DoD Buzz

Reports of the death of a crucial satellite system known as BASIC have been grossly exaggerated.
The Associated Press and other media outlets reported 10 days ago that $1 billion for BASIC was cut by the House and Senate Appropriations intelligence subcommittees, canceling the program. Well, as often happens with intelligence spending, the picture is much more complicated and nuanced, according to a senior Pentagon source and a congressional aide.

Theresa Hitchens, former editor of Defense News, is leaving the gently liberal (and officially nonpartisan) Center for Defense Information to take up a post with the United Nations. Hitchens will leave town in January to take up a post in Geneva, Switzerland as director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research. So when you see definitive UN research about weapons of mass destruction (nukes, chem/bio,) small arms, landmines, and space issues, that will be Theresa’s doing.

In what may be his last major policy speech before the next administration takes power, Defense Secretary Robert Gates made a strong pitch today at a highly symbolic venue — the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — for a new generation of nuclear weapons.
Clearly worried that nuclear deterrence has been neglected as a strategic issue, [...]

The Air Force leadership, eager to restore balance and accountability, decided to move cyber command to Space Command and will create a major command (MACOM) focused on “nuclear and deterrence missions.”
“Our goal is a more stable Air Force, focused on our core missions, as a key member of the joint team,” Gen. Norton Schwartz [...]

In a wide-ranging speech, Defense Secretary Robert Gates pointed to the examples of MRAPs, the anti-IED effort and uparmored Humvees as proof that the current system really doesn’t do a very good job of anticipating needs for assymetric warfare or for counterinsurgencies. “When it comes to procurement, for the better part of five decades, the trend has gone towards lower numbers as technology gains made each system more capable. In recent years these platforms have grown ever more baroque, ever more costly, are taking longer to build, and are being fielded in ever dwindling quantities.”

Updated (1:28 p.m.) with some missile defense details. The 2009 defense authorization bill cleared most hurdles last night. There were a number of issues in need of resolution but the chairman and ranking members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees hammered out agreements and the bill is now “moving fast” said one congressional aide.

It should be cleared by the end of the week. Details on some likely compromises follow.

The Pentagon is rushing to wrap up the Nunn-McCurdy review of the Advanced Extremely High Frequency communications satellite by the end of the year.
They are rushing because the military hopes to issue a contract for another bird, the Transformational Satellite (T-Sat) about that time. Since the Nunn-McCurdy process requires the military consider whether there is [...]

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz delivered an hour-long address to the Air Force Association today that will probably be remembered as a landmark in the remaking of the service.

The most enduring comments for the service will probably be those addressing the issue of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in which Schwartz called for a shift from the fighter pilot-centric service to one that treats unmanned aircraft pilots with equal respect, “not as a leper community.”

Saying they were surprised by the extent of the “erosion” in the quality of the Air Force’s management of its nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War, a panel of greybeards led by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger wants Air Force Space Command folded into a new Air Force Strategic Command and urges a range of other measures to ensure airmen dealing with nukes “feel they are part of an important mission.”

You can almost hear Dirty Harry saying, “Go ahead. Make My Day.” That classic line captured the grudging respect some Americans have always felt for vigilante justice. The latest version would not involve guns but distributed denial of service attacks using hundreds or thousands of computers linked together. A network security expert has received emails proposing a cyber version of vigilante justice — thousands of computers linked together to strike back at those trying to cripple or destroy American computers.