Defense Secretary Robert Gates has swung the axe once more, this time aiming for the enormous personnel costs that have swelled since Sept. 11, 2001, eliminating Joint Forces Command, freezing the numbers of senior military and civilian positions, cutting contractor numbers and aiming to control the costs resulting from congressional and OSD reports. Gates’ goal, put simply, is to inculcate a “culture of savings and restraint” and forestall any efforts to strip the overall defense budget in these hard economic times.

The talk on Capitol Hill is that major interagency reform — a new look at the interagency legislation and executive orders undergirding US national security — may be the hottest and hardest to address of the recommendations of the independent QDR panel led by Bill Perry and Stephen Hadley. The panel called for a substantial revamp of the national security structure, saying it was created during the Cold War and was best suited to that era, not to today.They also called on Congress to fix its own house and reduce the overlapping jurisdictions that slow and complicate everyone’s ability to act.

“The aging of the inventories and equipment used by the services, the decline in the size of the Navy, escalating personnel entitlements, overhead and procurement costs, and the growing stress on the force means that a train wreck is coming in the areas of personnel, acquisition and force structure.” Those are the words of the independent panel mandated with reviewing the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review.

The Air Force has lifted the suspension on L-3 Communications’ Special Support Programs Division in an action that shows just how sensitive the government has become about email and how it is handled, especially by a company performing classified work. The Air Force has required that L-3’s CEO, Michael Strianese, sign a three-year agreement with the Air Force mandating that company officials and employees receive ethics training, apparently in reaction to the mishandling of emails during a company security review.

“You are not going to have 300 to 500 ships. You are not going to have thousands of fighters.” At the same time, America must try and reverse its course of the last decade, which was bringing us to the point where we would have one ship on each coast and one plane on each coast, and focus on quantity to help reverse that stark reality: “We need quantity more than we need that exquisiite capability.” There you have it straight from the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Hoss Cartwright, who pulled the curtain back a bit on what he and his boss have been ruminating about for most of May.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hoss Cartwright, ranks as one of the smartest players in the national security world and he rarely speaks in public. Even more rarely does he speak in public about one of the most essential elements of his job — strategy. The Center for Strategic and International Studies are broadcasting a talk by Cartwright tomorrow as well as a host of a host of provocative panels. We’ll be covering his remarks, as well as those of some of the others speaking during the conference. Click for the link to Cartwright’s and the other broadcasts.

Defense budgets are not declining and will remain stable through 2015. Defense spending will remain at about 21 percent of total federal outlays, or around 4.7 percent of GDP, according to an analysis of the 2011 defense budget by business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. But, in a big change to business as usual, the defense budget will no longer be evenly divided between the three services as it has for around the past forty years; the ground forces will be the big winners in future years and the Army’s slice of the budget pie will grow.

The Pentagon’s top weapons buyer said industry and taxpayers should expect more independent cost scrubs like the one recently done on the Joint Strike Fighter. Ash Carter made it clear there is more blood to be squeezed from the acquisition stone at a lunch put on by the National Aeronautics Association. “There are too many programs that resemble the Joint Strike Fighter in the sense that they are not performing the way we expect them to,” he said. Carter declined to name any programs, but he said he’s got lots to choose from.

Black-Cyber-Operations have become all too common, launching highly sophisticated cyber actions against their targets that go undetected for months or years. Russia began developing black-cyber-ops teams as far back as the early 1990s. But Russia is not the only military with these capabilities. A Chinese black-ops team is credited with the design and execution of the “Titan Rain” initiative that long went unchecked and undetected deep inside the U.S. Department of Defense networks.

In a recent government survey of more than 100,000 people across the U.S., 40 percent reported no broadband or high-​​speed access to the Internet, while 30 percent said they have no Internet access at all. Satellite broadband delivery is seen to be a quick and economical solution to this problem.

Run for the hills! The Justice Department’s lawyers are trying to figure out just what would constitute an act of war during a cyber attack. OK, it may not be that bad, but the specter of a room full of government lawyers trying to decide what constitutes an act of war when it occurs via the Internet is not terribly reassuring. To be fair, no one has come up with a decent answer to what turns out to be a very thorny question.

Reviews of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review are pouring in from Washington’s defense cognoscenti and so far they come with a strong tilt towards disappointed. The lack of any real news or major program or policy shifts has led a number of defense wonks to question the value of the whole QDR process.

It is official. The two major theater war strategy — blueprint for American power for almost a quarter century — is no more. In the long run, that is likely to be the most significant change outlined by the Quadrennial Defense Review. This QDR acknowledges the need for a robust force capable of protecting U.S. interests against a multiplicity of threats. But it is “no longer appropriate to speak of major regional conflicts as the sole or even the primary template for sizing, shaping and evaluating US forces.”

The Pentagon has “dodged the bullet” in the fiscal 2011 budget but will almost certainly face demands for cuts next year. That was the fundamental assessment of strategy and budget experts at the respected Center for Strategy and Budgetary Assessments, a thinktank and consulting shop on which senior military leaders often rely. “I can tell you there is no way the defense budget will be immune to budget reduction efforts,” Stan Collender, one of Washington’s most respected budget wallahs, said at CSBA’s annual budget briefing.

Capitol Republicans have been banging heads over the last few weeks, trying to figure out how to counter the expected results of the soon-to-be-released Quadrennial Defense Review. The greatest challenge for the Republicans is simple: Robert Gates, who has drawn the mantle of this QDR tight about his shoulders, stands behind the decisions arrived at during the QDR and he was appointed by a Republican. His national security credentials are impeccable and no one can accuse him of being weak on national defense or a misguided Democrat.

The Army has released the final version of its Capstone Concept, shifting the service’s big ideas from preparing to fight mechanized battles on open battlefields to waging complex wars amongst the people against a hybrid mixture of adversaries. The new pub pushes the idea of “operational adaptability,” demanding intellectually agile soldiers who can rapidly adapt to complexity and a shifting and shadowy enemy.

The head of Air Force ISR — the guy who oversees Predator training and equipping — says that the Predator data that was broadcast in the clear and intercepted by bad guys in Iraq did not have “significant impacts” on US operations. That’s what Lt Gen. David Deptula said. “Nothing is compromised. I want to get information out to the joint forces on the ground, you follow me? If someone does pick [the video feed] up and they don’t know the context of how the information is being used, what’s the compromise?”

There were 28 lap­tops lost or stolen in the last four months and 66 in total since January 1, 2009. Looking back over the last 4 years there were 658 that van­ished. A major hunt is now on in London after a lap­top crammed with secret data was stolen from inside the Ministry of Defense (MoD) nerve cen­ter. FROM THEIR HEADQUARTERS!

The Army recently took a big step forward in its quest for the “holy grail” of battlefield network connectivity: providing satellite imagery, video feeds from aerial drones, text messaging and more robust communications to small networked teams on the move through rough terrain. The idea is to create a platoon or smaller unit computer “cloud” that can move with the soldier as they move, providing communications and connectivty between each other and higher headquarters even when dispersed.

Cyber insecurity has become such a seri­ous issue that President Obama recently ordered a thor­ough review and the devel­op­ment of a new approach to inter­na­tional cyber policies. One of the more sig­nif­i­cant actions resulting from this was the decision to begin talks between Russia and the United States. Back on 12 November, a Russian del­e­ga­tion led by Gen. Vladislav Sherstyuk, a deputy sec­re­tary of the Russian Security Council, flew to Washington for a meet­ing with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the U.S. National Security Council and the State Department, Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security.