The Insider

Compared with just a few years ago, traditional soft-power disciplines -- like stabilization operations and everything associated with nation-building -- now are big business at the Pentagon. Adding the sums involved in programs like Section 1206, for example, and the Commander's Emergency Response Program quickly leads to amounts upward of one billion -- and that's not counting the money specifically intended for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In these spheres, $50 million might almost go unnoticed. That's the amount by which the Defense Department's "building partnership capacity" request differed from the time Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the major budget moves in early April until defense officials formally unveiled the fiscal year 2010 budget request a month later.

During his April 6 press conference on the budget, Gates said this:

"To boost global partnership capacity efforts, we will increase funding by $500 million. These initiatives include training and equipping foreign militaries to undertake counterterrorism and stability operations."

DOD's May 7 statement on the official defense budget request roll-out said this:

"To boost global partnership capacity, the department will spend $550 million for training and equipping foreign militaries (in addition to those in Iraq and Afghanistan) to undertake counterterrorism and stability operations and to conduct security and stabilization activities."

We asked DOD spokesman Cmdr. Darryn James how the difference came to be. "When the SecDef spoke on 6 April, he was presenting his best estimate at the time, and between April 6 and delivery of the budget one month later, we finalized the details and determined we needed $550 million," James wrote in an e-mail today.

A new Defense Science Board report released this week makes mention of three relatively little-known Defense Department biodefense labs operated in conjunction with foreign governments. They are the US Army Medical Component of the Armed Forces Research Institute of the Medical Sciences (AFRIMS) in Bangkok, Thailand; the Naval Medical Research Center Detachment (NMRCD) in Lima, Peru; and the Naval Medical Research Unit Three (NAMRU-3) in Cairo, Egypt.

"These laboratories outside the continental United States (OCONUS) play an important strategic role by developing effective medical countermeasures for protection against naturally occurring infectious diseases in their endemic regions and for surveillance of naturally occurring pathogens such as the avian influenza," the report states.

Problem is, according to the report, that clearing foreign scientists to work in these labs is difficult because the traditional U.S. background screening procedures cannot be applied so far away from Washington.

Panelists believe a "blanket waiver" allowing the use of State Department background investigations, conducted by the requisite U.S. embassies, would satisfy security requirements and improve collaboration.

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dropped by the Cairo lab recently during a Middle East trip. According to an April 21 DOD news release covering the visit, the lab's workforce consists of 22 Navy and Army personnel and 11 career civilians, who work alongside 152 Egyptian scientists and 97 contractors.

This week, the day after the EastWest Institute released a report concluding that Iran could develop a nuclear warhead for ballistic missiles in six to eight years but would "not be able, for at least 10 to 15 years, to independently master the technologies necessary for advanced intermediate-range ballistic missiles or intercontinental ballistic missiles," Iran test-fired a two-stage, solid-fueled ballistic missile with a possible 1,200-mile (2,000-kilometer) range.

Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly today was asked at a House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee hearing whether he agreed with the report's conclusions. He did not:

A lot of the assumptions they use in these types of assessments are not accurate, and they don't reflect our true capability, our specifications, what we've demonstrated, also what we know of the threat for what I have access to in intelligence, it does not correlate to the basic assumptions that they use in that study and others I've seen like that.

We asked MIT Professor Ted Postol, one of the co-authors of the report and a missile defense critic, whether the Iranian test changes any of the report's conclusions. Here's his response:

The short answer to your question is that the recent launch of a two-stage solid propellant missile does not change any of our conclusions. However, it does raise questions that were not addressed in the current report that will have to be dealt with in our continuing work at MIT and Stanford on this and related questions.

There is very little data on the Sejjil missile and very rough estimates I have done this evening suggest that it is likely to be able to carry a 1000 kg payload to 2000 km range. I will need to do further analysis on this missile, but it cannot be ruled out that it could eventually achieve a range of 2500 km. I caution you these are very preliminary numbers and I am not yet ready to stand by them.

Our current study estimates that if Iran moved ahead with a nuclear program it could take Iran 1 to 3 years to test a first nuclear weapon and an additional 5 to 6 years or more to develop a nuclear warhead compact and light enough to fly on a ballistic missile. This estimate was arrived at by the experts in our study who have built nuclear weapons. Our estimates in the study for the time it would take Iran to be able to deliver a nuclear weapon to a range of 2000 km was for a modified version of the Safir satellite launch vehicle (SLV) where the second stage was redesigned to carry a payload of about 1000 kg. The development of this modified version of the Safir SLV would probably take no more than several years, but the long pole in having a nuclear-armed delivery system would be obtaining the warhead. This situation is also true if the solid propellant Sejjil missile is successfully refined into an operating system within the next several years. So in short, there is essentially no substantial change in our findings.

However, the fact that the Sejjil is a solid propellant missile introduces a new set of questions that we did not deal with in our report. This set of questions has to do with longer-term advances in ballistic missile capabilities that are based on solid propellant missiles. In the case of the Sejjil, increasing its range substantially would require building essentially a different and much larger solid propellant missile. This would be a gigantic enterprise, since scaling up the size of solid rocket motors is a gigantic technical and engineering task.

Problems that occur in constructing much larger rocket motors result from the sheer size of the motor and the casing. Early solid rocket motor casings were made of steel, and as the technology advanced the casings were fabricated from glass, Kevlar, and finally carbon epoxy materials. Winding these much larger casings, maintaining the strength and integrity of these much larger casings, mixing the propellant so that they are extremely uniform, and getting more energy out of the propellants, require major industrial and scientific efforts. You may recall, that when the US was rushing to deploy Pershing's in Europe, the development program was plagued with failures of that solid rocket motor. So the introduction of the Sejjil does not necessarily foretell the rapid development of larger longer-range solid propellant missiles. It does, however, introduce a potentially new class of systems. Since solid rocket propellant systems have relatively short burn times compared with similar classes of liquid propellants, they can potentially pose more demanding challenges to boost-phase and ascent-phase missile defense systems.

With regard to the boost-phase system discussed in the appendix of the report, this new technology will not be available for much larger and longer range rocket systems for quite a while, and even if it were available, the rockets would be very large and subject to the same vulnerabilities that were described for large liquid propellant missiles.

The Pentagon tomorrow will dispatch two C-17s laden with food, water trucks and tents to Pakistan as part of a humanitarian relief effort announced today by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Department spokesman Geoff Morrell said today in a press briefing.

The Defense Department, according to a White House fact sheet, plans to provide $10 million worth of goods and equipment as part of a $110 million U.S. government aid package to help people displaced by the Pakistani military offensive against the Taliban.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz told House lawmakers today the Air Force needs 243 Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptors to maintain air superiority.

During testimony before the House Armed Services Committee today, Schwartz said: “243 is the right number and 187 is the affordable force.”

The Air Force chief's answer came in response to a question from Rep. Rob. Bishop (R-UT), who asked if the Pentagon's decision to end production of the fifth-generation fighter at 187 aircraft was purely budget-driven or a requirement.

Schwartz's comments come the week after Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a Senate panel that the Air Force did not need any more Raptors.

President Obama has announced plans to nominate J. Michael Gilmore to be the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation. Here is his bio, as released by the White House:

J. Michael Gilmore most recently served as Assistant Director for National Security at the Congressional Budget Office, where he was responsible for CBO's National Security Division, which performs analyses of major policy and program issues in national defense, international affairs, and veterans affairs. Before joining CBO in 2001, Dr. Gilmore was the Deputy Director for General Purpose Programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Program Analysis and Evaluation. In that position, he was responsible for developing, formulating, and implementing Secretary of Defense policies on all aspects of Department of Defense general purpose programs. In his 11 years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, he began by analyzing strategic defense and military satellite communications programs and later, as part of the Cost Analysis Improvement Group, directed teams of analysts in preparing estimates of the costs of defense programs. Prior to his career in government, he was a defense analyst for McDonnell Douglas Corporation and a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he performed research on nuclear fusion. Dr. Gilmore received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and a B.S. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz told the House Armed Services Committee today the service plans to release a request for proposals for the KC-X tanker competition in June or July. The goal is to award a contract in mid-fiscal year 2010.

Speaking about the KC-X program last Friday, David Van Buren, the acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, said:

We're in the process now internally within the department of going though the acquisition plan, the execution, to be able to then come out to industry in the middle part of this year.

Schwartz and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley are on the House side of Capitol Hill this morning to discuss the service's FY-10 budget proposal. The duo are scheduled to brief their spending request to senators on Thursday.