The Insider

The Senate Armed Services Committee this morning voted to approve the nomination of Robert Work to become the next deputy defense secretary, according to a panel statement.

The committee also approved the nominations of Air Force Gen. Paul Selva to be head of U.S. Transportation Command and Navy Vice Adm. Michael Rogers become the next director of the National Security Agency and head of U.S. Cyber Command.

Additionally, the committee approved the nominations of:

* Michael McCord to be Pentagon comptroller;

* Christine Wormuth to be under secretary of defense for policy;

* David Shear to be assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs; and

* Eric Rosenbach to be assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense.

The nominations will now go to the full Senate for consideration.

The Air Force is exploring options for a follow-on to the MQ-9 Reaper even as the service scales back procurement of the remotely piloted aircraft and looks to fully retire its predecessor, the MQ-1 Predator.

According to service spokeswoman Maj. Mary Danner-Jones, Air Combat Command recently established an ISR Futures Office to begin the formal process of defining the requirements of a follow-on RPA for medium-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

"The formal process for defining . . . requirements is in the initial stages of development and will be shaped by our national- and defense-strategy goals," she said in a March 19 email.

A top contender for the position is the General Atomics Predator C, known as the Avenger. The service procured its first Avenger as test platform in 2009 and that unit is still in operation today.

The Pentagon's Threat Reduction Advisory Committee will hold a joint meeting early next month with the State Department's International Security Advisory Board, according to a notice published in this morning's Federal Register.

The two panels will "share information about their efforts in areas of shared responsibility," the notice states. Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Rose Gottemoeller, and Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall will provide opening remarks.

After that, the joint session's agenda is as follows:

Following the opening remarks, the members will receive two classified briefings on the ISAB's work with U.S.-Russia relations and International Cyber Stability. The CIA and DIA will provide a classified briefing on U.S.-Russia relations during the lunch session. At the afternoon session, the members will receive two classified briefings on the TRAC's work with Nuclear Strategic Stability and the Future of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program. The meeting will wrap up with a final discussion on the briefings of the day. The Committees will not deliberate nor develop advice and recommendations for either the Department of State or the Department of Defense. The TRAC members only will continue to meet on April 3, 2014. The TRAC will hold classified discussions to deliberate on their review of DoD's Global Combating WMD Awareness System (GCAS) program. The GCAS program is structured to support DoD in its roles to identify, reduce, and mitigate the threat of WMD development, proliferation, and use worldwide. The Committee will provide an assessment on the program's ability to meet that goal. This will be followed by classified deliberations on the future of the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (CTR). The Committee was asked to provide recommendations for the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Policy) regarding the development of a strategy for articulating the DoD CTR story, how best to coordinate with Combatant Commands on the use of the CTR program, and a strategy to advocate for the program with key stakeholders. The session will conclude with a classified discussion on the way ahead.

Risk management is one of the areas that plays a key role in cybersecurity, according to a Defense Department instruction issued Friday:

(1) DoD will implement a multi-tiered cybersecurity risk management process to protect U.S. interests, DoD operational capabilities, and DoD individuals, organizations, and assets from the DoD Information Enterprise level, through the DoD Component level, down to the IS level as described in National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication (SP) 800-39 (Reference (o)) and Committee on National Security Systems (CNSS) Policy (CNSSP) 22 (Reference (p)).

(2) Risks associated with vulnerabilities inherent in IT, global sourcing and distribution, and adversary threats to DoD use of cyberspace must be considered in DoD employment of capabilities to achieve objectives in military, intelligence, and business operations.

(3) All DoD IT will be assigned to, and governed by, a DoD Component cybersecurity program that manages risk commensurate with the importance of supported missions and the value of potentially affected information or assets.

(4) Risk management will be addressed as early as possible in the acquisition of IT and in an integrated manner across the IT life cycle.

The Missile Defense Agency today issued a request for information on its new midcourse tracking radar.

The Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR) "will provide persistent sensor coverage and improve discrimination capabilities against threats to the homeland from the Pacific theater," according to MDA's fiscal year 2015 budget justification book issued earlier this week. "This new radar also will give the Sea-Based X-band (SBX) radar more geographic deployment flexibility for contingency and test use."

MDA is asking Congress for $79.5 million to begin developing the radar.

As for where the new radar would be based, the RFI states:

The first deployment of the LRDR will be operational in Alaska no later than 2020 with the intent to address threats to the homeland from the Pacific region. The Respondents may assume Clear Air Force Station as a point of reference; however a final location has not been determined and will not be designated until a siting study and environmental analysis is completed.

MDA Director Vice Adm. James Syring said during a March 4 briefing that "we've talked about Alaska, but we're going . . . to do the due diligence and evaluate all the possible alternatives in the Pacific."

Navy Vice Adm. Michael Rogers, nominated to become the next head of U.S. Cyber Command, was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee what he saw as the biggest challenge that will confront CYBERCOM's commander. Here's his answer, submitted in advance of his nomination hearing this week:

I believe the major challenge that will confront the next Commander, U.S. Cyber Command will be dealing with the changing threat in cyberspace. Adversaries today seek persistent presences on military, government, and private networks for purposes such as exploitation and potentially disruption. We as a military and a nation are not well positioned to deal with such threats. These intruders have to be located, blocked, and extracted, sometimes over long periods of time. We have seen the extent of the resources required to wage such campaigns, the planning and intelligence that are essential to their success, and the degree of collaboration and synchronization required across the government and industry (and with our allies and international partners). We in DoD are creating capabilities that can adapt to these uses and others, but we have some key capability gaps in dealing with increasingly capable threats. Our legacy information architecture, for instance, is not optimized for defense in its current form, and our communications systems are vulnerable. U.S. military forces currently lack the training and the readiness to confront advanced threats in cyberspace. Finally, our commanders do not always know when they are accepting risk from cyber vulnerabilities, and cannot gain reliable situational awareness, neither globally nor in US military systems.