Spending Archives

The Defense Department would like to whittle down the number of reports it has to provide Congress every year as part of a project to cut $100 billion from its overhead during the next five years, Ashton Carter, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

Generating reports requires about 1,000 people he said in a response to a question from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. That's enough for an infantry battalion, by my reckoning. Carter added Defense is required to write about 1,000 reports a year because of requirements inserted in various bills, and another 1,000 various reports requested y individuals every year.

McCain agreed the requirement may be unnecessary considering what Congress does with them. "I'll let you in on a dirty little secret," McCain told Carter. "We don't even read them . . . [although] we might get briefed on them [by staff]."

In another moment of senatorial candor, Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was about to ask Carter a question about the fiscal 2012 Defense budget, but then paused. Referring to the fiscal 2011 budget, Brown said, "We don't have a budget yet, maybe we should lead by example."

As the new guy on the Hill, Brown has evidently yet to learn that it seems to be the mission of Congress not to pass budgets on time.

As anyone who has served in combat knows, if a buddy is wounded, the first two things you need to do are make sure he can breathe and his bleeding is stopped.

For the past several years, troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq have used an advanced Combat-Application-Tourniquet (C-A-T) developed by Composite Resources in Rock Hill, S.C. The tourniquet features a nylon strap and a plastic rod to tighten the strap to stop bleeding.

The regulation C-A-T costs about $28. But about two years ago the Army detected cheap knock offs made by a Hong Kong company that had entered the military's supply chain in Afghanistan and Iraq. The imitation sold for about $8.50.

They're accurate looking fakes, right down to the label and national stock number.

But as Col. John Kragh, a doctor at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, pointed out in June, the rod on the fake tourniquet "is bendable to a point where it cannot work right. It's like bending Gumby's arm."

He said the fake tourniquet could be fatal because it cannot stop bleeding. Kragh added a decentralized ordering system probably accounts for the presence of the fake tourniquets in the field, with low-level supply personnel ordering the knock offs over the Internet based on price.

The Defense Department issued a warning about the knock-offs in April, Kragh said, and the Food and Drug Administration this month put out a safety alert about the tourniquets, which are also used by civilian first responders.

The lesson here is a good deal isn't always that; it can even be deadly.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates made official the elimination of the office of the Assistant Secretary for Networks and Information Integration - also known as the office of the chief information officer. At a Pentagon press briefing today he detailed cuts in the Pentagon budget to save $100 billion over the next five years.

Gates added that the Joint Staff will also shut down its central command, control and communications shop. He added that the work done by NII and the Joint Staff C4 operation will be "assigned to other organizations and most of their acquisition functions will transfer to acquisition, technology and logistics."

Gates also derided what he called the decentralized approach to IT throughout the Defense Department:

"All of our bases, operational headquarters and defense agencies have their own IT infrastructures, processes and application-ware. . . . This decentralized approach results in large cumulative costs, and a patchwork of capabilities that create cyber vulnerabilities and limit our ability to capitalize on the promise of information technology."

Gates told the press briefing he wants to see the use of more common IT systems and applications throughout Defense.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I thought standards and commonality was a key job of the ASD/NII organization.

We have all come to accept the fact that the Navy and Army have sizeable air forces. And the Army even has its own mini-Navy of just fewer than 50 ships, including a nifty high-speed ferry that can transport 600 troops and their gear.

Now, it turns out every service has its own fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles in development, including a Navy vertical take-off-and-landing gizmo that looks like a miniature version of the manned V-22 Osprey used by the Marines.

The Navy has successfully proved it can operate helicopter-like Fire Scout UAVs from the decks of small ships such as frigates. The Senate Armed Services Committee thinks the Navy should now develop a submarine-based UAV capable of a stealthy, underwater launch.

In its report on the fiscal 2011 Defense Department Authorization Act, the committee added $4.6 million to the Navy budget to develop a capsule to covertly launch a UAV and integrate its systems with submarine command and control systems.

Now, I know the submariners would feel left out if they couldn't play in the au courant UAV game, but with bucks tight, do we really need an underwater UAV?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates invoking the spirit of former President and Supreme Cmdr. of Allied Forces in Europe Dwight D. Eisenhower in a call for a more frugal approach to spending by the Pentagon in a speech on May 7 at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas.

In case anyone is confused that patriotism equates to tossing around buckets of money measured in the megabillion dollar range, Gates took a line from Ike to argue the opposite.

Gates said in his speech at the library that Eisenhower had a "passionate belief that the U.S. should spend as much as necessary on national defense -- but not one penny more."

He then concluded, "I say the patriot today is the fellow who can do the job with less money."

Gates' entire speech is a must read. Read and highlight your own copy.

The folks over at the multiagency National Executive Committee for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing posted a notice reminding us that the "U.S. government strongly encourages all GPS users to maintain backup capabilities for positioning, navigation and timing" in case of jamming or other outages.

Well, President Obama zeroed out in his fiscal 2010 budget funding for the only 99 percent reliable electronic GPS back-up that I know of -- the e-Loran system. The Coast Guard merrily went along, so it did not have to staff Loran stations in decidedly noncoastal places such as Boise City, Okla.

The Federal Railroad Admininistration is eyeing GPS as the core technology for a Positive Train Control System for all railroads within the next five years.

What is the engineer of the Amtrak Super Chief supposed to do if his GPS signal is knocked out by a $94.99 GPS jammer as he rolls through What's Central in Las Vegas, N.M., five years hence? Use a sextant?

The executive committee wants all of us out here in GPS-land to know that the Air Force is working on an unspecified GPS back up.

I bet it will cost more than the $190 million the Coasties expect to save over five years from shutting down the 24 Loran stations.

The U.S. Postal Service, which expects to lose $7 billion this year, could pick up more than a bit of spare change by helping the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications Administration conduct a national analysis of spectrum usage, according to the FCC's National Broadband Plan, which it recently sent Congress.

FCC said the national inventory of spectrum usage would require sniffing the airwaves with spectrum analyzers mounted on postal vehicles, and it put the cost at $15 million.

That won't come close to erasing the Postal Service's deficit, estimated to hit $238 billion by 2020, but, hey, every million bucks here and there counts when you are struggling to get by.

The Pentagon will end up paying Lockheed Martin Corp. between $95 million and $131 million for each next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet -- or 60 percent to 90 percent more than the original advertised sticker price.

But that hefty tab will not include fire extinguishers.

Of course, an advanced jet does not use fire extinguishers. The F-35 was supposed to have fire suppression systems, which, for the most part, were eliminated to save weight and cost, according to J. Michael Gilmore the Defense Department's director of operational test and evaluation at Defense.

Gilmore told a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the F-35 program office decided to cut costs and shave weight by eliminating the systems in all areas of the aircraft (except the engines).

The office also eliminated another fire-safety gadget: fuses on fuel hydraulic lines. Together the two omissions have increased the threat of fire if the plane is hit by an ordinance in combat. They also make the F-35 "more vulnerable to typical noncombat fires caused by fuel leaks and other system failures," Gilmore told the committee.

Gilmore testified that he remains "concerned regarding the aircraft's vulnerability to threat-induced and safety-related fires."

I have asked the Air Force and the Pentagon how much money it saved by eliminating the fire suppression systems on a project that will now cost $323 billion for 2,450 aircraft. I have not heard back.

At that whopping price tag, one would hope money could be found to provide F-35s with a factory installed fire suppression system, because I don't think there are many aftermarket suppliers.

Maybe the Pentagon should eliminate the power windows and door locks, too.

Roger Baker, the chief information officer at the Veterans Affairs Department and the $6.6 billion man, will get a few more shekels to spend in fiscal 2011 if the Senate VA committee and the Republicans on the House VA committee get their way in the long budget process.

The Senate panel said it was concerned with the flat lining of VA's $3 billion IT budget from 2010 to 201 and added about 1 percent -- or $30 million -- to fiscal 2011 funding to help with unspecified projects in the Veterans Benefits Administration and the Veterans Health Administration.

The committee also said it wanted to see an increase in the VA's Telehealth budget by $40 million, or 23 percent, to $215 million from the $175 million requested.

The Democrat's on the House VA committee believed Baker when he said he did not need any more money in fiscal 2011, but the Republicans said they would like to add another $56.2 million to the IT budget to automate a system used to pay private doctors who treat veterans outside the Veterans medical system and to establish safeguards to prevent unauthorized alterations of medical records.

If all these increases go through, Baker will end up almost a $7 billion man.

In the most startling act of generosity of the year, the Air Force plans to pony up $104 million for the new headquarters of the U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, Md., in its fiscal 2011 budget.

That nugget of information is contained in the prepared budget testimony that Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz delivered to the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

"In support of the national cyber effort, this budget request dedicates $104 million to support operations and leased space for headquarters staff at the sub-unified U.S. Cyber Command," the testimony noted.

I thought this was quite collegial of the Air Force because the service had spent a couple of years trying to own the cyber mission only to lose it to the U.S. Strategic Command, which will set up the command.

So I called the Air Force press desk in the Pentagon to check if the service had engaged in this act of fiscal largesse or if the $104 million line item was for Air Force cyber space at Fort Meade.

Capt. Joel Harper, an Air Force spokesman, ran my query past the green eye-shade folks, and he told me that, yes, the Air Force plans to fund the new Cyber HQ from its budget and that it was indeed a generous act.

In return, I think Cyber Command should allow widespread use of Air Force blue throughout its new building and invite the service's band to play "Into the Wild Blue Yonder" at the dedication ceremony.