The Insider

At 4:30 p.m. today, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden were scheduled to meet with President Obama in the Oval Office. No word on the agenda for the session, which was closed to the media.

Earlier today, Obama held his first official cabinet meeting. The president also spoke to CIA leaders and employees this afternoon.

Two key nominations were announced today by the White House. Michael Nacht is President Obama's nominee to be the Pentagon’s assistant secretary of defense for global strategic affairs. Robert Litt is the nominee to be the general counsel in the office of the director of national intelligence. Here are their bios, as released by the White House:

Michael Nacht, Nominee for Assistant Secretary of Defense (Global Strategic Affairs), Department of Defense
Michael Nacht is currently Professor of Public Policy and former Aaron Wildavsky Dean at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California - Berkeley. Nacht served a three-year term as a member of the U.S. Department of Defense Threat Reduction Advisory Committee, for which he chaired panels on counter terrorism and counter proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, reporting to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. He continues to consult for Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. From 1994-1997, Nacht was assistant director for Strategic and Eurasian Affairs at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, leading its work on nuclear arms reduction negotiations with Russia and initiating nuclear arms control talks with China. He participated in five summit meetings with President Clinton - four with Russian President Boris Yeltsin and one with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Nacht has testified before Congress on subjects ranging from arms control to the supply and demand for scientists in the workplace. Nacht earned his B.S. in aeronautics and astronautics at New York University and began his career working on missile aerodynamics for NASA before earning a Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University.

Robert S. Litt, Nominee for General Counsel, Office of the Director of National Intelligence
Robert S. Litt is a Partner at Arnold & Porter LLP, where he specializes in white collar criminal defense. Prior to joining the firm, Litt served for five years at the Department of Justice as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division. In these positions, his responsibilities included matters relating to national security, healthcare fraud, public corruption, computer crime and intellectual property. From 1978 to 1984, Litt served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, including as Chief Appellate Attorney. Litt is a member of the governing Council of the Criminal Justice Section of the American Bar Association and is a member of the Advisory Committee to the ABA’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security. He clerked for the Honorable Edward Weinfeld in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Honorable Potter Stewart on the U.S. Supreme Court. Litt holds an A.B. from Harvard College, a M.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

The Environmental Protection Agency today issued a proposal that finds greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public's health and welfare. The document also says pollution that warms the planet poses U.S. national security risks.

Climate change impacts in certain regions of the world may exacerbate problems that raise humanitarian, trade and national security issues for the U.S. Climate change has been described as a potential threat multiplier regarding national security issues. This is because, as noted above, climate change can aggravate existing problems in certain regions of the world such as poverty, social tensions, general environmental degradation, and conflict over increasingly scarce water resources.

This echoes findings of a 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on Climate Change that determined a steady increase in Earth's temperature could trigger a range of global crisis that would impair U.S. military readiness by diverting key transportation assets and combat support forces.

As defense officials begin the Quadrennial Defense Review, questions over Washington's course of action in Somalia loom large. In a speech yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates himself hinted at a high-level review of the issue, but he was hesitant to reveal too much about the process.

"Well, I don't want to get too far ahead of our headlights here," he said in a speech at the Army War College in Carlisle, PA. "We're thinking about this right now. The ((National Security Council)) is carrying forward frequent meetings, practically daily, in terms of looking at those options."

Whatever those options may end up being, the problems surrounding the impoverished nation could serve Gates as a validation for his focus on irregular warfare as he gears up for a fight with lawmakers over proposed cuts to certain weapon systems, according to one Washington defense analyst.

"It's a clear illustration that the issue of failed states is not just a matter of ground forces," the analyst added in light of the Navy's role in combating piracy off the coast of Somalia.

According to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO), establishing a functioning government in Somalia should be a "long-term" goal, while increased counter-piracy efforts should get immediate attention.

"I encourage you to pursue these pirates beyond the waters we are currently patrolling and into the safe havens where they are operating," Skelton wrote in an April 14 letter to Gates. "In most cases we already know the cities in which they are operating and often even the names of those organizing the attacks. Pirate attacks and rhetoric have only become more brazen in recent months and cannot be allowed to continue."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates this week embarked on a barnstorming tour of several military bases across the country to further sell his multibillion-dollar changes to the fiscal year 2010 budget. During a press conference at Ft. Rucker, AL, on Tuesday, Gates defended his $1.4 billion cut to the Missile Defense Agency's proposed budget for fiscal year 2010, as well as the cancellation of the Multiple Kill Vehicle program and the second Airborne Laser aircraft.

The secretary also wants the president and the Congress to shift hundreds of millions of dollars to fund more theater missile defense systems, including Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense as well as Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense. When asked about it on Tuesday, Gates elaborated a bit on the BMD effort:

My view is that we kept in place and strengthened programs having to do with each aspect of missile defense. Terminal defense, we've added money for both THAAD and SM-3, Standard Missile-3, a significant amount of money to maximize production there. For mid-course, we will sustain the 30 interceptors in Alaska and California and, as I said, robustly fund continuing R&D so that those capabilities can continue to improve. And we have a number of programs, some of them classified, that deal with the boost phase.

I've kept alive the Airborne Laser. It's clear that that program doesn't make any sense to go to a full procurement, but we are keeping alive the first 747 research vehicle and we will continue to put money into that program because we think high energy or directed energy has some real potential for that.

He then attempted to assuage the fears of missile defense proponents:

So I think we -- for those who think we've slashed missile defense and so on, I think we have kept robustly funded each of the three elements of missile defense that makes sense. I would say that we have shifted emphasis perhaps somewhat in keeping the ground-based interceptor program where it is with additional funds for research and development, but we have put substantial funds into the terminal phase, into THAAD and SM-3, in no small part because they provide significant additional protection for our troops in the theater and that are deployed, the same thing with the six destroyers that we will convert to having an Aegis missile defense capability.

So anybody who thinks that we're not taking missile defense seriously, that we do not take seriously the North Korean launch and what North Korean capabilities are developing, I think has not looked carefully enough at the program.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates today responded to a recent story in The Washington Times reporting that he denied U.S. Northern Command the use of its most powerful radar to monitor North Korea’s recent rocket launch.

Gates told reporters traveling with him today that top military brass advised him not to approve the use of the radar. He also noted the radar was undergoing maintenance and added that it would have cost $50 million to $100 million to make it available, which did not seem worthwhile under the circumstances.

A proposal to replace the Joint Contracting Command-Iraq/Afghanistan with a new organization better focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan is still being vetted by defense officials, we're told. The concept for a Joint Theater Support Contracting Command, or JTSCC, directly underneath U.S. Central Command leaders was proposed recently by command officials. It has since reached reviewers on the Joint Staff, one official said.

Some details about the JTSCC are included in a briefing posted on a Pentagon Web site until recently. Shortly after our story on the subject last month, however, officials removed the document from the site. Of course, we still have it in our archive.