The Insider

Incoming House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) announced that the Republican Steering Committee has appointed twelve new members to the panel for the next congressional session. In a statement, McKeon said:

“The Armed Services Committee will be blessed with the addition of such a strong group of members next Congress. Their backgrounds -- including many with combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan -- and unique experiences will benefit our committee, the military services, and, most importantly, the men and women of our Armed Forces and their families,” said McKeon.

“Our new Members will be called upon to immediately put their talents to work on behalf of our troops as the committee shifts to a war footing. We will work tirelessly to ensure our deployed forces have the resources they need to win in Afghanistan and sustain hard-fought gains in Iraq. Additionally, I’m confident that each of our new Members share my commitment to spend every defense dollar wisely and return fiscal discipline to the Department of Defense,” concluded McKeon.

The new Republicans selected for the House Armed Services Committee include (in alphabetical order):

Mo Brooks – Alabama

Chris Gibson – New York

Tim Griffin – Arkansas

Vicky Hartzler – Missouri

Steve Palazzo – Mississippi

Scott Rigell – Virginia

Martha Roby – Alabama

Jon Runyan – New Jersey

Bobby Schilling – Illinois

Austin Scott – Georgia

Allen West – Florida

Todd Young – Indiana

The House Republican Steering Committee is meeting this week to decide the committee membership in the next Congress. Among those decisions will be a recommendation from incoming House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) to become vice chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

"Mac Thornberry is a real leader in our Conference on national security. His record on both the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees has shown him to be both an innovator and strategic thinker," Boehner said in a statement. "I am backing him to be the next vice chairman of the Armed Services Committee, a role that will provide Mac with new responsibilities and opportunities to advance the security of our nation. I have also asked Mac to lead an initiative on cybersecurity that cuts across committee lines."

Boehner also appointed Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) to become chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, according to the statement:

As a former FBI Agent and U.S. Army Officer, Mike Rogers' experience and expertise has proven invaluable throughout his tenure on the Intelligence Committee. It is incumbent upon the Intelligence Committee to ensure that Congress and the Obama Administration are supporting our intelligence professionals and providing them with the resources and authorities they need to keep America safe, and I look forward to working with Mike in his new role as Chairman.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates today voiced his support for passing an omnibus fiscal year 2011 spending bill:

I strongly support Congress approving an omnibus appropriation bill, rather than requiring that the Department of Defense operate under a year-long continuing resolution.

To do otherwise would leave the Department without the resources and flexibility needed to meet vital military requirements. The proposed continuing resolution would cut defense funding by about $19 billion but would not reduce or eliminate any of the additional bills we must pay in the coming year. We will need to cover the military pay raise, increases in military health care costs, higher fuel prices, and other "fact of life" bills. None of these additional costs are covered by a continuing resolution.

The omnibus would allow the Department to pursue critical national security initiatives such as standing up the new Cyber Command, increasing special operations forces, and funding family support improvements including efforts to upgrade Department of Defense schools. And the heavy volume of reprogrammings needed to manage the vast and complex operations of this Department under a year-long continuing resolution would slow our efforts to meet unanticipated wartime needs.

I urge the Congress to take these concerns into account and enact a full defense appropriations bill as part of an omnibus appropriations bill.

With Republicans taking over the House of Representatives, one can expect a different way of doing business in the people's chamber, according to Rep. Buck McKeon (CA), the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Speaking at a get-together this morning with reporters on Capitol Hill, McKeon said:

Under the new Congress, we're going to try to put more authority back into the committees; we're going to have a schedule that allows committees to function more -- you know, in this last year or two, sometimes we're in a hearing with the secretary of defense, and we have to leave to go vote to name a post office. We're going to have a lot of change in that regard, so the subcommittees will also be more enthroned, so to speak . . . The Speaker's office is not going to be telling us what to do, and we're told that we should be prepared to bring bills to the floor under open rules, so it'll be a different process than we've seen in the last few years.

The board of directors of the transatlantic consortium developing the Medium Extended Air Defense System has named a pair of new leaders.

David Berganini has been named president of MEADS International, and Volker Weidemann will be the new executive vice president and chief operating officer, according to a statement. On Berganini:

Berganini has 23 years of systems engineering and program management experience, and was named Chief Engineer for MEADS International in 2007.  In this role, he was responsible for Mission Success across all facets of the system/subsystem technical design and was the architect for the incremental Critical Design Review (CDR) that led to tri-national approval of the MEADS design in August 2010.  He also led the industry team working with the NATO MEADS Management Agency (NAMEADSMA) to implement a low-risk optimized program for integration and test of the advanced air and missile defense system.  Berganini was previously director of Systems Engineering at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, responsible for technical and personnel leadership and oversight of the Systems Engineering Department.

He succeeds Steve Barnoske, who led MI through successful completion of the CDR phase of the MEADS program.  Barnoske guided the program team to successful tri-national approval of the MEADS system design and set in motion an organizational transition from design to integration and test efforts.  He moves into a new leadership position in the Tactical Missiles line of business at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control.

As for Weidemann, he replaces the retiring Klaus Reidel. Moreover:

Weidemann has served MI for the past 5 years as director of System Engineering, Integration, and Test (SEIT) and was responsible for coordinating tri-national design efforts at six development locations.  He was responsible for development and implementation of design requirements for the MEADS system and its six major end items.  During his tenure, he led the technical team through the transition from design, including a successful Preliminary Design Review and Critical Design Review, to initial build and test efforts.  Retired as an officer in the German air force, he has over 20 years of engineering management and air defense experience.  He previously served as SEIT Deputy Director and has been associated with the MEADS program for over 12 years.

Weidemann’s responsibilities as Director of System Engineering, Integration, and Test (SEIT) will pass to Norbert Wührer.  For the past three years, Wührer has led the Launcher and Reloader integrated product team based at LFK in Germany.  He has over 20 years of systems engineering expertise in air and missile defense technology, and has served as Project Manager for several Patriot efforts, including PAC-3 Missile integration and the German live firings at WSMR.

Riedel retires with extensive executive management experience on the MEADS program and will retain close ties to the program.  He previously served as President of MI and Chairman of the MI Board of Directors.

Dr. Walter Stammler, Chairman of the MEADS International Board of Directors, said, "The board appreciates the leadership that Steve and Klaus have brought to the successful MEADS design effort and development of our first major end items.  We now look to Dave and Volker to ensure successful flight tests and completion of the Design and Development contract.  MEADS International is proud that we will soon be delivering the mobile, interoperable, and affordable air and missile defense system jointly envisioned by Germany, Italy and the United States."

While a bridge contract with industry for MEADS has provided a sense of business-as-usual for the trinational project since the summer, Defense Department leaders are expected to decide by the end of this month whether they want to add nearly $600 million to the program, Inside Missile Defense reported on Dec. 1. The money is needed to bring the program's design phase to a successful close, according to officials. Further:

What could play into the decision are signals given last month at the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, where alliance leaders agreed that territorial missile defense should be a core NATO military mission. Experts said the move would ultimately afford upper-layer missile defense a place as a NATO-wide program, including dedicated funding streams. That new focus, officials said, would also trigger a renewed emphasis on lower-level defense systems, of which MEADS is one, that could provide a symbolic boost to the U.S.-German-Italian project.

Adding to the debate in the three countries are newly emerging prospects of sales to countries in the market for air and missile defense systems, including Poland, Japan, Spain and Qatar, several officials confirmed.

Defense acquisition chief Ashton Carter is expected to decide by year's end whether the Pentagon would help plug a funding hole of roughly $1 billion, diagnosed last year by an Office of the Secretary of Defense-led assessment.

The cost-sharing arrangement agreed in the original MEADS memorandum of understanding for the currently design-and-development phase of the project -- 58 percent from the United states, 25 percent from Germany and 17 percent from Italy -- would remain in place, according to defense officials.

The Pentagon recently asked the JASON research group to conduct a study on the theory and practice of cybersecurity, the findings of which were obtained by the Secrecy News blog. According to the report, JASON was asked to "evaluate whether there are underlying fundamental principles that would make it possible to adopt a more scientific approach, identify what is needed in creating a science of cyber-security, and recommend specific ways in which scientific methods can be applied." Further:

The need to secure computational infrastructure has become significant in all areas including those of relevance to the DOD and the intelligence community. Owing to the level of interconnection and interdependency of modern computing systems, the possibility exists that critical functions can be seriously degraded by exploiting security flaws. While the level of effort expended in securing networks and computers is significant, current approaches in this area overly rely on empiricism and are viewed to have had only limited success.

The JASON report "identifies a need to accelerate the transformation of research results into tools that can be readily used by developers. There are some very sophisticated approaches (model checking, type checking etc. as discussed previously) that can be used to assess and reason about the security of current systems, but they are not widely available today in the form of developer tools. There may be an insufficient market for private development of such tools and this may argue for a more activist role on the part of DOD in supporting future development."

Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week that the Defense Department must spend far more money defending its networks than hackers do attacking them, a trend that has to be reversed, Inside the Navy reports this week. Further:

"The lines of code to attack any software haven't changed in the last five years, a number of them," Cartwright said during a roundtable discussion hosted by Government Executive. "What changes is, every time we get attacked, we have to spend substantially more than they invest to protect ourselves. We've got to turn that equation around."

He said the Pentagon intends to make it much more difficult to attack its networks in the future.

Cartwright noted that that major military networks were "not designed to be defended," but were made to allow anyone to plug into them virtually anywhere and use them in myriad ways.

"We've got to change that construct to one that gives us a layered defense, gives us a non-homogenous surface, so to speak," the general said. "In other words, it is not the same when you go out. We like to see things like operating systems changed every few hours and be invisible. It makes it extremely difficult."