Success Rate

Members of the House Armed Services Committee apparently found many of the Defense Department's legislative ideas from the past two months convincing. The summary of the panel's fiscal year 2010 defense authorization contains a number of provisions that will sound familiar to those following our coverage.

For example, panelists gave a thumbs-up to the DOD idea of training private-sector information technology specialists at the Defense Cyber Investigation Training Academy (DCITA), operated by the DOD Cyber Crime Center in Maryland.

Also considered in the bill is a Pentagon request to authorize the provision of senior-level civilian U.S. defense advisers to the defense ministries of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A DOD request to expand a program for paying tipsters who provide counterterrorism-related information directly to US. officials or through foreign intermediaries made it into the bill, too.

Lawmakers OK'ed a Pentagon request to make permanent a pilot program for sharing space situational awareness data with private companies and foreign organizations.

They included a DOD proposal in their bill that would make it possible for the Pentagon to do business with countries eyed to host segments of what U.S. officials call the Northern Distribution Network of supply routes to Afghanistan.

However, committee members adopted the latter proposal with caveats. A panel spokeswoman would only say the bill language is “much more limited” than what DOD officials wanted.

The final bill text, which should include details on the limitations, will be available to the public after committee staffers file the legislation with the House Rules Committee later this week, the spokeswoman said.