The Insider

CIA Director Michael Hayden today issued a statement to agency employees explaining how the agency will educate the incoming administration while still supporting the outgoing Bush team -- a primer on how to serve two masters, in essence, that applies to the Pentagon and other government agencies:

That means that we in the intelligence community will have -- until noon on January 20th -- two sets of consumers. As we continue to serve the current administration, we are also in touch with President-elect Obama and his national security team. Through expanded access, greater than what he had in his briefings as a candidate or as a senator, he will see the full range of capabilities we deploy for the United States.

Hayden said the agency's leadership was to meet this morning to talk about the transition to a new administration. CIA has prepared a great deal of information about the agency for the Obama team, Hayden said.

“((Director of National Intelligence Mike)) McConnell, who will launch the first briefing of the incoming administration, has asked Michael Morell, our director for intelligence, to be his representative throughout that process," the statement reads. "The two principal briefers for the president-elect are also CIA careerists.”

Hayden also noted that with every incoming administration there is talk about personnel changes across the government. On that note, he has some advice for the CIA staff: “At this point, I would urge you to ignore it. I certainly have.”

Sen. Barack Obama, who will become a wartime president on his first day in office, will face pressing national security challenges and be forced to make critical decisions early, according to a report released today by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The document -- written by well-known defense expert Anthony Cordesman -- says Obama will have to determine how to handle the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, how to reshape the fiscal year 2010 budget, how to deal with “the cost-containment crisis in defense procurement” and how to restructure deployment plans to reflect needs in Afghanistan.

“The new President elect is not going to have the time to meditate, have task forces examine broad changes in strategy, and think conceptually,” the report says. “As of January 20th, he will have to deal with the inheritance of ongoing wars and crises in many aspects of defense.”

While acknowledging the challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cordesman also zeroes in on the problems with defense programming and budgeting.

“There will be an immediate need to compensate for nearly eight years of conceptual strategies decoupled from force plans, and budgets, poorly structured wartime budget supplementals, a grossly mismanaged procurement effort in every military service, and a failure to contain the cost of U.S. defense spending,” he writes.

Immediately and for some time, Obama will have to reshape the Defense Department as well as national security policy to rebalance the structure and missions of the active and reserve components, address recruiting and retention problems and control costs, among other issues, the report says.

In the long-term, he will need to create forces able to perform both “hard” and “soft” functions, establish effective defense planning structures and cycles and ensure that procurement plans are “real and affordable,” while also addressing many other challenges.

The question, Cordesman concludes, is the degree to which the Obama administration will be realistic. He calls on the new presidential team to make “hard trade-offs without abandoning key options,” accept “the fact that the U.S. status as 'superpower' was always severely limited and these limits will grow” and look to create integrated and affordable plans and budgets that are tailored to major missions and regions.

“The extent to which the Obama Administration acts on this basis, rather than the basis of the ideological extremism and failed management of the Bush Administration, will determine much of its success and the state of U.S. national security,” Cordesman writes.

Advisers to president-elect Barack Obama are in negotiations with Defense Secretary Robert Gates about the conditions of a continued tenure at the helm of the Pentagon, InsideDefense.com has learned.

The Obama team wants to put Richard Danzig into the deputy defense secretary job, according to a source close to the president-elect's transition team. The plan is to elevate the former Navy secretary to the top Pentagon post following a transition period during which Gates would remain secretary, a source close to the Obama transition team said.

But Gates said he wants to keep his current deputy, Gordon England, in place during that time, the source said this evening, describing the situation as an “impasse.”

For the of job of national security adviser, Brookings Institution scholar James Steinberg is emerging as a likely pick, the source said, speaking on condition of not being named.

Steinberg was a deputy national security adviser during the Clinton administration.

A senior Pentagon advisory panel has issued a 66-page report laying out the top five issues the next commander-in-chief must put on his agenda. According to the Defense Science Board, these issues "could lead to future military failure" if left unresolved.

According to the report, “Defense Imperatives for the New Administration,” those issues are: Developing the intelligence needed to confront terrorism, protecting and defending the homeland; maintaining the capability to project force around the world; bringing stability to states and regions; and supporting state and local authorities in providing domestic catastrophe relief.

On the intel front, the science board says the United States lacks the means to get the type of intelligence needed to get inside terrorist networks. No matter who is sitting in the Oval Office next year, he will have to confront the threat of terrorism, a threat the science board board contends the U.S. intelligence community is not fully equipped to handle.

The limiting factor in thwarting terrorists is learning their identity and location. Terrorists have gotten better at their trade craft -- they are harder to detect and more lethal. In turn, we are spending a considerable amount on intelligence overall, and many intelligence community efforts have been redirected toward terrorism. Despite concerted efforts, we still lack the deep penetration required for actionable intelligence -- both foreign and domestic.

Despite the millions of dollars the U.S. government spends annually on intelligence gathering, the science board contends the intelligence community does not know enough.

The number one issue in counterterrorism is that we are information limited. Many nostrums for improving intelligence in support of counterterrorism focus on 'connecting the dots' on the presumption that we have all the dots. We do not, nor are we sufficiently astute and aggressive in collecting them.

One improvement needed is to strengthen domestic intelligence, the report says.

The creation of the Director of National Intelligence responded, in part, to the September 11 attacks against our homeland and placed domestic as well as foreign intelligence within the purview of a single individual. Notwithstanding, the successive directors of national intelligence have been slow to embrace domestic intelligence and that must be remedied.

Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England in a few days will recommend to the next president's Pentagon transition team increasing funding for the Joint Strike Fighter program in order to accelerate purchases of the stealthy single-engine jet slated to be used by the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported yesterday.

England, in Fort Worth this week for a speaking engagement, said he will strongly advise the next administration to continue and even increase funding for F-35 development and production.

"In my judgment, it will be the best-performing airplane out there," England said when asked about criticisms of the F-35 from inside and outside of government.

England confirmed reports that the 2010 defense budget the Pentagon will propose to the next president lays the groundwork for increased funding to speed up F-35 purchases and production as soon as 2011. It’s important, England said, to increase F-35 production as soon as possible to bring down the cost to the U.S. and foreign buyers.

"We need to get the level of procurement up to get the most value for the money spent," said England, who, under General Dynamics and, briefly, Lockheed, ran the Fort Worth plant where the F-35 will be built.

Will the proposed F-35 spending hike snuff out continued F-22 production? The dogfight between supporters of both programs in Congress and Inside the Pentagon will play out in the next few months.

More than three months ago we reported the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was slated to be a key beneficiary of the $57 billion boost England is preparing in the fiscal year 2010 budget proposal for the next administration.

Members of the congressional delegation from Georgia, as well as Gov. Sonny Perdue (R), this week lobbied the Defense Department to consider setting up the headquarters of U.S. Africa Command in the Peach State.

In an Oct. 30 letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, lawmakers argued Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, GA, would make a fine location for the new command.

Their pitch, complete with mention of a major defense contractor in proximity of the base, goes like this:

Dobbins has a substantial runway network as well as rail infrastructure that connects it with the Port of Savannah -- already a point of shipment for a significant amount of cargo bound for Africa. Further, given that the facilities in Marietta are presently shared by Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Naval Air Station Atlanta, the Georgia National Guard, and Lockheed Martin, they have long been a model for joint-ness within the Department of Defense, an important and unique characteristic given that AFRICOM will be a joint command and require coordination with many international partners and across numerous government agencies. With 52 acres of available property adjoining the base, any needed expansion of existing or construction of new facilities would also be unencumbered.

The letter this week follows a similar missive sent by Georgian lawmakers in August. That letter sought to advertise the locations of Ft. McPherson Ft. Gillem as possible locations for the AFRICOM headquarters. Both installations are located just south of Atlanta.

Pentagon officials apparently were already considering Dobbins, along with McPherson and Gillem, before lawmakers wrote to Gates yesterday, according to the text of the letter.

Currently, AFRICOM is based in Stuttgart, Germany, near the headquarters of U.S. European Command.

AFRICOM officials have said the command does not necessarily need a headquarters on the continent, but officials think some sort of presence there would be helpful.

“We believe AFRICOM will be more effective if some members of the staff are physically living and working on the continent, where they can meet face-to-face with their counterparts in African governments and nongovernmental organizations,” the command’s Web site states.

During his roundtable discussion with reporters yesterday, Pentagon acquisition chief John Young announced he had made several new changes to the Defense Department acquisition directorate's "Strategic Goals Implementation Plan."

Inside the Pentagon reported in June on the progress of some of those goals, among them defining the so-called "desirable attributes" of the defense industrial base and the methodology to assess industry progress toward developing these attributes, a DOD official told ITP at the time.

Yesterday, Young told reporters that he had "sent a note and an updated version that we're about to issue” to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England “that said we believe we've completed on the order of 169 ((of the goals in the plan)), and we discussed this at an off-site in September, and at that off-site we added something like 240 new metrics, and that's what the new version will put out there -- the ones that we have remain((ing)) to do and the fact that we have new ones."