The Insider

French air force Gen. Stéphane Abrial almost made big news last week when he spoke to an audience of senior U.S. military officials and defense policy experts.

Unfortunately, he left out a bit of information of the kind that could spark a more public examiniation of how NATO's International Security Assistance Force does business in Afghanistan.

The story: Abrial, the first European to head the alliance's U.S.-based Allied Command Transformation, was giving a talk -- titled "International Perspectives: Developing Global Partnerships " -- at a conference in Washington sponsored by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

During his Jan. 21 address, Abrial touched on the problem of intelligence sharing among ISAF nations during operations in Afghanistan. Almost in passing, he noted just how bad it still is, according to a transcript of the relevant section later provided by a spokesman.

And of course working in a coalition poses the very real question of the sharing of intelligence. Operations in Afghanistan have shown the difficulties arising from an insufficient ability to do it. Inability to access national intelligence justifying a target being placed on a Joint Prioritized Effects List has kept whole nations outside much of the targeting process. On the other hand, some nations will not share intelligence which could result in kinetic actions.

Naturally, we were curious as to which sharing-averse nations Abrial was referring to.

It took a few days to get this question straight with the folks at ACT. In their initial response they acknowledged that, yes, we captured the general's comments correctly in formulating our question.

But which countries was he talking about? He won't say, Abrial's spokesman, Roy Thorvaldsen, told us in an e-mail.

"I don't think GEN Abrial would want to drop any names," one public affairs officer said to another, according to e-mails exchanged within the command.

"This is all that you are going to get out of this," Thorvaldson finally told us, after we prodded again. "Remember that NATO is an Alliance of 28 individual nations and a complex political balance. A Strategic Commander needs to be very careful not to step on any toes."

The thrust of the Pentagon's fiscal year 2011 budget request, due to be unveiled Monday, should come as no surprise, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' spokesman Geoff Morrell said yesterday.

"We've been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs . . . over the past several years in terms of where the secretary was heading in terms of reforming the defense budget," he said. "You saw in dramatic fashion last April when he announced the FY-10 budget proposals, and I think you will see FY-11 continue to build upon the reforms and the rebalancing that were first put forth in the '10 budget."

"But I don't think there will be any surprises in terms of where, philosophically, we are headed," he added. "This is very much about building upon the progress that was made in the ((FY-10)) budget and continuing the rebalancing so that there is focus on our forces and their families; that there is a greater commitment of resources necessary to win the wars that we are currently fighting; while at the same time obviously doing the prudent kind of planning for deterring or if necessary fighting future perhaps conventional conflicts against near peers. And that's the trajectory we've been on, and that's the one we'll continue to head on."

Given the fiscally constrained environment, DOD has made some "hard choices," he noted. "There are things that will be cut and things that will be added to, to achieve the proper balance that the secretary believes we must have."

For some time , defense officials have been observing a trend among would-be adversaries, like China, of investing in systems capable of engaging U.S. forces from afar. The idea of these anti-access capabilities is to keep the world's best-equipped military from physically entering theaters of war, either by directly denying U.S. forces entry or, more indirectly, by disabling critical capabilities -- think GPS, for example -- needed to maneuver.

A U.S. Joint Forces Command-sponsored war game last year led to a number of urgent recommendations for Quadrennial Defense Review leaders to address the issue, we reported last October.

Jim Thomas, vice president for strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment, yesterday pointed out two program portfolios worth watching in next week's defense budget request because they could offer insight into exactly how defense officials intend to approach the problem.

For one, DOD's plans for long-range strike capabilities, which would need to consider U.S. countermeasures to overcome anti-access weapons, is one area to keep an eye on, Thomas told reporters yesterday. Another, he said, has to do with space assets. Because satellites are increasingly vulnerable to enemy attack during a concerted anti-access campaign against U.S. forces, officials are expected to field more air-breathing systems delivering similar capabilities as backups, he said.

President Obama spoke with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev today regarding the negotiations over a follow-on pact to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. According to a White House "readout" of the call:

Earlier today, President Obama spoke with President Medvedev of Russia to thank him for his hard work and leadership on the New START Treaty negotiations, as the two sides have made steady progress in recent weeks. The Presidents agreed that negotiations are nearly complete, and pledged to continue the constructive contacts that have advanced U.S.-Russian relations over the last year.

The original START Treaty expired on Dec. 5. Russian and U.S. officials broke off negotiations late last month for the Christmas holidays. Rose Gottemoeller, assistant secretary of state for verification and compliance, left earlier this month for Moscow, and the rest of the U.S. negotiating team will head for Geneva on Feb. 1, Inside Missile Defense reported today.

IMD also notes that a senior U.S. diplomat earlier this month declined to say exactly when a final agreement could be reached:

“We’re doing all the things that you have to do beforehand -- the language, working on annexes, but these things are very technical; these technical annexes are non-trivial,” Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher said.

“There’s a lot of really important stuff in there, so when do you declare yourself done?” she added in a Jan. 13 breakfast meeting with defense reporters. “I could actually say, ‘We’re done negotiating, but we have all these other things to do,’ and there’s going to be a lag time between the time we say we’re done and the time that it actually gets up to the Senate.”

“I think that we are really close, we are in a place where we’re working very, very hard, both sides are doing those things,” Tauscher said.

The latest issue of the Army AL&T Magazine, put out by the office of the assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology, focuses a bit on unmanned systems, and the service's acquisition executive, Dean Popps, summarizes neatly where the Army has come in a very short time frame on unpiloted aircraft:

The Army UAS story is a recent one. In 1999, a single Hunter system was sent to support U.S. troops in the Balkans, becoming the first Army UAS to support real-world operations. A year later, the UAS PO consisted of 70 people with an annual budget of $60 million. Today, the PO manages more than $1 billion annually with more than 1,100 unmanned aircraft in support of Operations Enduring and Iraqi Freedom (OEF/OIF), and this demand for unmanned systems is continually increasing. It took the Army more than a decade to fly 100,000 UAS hours. It took us less than 1 year to fly the next 100,000 hours, and we fly more than that each year in theater. These systems operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with multiple aircraft in the same unit operating simultaneously.

Two of the featured stories deal with that UAS office -- and one in particular highlights the Army's work on manned/unmanned (MUM) teaming, a big deal for the service and an increasingly bigger one going forward.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) today named Charles Curtis and John Nagl to an independent panel that will assess the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review.

"Charles Curtis and John Nagl offer a wide range and depth of defense policy and practical experience both in and out of government," Levin said in a statement. "Their demonstrated ability for independent thinking will contribute significantly to the panel’s assessments and recommendations relating to the 2009 QDR."

The Fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Act requires the defense secretary to establish an independent panel to assess the QDR's "recommendations, stated and implied assumptions, and the vulnerabilities of the underlying strategy and force structure," the committee statement reads. "((Defense)) Secretary ((Robert)) Gates announced he would appoint a 12-member, bipartisan panel to meet this requirement, and the FY2010 NDAA included a provision that adds eight congressionally appointed members to the QDR independent panel for 2009, two each to be appointed by the HASC and SASC chairs and ranking members."

According to the bios included in the Levin statement:

Honorable Charles Curtis

Mr. Curtis is currently a non-resident Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the president emeritus of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group founded by former Sen. Sam Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner that works to address threats from nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Before joining NTI, he was executive vice president and chief operating officer of the United Nations Foundation. From 1994 to 1997, he served as undersecretary and deputy secretary of the Department of Energy.

Dr. John Nagl

Mr. Nagl is the president of the Center for a New American Security. He is a retired Army lieutenant colonel whose service includes combat service in the Iraq war and Operation Desert Storm and a former West Point professor. He contributed to Army’s field manual on counterinsurgency, and is the author of "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam."

Inside the Pentagon reported last November that former Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who along with former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL) had been eyed to lead the panel, had withdrawn his name from consideration. It also appeared doubtful that Graham would co-chair the group if the Florida Democrat participates.

Warner told ITP at the time that he had informed DOD of his decision -- based on potential conflicts of interest -- on Oct. 23, the day after ITP first reported Pentagon and congressional sources considered him a frontrunner to co-chair the panel.

Meanwhile, a source close to Graham told ITP in November that if Graham serves on the panel he is unlikely to co-chair it because he is already busy with other commitments.

Graham chairs the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and serves on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, both created by Congress.