If you’re among the millions of Americans who were affected by the OPM data breach and are upset about the government’s slow approach to disseminating information about what actually happened, you should keep your ear on any public speeches by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, who seems to have a habit of going off-message.

Just to be clear, I say that with appreciation, not disdain.

A couple months back, he attributed the intrusion to the Chinese government – the first U.S. official to do so in a public setting until then or since then (though, upon further questioning by a moderator, he downgraded that attribution to say that Beijing was just the ‘leading suspect.’)

Then there was this bit of news on Thursday: (more…)

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work has already made it clear on numerous occasions that he thinks there are significant savings to be wrung from Pentagon back-office operations. But his latest initiative appears to be directly targeted at reducing headcount and addressing the perceived problem of too many supervisors and organizations managing too few front-line workers.

In a July 24 memo titled “Implementation of Institutional Reform Opportunities,” Work tasked DoD’s deputy chief management officer, Peter Levine, to come up with a “delayering” strategy for all of the organizations that fall within the sprawling Office of the Secretary of Defense, including the Defense agencies such as the Defense Information Systems Agency and Defense Logistics Agency and field activities like the DoD Education Activity and the Defense Technical Information Center.

Work told the DCMO’s office to come up with an implementation strategy for a “rationalized” Pentagon organizational chart after it conducts a thorough review of supervisors’ spans of control and the ratio of supervisors to rank-and-file employees. (more…)

The Senate packed a lot into its version of the 2016 Defense authorization bill before final passage Thursday afternoon. In a notable break from recent history, the full package passed well before the start of the new fiscal year. (Last year, readers will recall, the Senate didn’t get around to passing its own NDAA at all. It finally voted in December on a compromise package hammered out by the four leaders of the two Armed Services committees.)

Among the major provisions in this year’s bill is an overhaul of military retirement that’s mostly aligned with the version the House approved last month and with the recommendations of the Military Retirement and Compensation Modernization Commission. They would trim defined pensions in return for government contributions to members’ TSP accounts.

But the House and Senate are coming from slightly different places when it comes to acquisition reform. The House package is largely focused on streamlining processes and reducing paperwork. But the NDAA the Senate passed Thursday night, based on the work of the Senate Armed Services Committee, makes major changes to roles and responsibilities within DoD’s acquisition chain. (more…)

W e heard about several key personnel changes within the Defense Department this week, some of which the Pentagon has publicly announced, and some of which it hasn’t. To mention a few:

• Michael Vickers, the undersecretary for intelligence since March 2011, will retire at the end of next month. He is the third person to serve in the post since Congress first created it in 2003 as part of post-9/11 intelligence coordination reforms. The White House has not yet named a replacement.
• The official nomination is still pending, but the White House said last week that President Barack Obama plans to nominate Juan Garcia to serve as the assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs. Garcia has been the Navy Department’s top manpower and reserve official since 2009, so the Pentagon print shop will have to change only one word in his title when he gets his new business cards.
• Stephen Welby is President Obama’s pick to be the new assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. The post would seem to be fairly important given DoD’s recent emphasis on technology superiority, but it’s been vacant since November 2012. Since then, Al Shaffer, the principal deputy, has filled the role in an acting capacity. He and Welby have worked together in the office for years. Welby is currently the deputy assistant secretary for systems engineering; Shaffer’s focus, in addition to leading the office in an interim capacity, has been on the research side of the enterprise.
• Bill Marion, the chief technology officer at Air Force Space Command, will become the chief information officer for the Air Force’s personnel directorate (A1) at the Pentagon. The SES appointment is official as of Apr. 5, he told Federal News Radio.

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T he decisions the Army has made or proposed as part of its required drawdown from 570,000 active duty soldiers to 450,000 (and potentially 420,000) have caused a considerable degree of heartburn on Capitol Hill and strained relationships between the active and reserve components. So, at the end of last year, Congress ordered the Army to freeze some of those proposals and ordered up a new commission to study the Army’s future. We now know who will serve on that eight- member study panel.

The legislation gave four picks each to the President and Congress. On Wednesday, the White House named: (more…)

A s part of its “third offset” strategy — DoD’s near-and- long term effort to widen a narrowing technology gap between it and other potentially-belligerent militaries — the department says it needs a big focus on electronic warfare.

To that end, Bob Work, the deputy secretary of Defense, signed a memo last Tuesday creating a new electronic warfare programs council. It will be co-chaired by Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, logistics and technology, and Adm. Sandy Winnefeld, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its charge will be to examine all of the military services’ scattered investments in electronic warfare — an area DoD leaders think got short-shrift while the military’s been busy with low-tech adversaries — help coordinate their efforts and guide future programs.

“EW has often been regarded as just a combat enabler. Our adversaries don’t think so,” Work told the annual McAleese-Credit Suisse defense conference in Washington. “They believe it is an important part of their offensive and defensive arsenal. For relatively small investments in EW, you get an extremely high potential payoff, and our competitors are trying to win in that competition. We still have a lead, I think, but that lead is diminishing rapidly.” (more…)

F or years, the prospect of letting Defense Department employees conduct government business on their personal wireless devices has been a bit too nervous-making for the department to take a bring-your- own-device model seriously. That may be about to change, albeit slowly.

Terry Halvorsen, DoD’s chief information officer, told reporters last week that he plans to conduct a limited BYOD pilot this summer, while also making clear that for the vast majority of DoD users, policies surrounding personal devices aren’t going to change overnight, and for many of them, maybe never.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he said. “People need to do some homework on bring-your-own-device, where it’s working, and where it’s not. Lots of big enterprises are actually rescinding their BYOD policies. What I suspect will happen in DoD is because of our size and all the businesses we’re in, there will be places where it will work and a whole lot of places where it doesn’t. There are not going to be clean answers that say, ‘Yep, DoD is doing BYOD.’ I suspect at some point, particularly in things that are in more common business sets like retail and recreation, there will be some BYOD. In other cases, there won’t be.” (more…)

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama named his picks to fill two Senate-confirmed DoD positions that have been vacant for quite a while. If senators consent, Peter Levine would become the Pentagon’s deputy chief management officer, and John Conger would be the new principal deputy comptroller.

Levine is a longtime Capitol Hill staffer. Most recently, he served as the staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee under then-chairman Carl Levin, from 2013 until Levin retired in January. The Pentagon has been without a Senate- confirmed DCMO since November 2013, when Beth McGrath retired.

The office has been led since then by Dave Tillotson, who’s had a full plate recently co-leading an exhaustive review of the Pentagon’s IT spending and business processes alongside acting CIO Terry Halvorsen — a process we’re told should be wrapped up any day now.

Conger is already a familiar face within the Pentagon, but this would be his first Senate-confirmed position. He’s currently performing the duties of the assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and environment, a new job DoD created when it merged its operational energy and installations offices. He’s also been the Pentagon’s point man on all-things-BRAC for the last couple years, a responsibility I suspect he’s not sorry to leave behind.

Conger would replace Mike McCord as the principal deputy comptroller. McCord was promoted to comptroller when the Senate confirmed him last June, replacing Robert Hale.

Notwithstanding the progress in filling the posts mentioned above, there’s still an important one left empty. DoD has not had a permanent official for installations since 2012, when Dorothy Robyn left the Pentagon to head up GSA’s Public Buildings Service. By all accounts, Conger has filled the role admirably in an acting capacity since then, but now that he’s leaving and the office has been reshuffled, this would seem like a good time to name someone to the permanent post.

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It seems unlikely that Congress will go along with DoD’s latest request to close stateside military bases, but in the case of the Army, many of the bases lawmakers are protecting would become a lot more sparsely-populated if the Budget Control Act stays in full force.

Later this month, the Army will wrap up a listening tour it’s been conducting at bases around the country as it prepares to draw up plans for how it would allocate its forces under full sequestration, which would push its already-planned drawdown from 570,000 to 450,000 soldiers to a yet-smaller force of 420,000.

Katherine Hammack, the assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, told Congress in a hearing last week that preliminary estimates show some bases could lose as many as 15,000 personnel under such a scenario.

“We’re looking at 30 different bases right now that will be those that are most impacted, and we are going out and doing listening sessions to better understand the impacts to the community,” she told the House Appropriations Committee. “Impacts to the community are part of the evaluation. Military value is part of the evaluation. We take a look at everyone and everything.”

Hammack said the Army team would be making base-level recommendations to Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno and Secretary John McHugh in April or May, and will announce final decisions about where cuts would take place sometime in June.

“And let me reiterate: These are cuts directly in response to the Budget Control Act and sequestration,” she said.

Some of the analysis the Army is doing right now would be happening with or without sequestration in order to meet the 450,000 soldier target it’s already planned, but senior leaders ordered that the listening sessions and supplemental environmental assessments be consolidated into one fell swoop so they’d only have to go through the process once.

Without sequestration, the Army already plans to reduce its number of brigade combat teams from 45 to 32 by the end of this year and shrink to total size of 450,000 by the end of 2017.

Officials have not estimated how much excess capacity either of the final drawdown figures would leave on their bases, but even before the drawdown is completed, the Army estimates its current U.S. base footprint is between 12 and 28 percent underutilized, and that it’s spending roughly $480 million per year to maintain unused infrastructure.

One more takeaway from Kendall’s remarks to NDIA in this week’s notebook: This one has to do with a nascent move to give the military’s joint chiefs a larger role in procurement as part of the acquisition reform that’s expected to start taking shape on Capitol Hill this year.

No specific legislation’s been offered yet, but Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has already said he intends to insert language in this year’s defense authorization bill to let the chiefs participate in acquisition in a “much more meaningful fashion,” and several of the chiefs have expressed support for the idea.

Kendall says he supports that — up to a point, but that it’s easy to see how things could be taken too far.

“They should not be deeply engaged on how to structure a program, what kind of contract to use or what kind of risk mitigation to use. Because when they get engaged on those things, we have big problems,” Kendall said.

He offered a handful of historical examples, including the Army’s ill-fated Future Combat Systems, which spent $159 billion before it was canceled by former Secretary Robert Gates. Kendall worked on the program at the time for an outside contractor.

“One of the important reasons FCS ended the way it did was because of an arbitrary direction from a service chief about how long it would take us to get from milestone B to production,” Kendall said. “It was utterly, totally unrealistic, and it forced us to take huge risks in order to try to realize what he said we should do. We need to be careful about what we ask the service chiefs to do. They do not have expertise in technology or program management or testing. They don’t come from those communities, and we are a professional community.”

All that said, Kendall does want the chiefs to play a greater role in some areas. He told reporters after his NDIA speech that he’d like to see the joint chiefs do more to build the uniformed acquisition workforce and make sure people in those career fields have a fair chance to be promoted, make sure senior military officials are willing and able to adjust systems’ requirements as needs arise, and help their services as a whole maintain realistic acquisition budgets — none of which, it should be noted, would necessarily require legislation.

“I need to talk to the chiefs more about this, but I think there’s a perception that they’re excluded from acquisition more than they actually are. They don’t need a statutory change to be fully engaged,” he said. “I can’t recall when I’ve had a service chief come to an acquisition board meeting, but they’re certainly welcome to come in any time. I value their advice on their programs.”