The Insider

The White House's Office of Management and Budget released a report on sequestration Friday evening, providing calculations of the amounts and percentages by which various budgetary resources are required to be reduced, and a listing of the reductions required for each non-exempt budget account.

"The cuts required by sequestration will be deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments and core government functions," the report states, noting there will be "a reduction in readiness of many non-deployed units, delays in investments in new equipment, cutbacks in equipment repairs and needed facility maintenance, disruptions in military research and development efforts, significant reductions in weapons programs, and furloughs of most civilian employees for a significant amount of time."

Senior service officials were on Capitol Hill yesterday talking about the impact of funding cuts on individual weapons programs. Our coverage:

General: Sequestration Will Force Marines To Choose Between JLTV, MPC

The Marine Corps will have to choose between the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and the Marine Personnel Carrier if sequestration is implemented, according to a service official.

Sequester To Cut Air Force's F-35A Purchase By Up To 5 Jets

The Air Force expects to cut its procurement of the Joint Strike Fighter this fiscal year by as many as five aircraft as a result of sequestration, a top service official said today.

View the prepared testimony from yesterday's hearing.

The Aerospace Industries Association has established a new, cybersecurity-centered "National Aerospace Standard," according to an AIA statement issued this morning.

"National Aerospace Standard NAS9924, 'Cyber Security Baseline' provides guidance that benefits the aerospace and defense suppliers of all capability levels by giving the supply chain a base line of standard practices they can follow to better protect their information system infrastructures from cyber threats," the statement reads.

"We're very proud to announce this first National Aerospace Standard on cyber security," AIA President and CEO Marion Blakey said in the statement. "It will benefit the entire industry through education and increasing security throughout the supply chain. As our nation's leaders work to counter increasing cyber security challenges, industry looks forward to supporting their efforts and assuring we remain Second to None in the cyber domain as well as in aerospace."

According to AIA's abstract of the document (available for purchase on the AIA website):

The new standard provides information for companies to assess themselves on their information technology security practices and helps them determine their preparedness for cyber threat risk management for their customers while assessing the risks presented by their own suppliers.

Supply chain companies are important to the aerospace and defense industrial base. Suppliers may have unique capabilities that are vital to aerospace and defense programs.

Aerospace and defense companies have been dealing with the threat of cyber intrusion for the past several years. As companies have increased the security of their IT network defenses, the attackers are now being driven to softer targets where they may find some of the same type of data that they previously had sought from these companies. The adversary is also using the collaborative relationships between the aerospace and defense companies and their suppliers as a "back door" as the defenses get better. Companies further down the supply chain may not have had the opportunity or expertise necessary to fully prepare to defend their systems from these attackers, but the result of the increased defenses in the major suppliers is that the attacker may target their suppliers based on their vulnerabilities. This document was designed to be a supplier baseline so that suppliers know what kind of security they need to have if they want to do business with aerospace and defense companies.

The document, according to AIA, "provides basic information" that an aerospace/defense supplier can use to:

* assess themselves on their information technology security practices;

* determine their preparedness for cyber threat risk management for their customer; and

* assess the risks presented by their own suppliers.

Last Friday, InsideDefense.com reported that a senior Pentagon official has called on lawmakers to pass legislation to create and enforce standards for companies to strengthen their networks against cybersecurity attacks. Further:

"I believe that there has to be some aspect of best practices that Congress nudges the private sector to raise their game on this," Eric Rosenbach, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, said today at an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association cybersecurity symposium.

Rosenbach added that a lot of industry leaders still might not understand the magnitude of the threat or are not willing to put up the extra investment to protect their companies.

He noted the relative ease with which hackers can look for network vulnerabilities on the Internet. "There's someone out there who has been sloppy, probably inadvertently sloppy, but they're not doing what they should do to keep their kind of game high and have a good defensive posture," Rosenbach said.

Read the full story.

Additionally, Inside the Pentagon reported last week that while the Department of Homeland Security has the lead in securing critical U.S. infrastructure against cyber attacks, the administration is looking to the Defense Department to play a key though less prominent role in advancing the goals of an executive order recently signed by the president. ITP further reported:

DOD, the largest cabinet agency, is expected to bring to bear expertise in acquisition and information sharing -- skills deeply ingrained in day-to-day operations at the Pentagon, though sometimes with mixed results. Defense officials, together with the General Services Administration, have 120 days to craft a report on the role security standards would play in acquisition planning and contract administration.

The final version of the executive order, dated Feb. 12, no longer contains a passage from a widely circulated November 2012 version that instructed DOD to consider "changing the federal procurement process" to give preference for vendors meeting given cybersecurity standards. The omission touches on a discussion within the defense acquisition community where divvying up the supply chain into vendors meeting certain qualifications and those that do not has routinely occurred.

Jim Lewis, director of the technology and public policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the practice would be difficult to apply for acquisitions related to critical infrastructure because monopolies -- for utilities, as an example -- are common in that market segment. "It's hard to get meaningful acquisition improvement in critical infrastructure without legislation," he said.

Read the full story.

On his first day on the job, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will meet privately with senior defense officials and speak publicly with service members and civilian employees at the Pentagon.

Hagel was scheduled to arrive at the building at 7:30 a.m; at 8:15 a.m., Hagel was slated to take the oath of office in a private ceremony attended by family members and his immediate office staff. "Secretary Hagel will then host the daily senior staff update meeting attended by civilian and military leaders of the department," according to a statement released by the Pentagon.

And at 10:30 a.m., Hagel is scheduled to make remarks in the Pentagon's auditorium, which will be open to the media and webcast live by the department. In the afternoon, Hagel is due to meet with the service secretaries and attend meetings at the White House.

"I will be counting on Chuck’s judgment and counsel as we end the war in Afghanistan, bring our troops home, stay ready to meet the threats of our time and keep our military the finest fighting force in the world," President Obama said in a statement last night after the Senate narrowly confirmed Hagel by a vote of 58-41.

The Senate Armed Services Committee plans to hold a hearing featuring the heads of U.S. Central and Special Operations commands next week.

Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, the current head of CENTCOM, will testify alongside Navy Adm. and SOCOM chief William McRaven at 9:30 a.m. on March 5, according to a committee statement issued this afternoon.

Meanwhile, the committee earlier today approved the nominations of Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to become the next CENTCOM chief and Army Gen. David Rodriguez to become head of U.S. Africa Command, according to a separate panel statement.

No date has yet been set for the full Senate to consider the Austin and Rodriguez appointments, whose nomination hearing took place earlier this month.

With the sequestration deadline looming at the end of this week, House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee Chairman Randy Forbes (R-VA) announced this morning that he has introduced a bill that would remove the Defense Department-related budget cuts from sequestration and reduce the total size of the sequester by that amount. According to a statement his office just issued:

"Sequestration cuts eclipse any other national security threat facing our nation," said Forbes. "Lawmakers in Washington have crossed a red line in our constitutional duty -- outlined in the first sentence of the U.S. Constitution -- to provide for the common defense.  I voted against sequestration and I’ve warned about these cuts for 18 months.  This bill represents an opportunity for lawmakers to blunt sequestration's debilitating impact on national defense."

With just days before the sequester takes place, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey has testified that the U.S. military "can’t give another dollar" in defense cuts.  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said sequestration "guarantees that we hollow out the military."

Since 2009, the Department of Defense has taken roughly $800 billion in spending reductions.  Sequestration would cut nearly $500 billion more in defense spending. National defense accounts for approximately 20% of federal spending, yet will constitute roughly 50% of the total spending cuts under sequestration.  These cuts would represent the most dramatic cuts facing the Department of Defense in three and a half decades -- far surpassing the cuts of the 1990s which left our nation unprepared for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"While I believe that the whole of sequestration's arbitrary cuts can and should be avoided, America's lawmakers must take direct and immediate action to ensure that the U.S. military has the capabilities necessary to protect and defend the United States," Forbes said. "The security of our nation and our men and women in uniform must not continue to bear the brunt of the two-plus-year failure of Congress and the President to agree on the appropriate way to reduce the federal debt and deficit."

Former Pentagon policy chief Michèle Flournoy today defended the department's decision to omit from the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance any discussion of greater risks it might accept in various potential budget-cutting scenarios.

Officials decided against including options for scaling back the strategy because Congress could have seized the opportunity to pocket savings, she said during a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution.

"I think there was a sense that the task at hand was to take the 10-year budget guidance that was in the Budget Control Act of 2011 and rethink our strategy in that context," Flournoy said.

"I think that there was an assumption that this was going to be an iterative process – that if the goal posts keep moving in terms of the resource constraints, we're going to have to keep learning and refining on that strategic guidance," she added. "So I think it was seen as a first bite at the apple." Given the iterative nature of the process, it was natural for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey to immediately launch his "visioning exercise to think about the force of 2020" after the guidance was released, Flournoy said.

"But we don't want to have to accept risk or manage risk in areas that we really would rather not until we have clarity on the resource picture," she said. "And we still don't have clarity on the resource picture because here we are facing sequestration in the complete absence of any kind of consensus about the parameters of a budget deal."

But Kori Schake of the Hoover Institution and former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, who co-authored a paper on national defense issued today, criticized DOD's approach during the panel discussion.

Schake said she and Roughead strongly believe it would have been better to include excursions in the Defense Strategic Guidance showing where greater risk might be taken in the event of more budget cuts. DOD's decision not to do that has dramatically complicated the current challenge of balancing risk in the force, she said.

Flournoy countered that the strategy was aligned with the Budget Control Act's resource picture. The problem with including excursions, she said, was that it would have enabled Congress to "pocket" savings where the department was presumably willing to take risk without pledging to provide DOD resources.

Roughead said rather than being "pick-pocketed," DOD is about to lose the "whole enchilada" through sequestration. The American people have not had the benefit of a discussion about the risks and tradeoffs involved, he said.