs and builds the U.S. military's weapon inventory, he said.

None of the findings of the new review are reflected in the 2011 Annual Industrial Capabilities Report To Congress, a statutorily mandated report the Defense Department delivered to lawmakers on Monday, Lambert said. That report largely restates findings on key sectors of the defense industrial base published in the 2010 report.

Lambert said next year's annual report to Congress, however, will reflect results of the S2T2 effort. Still, he said, the Pentagon has no plans to produce a separate, publicly released report on the findings of the S2T2 assessment, whose insights are ultimately intended to guide investment decisions.

The Defense Science Board plans to meet in closed session later this month, according to a notice published this morning in the Federal Register.

The DSB almost always meets in closed session. In this case, the notice provides few details on what will be discussed during the Oct. 26 and Oct. 27 meetings at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD:

At this meeting, the Board will discuss interim finding and recommendations resulting from ongoing Task Force activities. The Board will also discuss plans for future consideration of scientific and technical aspects of specific strategies, tactics, and policies as they may affect the U.S. national defense posture and homeland security.

While no specific studies are mentioned, here are a couple possibilities, culled from InsideDefense.com's recent coverage:

Lynn Directs Defense Science Board To Establish Cloud Task Force

Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn has directed the Defense Science Board to establish a Defense Science Board task force examining cybersecurity and reliability in the digital cloud.

The directive in a May 19 memo comes after the Obama administration shifted to a "cloud first" policy as a major tenet in its reform of IT management. Cloud computing is an information technology architecture that allows multiple users in different locations to access information, resources and data through the Internet and is emerging in both the private IT and federal cybersecurity sectors.

The task force, Lynn writes, should focus on identifying research opportunities and should "estimate the level of investment to achieve results consistent with DOD needs."

"Cloud advocates assert that infrastructure incorporating cloud-based technologies and virtualization can deliver both higher reliability and more assured cybersecurity," the memo states.

-- DOCUMENT: DSB Terms Of Reference Memo On 'Resilient Military Systems'

Pentagon Panel Conducting Study On Predicting Violent Behavior

Defense Department advisers are conducting a new review of warning signs to help identify a small fraction of DOD personnel who might commit workplace violence, terrorism, suicide or cybersecurity breaches.

In a May 21 memo to the Defense Science Board, Pentagon acquisition executive Ashton Carter directs the federal advisory board to examine a number of key issues and brief the study's findings and recommendations to DOD homeland defense chief Paul Stockton by June 30.

The charter is nearly identical to one issued last October by Frank Kendall, the department's No. 2 acquisition official, except the new version states former Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency chief Larry Lynn and former DOD General Counsel Judith Miller will chair the review.

The initial charter said Lynn and Ann Skalka of the Fox Chase Institute for Cancer Research would lead the effort. But by February, the board no longer listed Skalka as a co-chair and the task force was still in formation. In an internal bulletin issued last month, DSB chairman and former DOD acquisition chief Paul Kaminski noted the task force "recently convened" with Lynn and Miller in charge.

-- DOCUMENT: DSB Terms Of Reference Memo On 'Predicting Violent Behavior'

The president of the Defense Acquisition University sent out a memo Monday explaining why some of the university's online courses have been inaccessible for the past few months. The problem is DAU was hacked over the summer and has been slowly restoring access to its courses ever since.

In her memo, Katharina McFarland laid out the problem:

A well-known group of computer hackers gained access to a vendor's system and stole both company information and the source code of the learning management system that DAU uses. While our system itself was not hacked, having source code available publicly made our system potentially vulnerable. We and the United States Cyber Command evaluated the risk level to our system based on the incident that occurred on the vendor's network and made a decision to secure our system.

The intrusion occurred on July 21, 2011, we suspended access to the DAU Virtual campus the next day and have been restoring service in a secure environment incrementally since then. No information was lost or compromised. Student records and progress information are intact, we are working with the vendor to mitigate future risk by implementing new source code, and we are taking steps to restore full access and functionality.

Many of the people working for the government's civilian agencies and defense contractors take online DAU courses. Mcfarland explained that on Set. 19, the university launched a Defense Department Common Access Card version of DAU's Virtual campus so the defense acquisition workforce could once again enroll in and complete courses.

DAU is working to strengthen username/password authentication encryption and policies so non-CAC holders could get back in th system. The target date to complete that is Oct. 31, McFarland wrote.