The Insider

The U.S. Court of Appeals today sided with the Air Force, rejecting a claim by Alabama Aircraft Industries that the service unfairly awarded a $1 billion-plus KC-135 maintenance contract to defense giant Boeing back in 2007.

The decision paves the way for Boeing to begin executing scheduled depot maintenance on its aging fleet of Stratotanker aerial refueling aircraft.

The Air Force awarded the depot maintenance contract to Boeing in September 2007. Alabama Aircraft Industries protested that decision to the Government Accountability Office, which “denied the protest on all grounds raised by AAII, with the exception of the agency's cost/price evaluation,” according to the decision.

“The GAO concluded that the record was insufficient for the GAO to determine the reasonableness of the agency’s price-realism analysis,” the decision reads.

The Air Force then reexamined both companies' proposals and determined the prices presented “were realistic and reasonable.” The Air Force affirmed the contract award to Boeing in March 2008. AAII protested for a second time; however, GAO denied the claim.

The company then filed a complaint in the Court of Federal Claims. That court ruled the Air Force's price realism analysis was “arbitrary and capricious” because the agency failed “to deal explicitly with the aging-fleet issue in the RFP” and then sought “to sidestep the aging-fleet issue in the price-realism analysis of Boeing’s prevailing offer,” according to the decision.

The court ordered the Air Force to resolicit the contract. The Air Force and Boeing subsequently appealed the ruling, which the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed today.

Alabama Aircraft Industries -- in a last-ditch chance to have the contract voided -- could petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review today's decision.

The latest Pentagon report on the security situation in Iraq comes with a noteworthy new caveat in the foreword. Since U.S. forces withdrew from Iraqi cities in June, U.S. officials find it hard to obtain and verify source data for the performance categories discussed in the document.

As a consequence of the movement of U.S. forces out of Iraqi cities on June 30, 2009, the U.S. has experienced reduced visibility and ability to verify Iraqi reports. Without a robust U.S. presence, Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) has begun reporting metrics that include host nation reports that it may not be able to independently verify. The overall trends between Coalition force data and host nation data are very close, but some values may change. Current charts show a combination of Coalition and Host-Nation reported data. The combination of these reports causes baseline numbers to increase, making it difficult to compare these charts with those presented in previous publications of this report.

The congressionally mandated document examines a host of indicators that would tell U.S. lawmakers whether the government of Iraq is making progress in the areas of security, public services and economic development.

The latest version, dated September 2009 but released only this month, describes "generally positive trends" but also warns that Iraq remains fragile because "many underlying sources of instability have yet to be resolved, putting security gains at risk."

The Pentagon's Defense Research and Engineering office is calling for new fiscal year 2011 Joint Capability Technology Demonstration candidates, according to a recent memo.

In the Oct. 9 memo, DR&E Complex Systems Director Charles Perkins writes:

I invite you to submit FY 2011 candidates for the JCTD program. Candidates should have a Combatant Commander as the primary sponsor, support joint, coalition, or inter-agency capabilities and counter unconventional and time-critical threats by rapidly providing "leap ahead" capabilities for the warfighter while encouraging rapid technology transition within the department by matching customer needs with S&T innovation.

To be more responsive to the warfighter, I will accept candidates year-round. However, candidates that would like to be briefed at the Candidate Review Board (CRB) in March 2010 should submit documentation by Jan. 15, 2010. A second CRB will be held in September 2010.

JCTD candidates should be submitted to the Rapid Fielding Directorate using the Defense Research and Engineering office's Knowledge Management Information System (KIMS) on the office's Web site, according to the memo. Classified proposals should be submitted to the KIMS page found on the SIPRNET Web site.

Advertising firms around the world could soon be due for more work from the U.S. military. Authors of the recently released Strategic Communication Joint Integrating Concept believe in a "likely need for significant outsourcing" of military communication needs, according to the document, because commanders "will not have access to or credibility with" some audiences worldwide that would be required for things like opinion polls.

"This will have implications for budgeting and contracting," the document states.

Another possible "implication" of the strategic communication concept are beefed-up, all-in-one "public affairs operating units," according to the concept document. These folks would produce a "variety of public information products for designated audiences -- while retaining the staff public affairs function," the document states.

The document defines public affairs work as directed at U.S. audiences.

Government Accountability Office auditors recently said the Defense Department still lacks needed information on contractors working in the U.S. Central Command region, despite Pentagon efforts to address the issue.

Defense officials introduced the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker (SPOT) system some years ago to keep tabs on how many contractors are working for DOD overseas, where they are located and what exactly they were hired to do. Since then, officials have been scrambling to make the use of SPOT mandatory for contractors, rewriting procurement regulations to that effect and reminding contracting officers to get their suppliers' records into the SPOT database as soon as possible.

In a new CENTCOM order, dated Oct. 31, officials are taking another step. The order comes in the wake of the latest GAO report on the topic of contractor visibility, which said Pentagon officials lack uniform criteria for issuing "letters of authorization" to contractors. The documents grant workers access to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and they are required for receiving DOD support services while deployed.

As of Dec. 1, CENTCOM officials will no longer accept "manual" LOAs, the order reads. Instead, all contractors must go through the SPOT application to obtain a system-generated LOA. Those without SPOT-issued LOAs after the deadline will no longer be eligible for identification cards, military transport or DOD medical services in theater, the order reads.

In addition, the order requires all armed contractors to be registered in SPOT, complete with data about the weapons they are authorized to carry. Moreover, officials must enter instances of contractors killed, missing, wounded or cases of misconduct into SPOT, the order reads.

President Obama today nominated Erin Conaton, the House Armed Services Committee's staff director, to become the next under secretary of the Air Force.

According to her White House bio:

Erin C. Conaton is currently the staff director for the House of Representatives’ Committee on Armed Services (HASC). In that capacity, she serves as the primary advisor to Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) and the 61 other members of the Armed Services Committee. She directs the committee’s 70 person staff who support the HASC members with drafting and negotiating each year’s National Defense Authorization Act, which provides annual funding and authorities to the Department of Defense. In the 109th Congress, she was the committee's Minority Staff Director. Prior to that, since joining the HASC staff in 2001, she served as a Professional Staff Member covering a range of defense policy issues. Before joining the committee staff, she was the Research Staff Director for the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission) in the Department of Defense. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently completed a report on maritime and air domain awareness.

Titled "Global Maritime and Air Communities of Interest Intelligence Enterprises" and first obtained by the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News, the report describes "the level of integration and collaboration achieved" since the inception of the maritime and air domain awareness mission. It warns that the threat from terrorists or other non-state actors remains high, specifically with efforts to cripple the various elements of the global supply chain.

According to the report:

The key to successfully achieving persistent domain and cross-domain awareness goals, and efficiently defeat adversaries, is to improve all-source analysis focused on illicit trafficking net-works to effectively narrow the search to a specific vessel, aircraft, container and/or person that represents a threat. Our adversaries take advantage of the relative anonymity of the global commercial environment to accomplish their objectives. Each conveyance carrying humans and/or cargo is vulnerable to this threat, yet tracking all conveyances and cargo alone will not provide insight into the potential for hazard. Understanding the networks of human beings behind the cargo and conveyance is a valid means and more resource efficient method of ascertaining the threat. Actions taken by the IC since 9/11 demonstrate that information on illicit and other criminal activity in the global transportation network affords critical insights into the intentions of those who would do us tremendous harm. Examining smuggling networks, front companies, and "gray" actors and transactions have resulted in successful interdictions of people and cargo who clearly pose national security threats. Notably, much of the data necessary for this intelligence production resides outside the traditional IC, existing within law enforcement, regulatory, private sector and foreign organizations in the global communities of interest.

There is a growing consensus that urgency has waned since 9/11, and we are still not able to rapidly "connect the dots." It is therefore imperative that we accelerate efforts to create a globally networked and unified intelligence enterprise steadily focused on maritime, air and intermodal mission sets, with the means to integrate and leverage federal, state, tribal, local, private and foreign entities to support the common goal of shared attentiveness to potential threats. Persistent domain and cross-domain awareness grants time and distance to detect, deter, interdict and defeat such threats. Only through an inclusive, collaborative approach can we gain the critical information that lies outside of traditional intelligence collection that will create the incisive understanding and decision advantage necessary for anticipatory and proactive measures.