Hubbard Radio Washington DC, LLC. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.
As Ashton Carter leaves the Pentagon as its deputy defense secretary, the long-time public servant criticizes the political divisiveness in Washington as being detrimental to the readiness of U.S. forces.
Defense Department Deputy Secretary Ashton Carter will retire in December, the Pentagon announced Thursday. Carter plans to leave DoD Dec. 4, according to a statement from Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
Former Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has a new job: Help the Defense Department cut its headquarters budget by $40 billion over the next 10 years and streamline the Pentagon's organizational structure. Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter revealed in internal guidance Monday that Donley, who stepped down from the Air Force in June, would lead the efficiencies review.
The Pentagon says no decisions have been made, but eliminating 2013 furloughs is at the top of the funding priority list if it can find any excess funds.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel says service members will have to share in the pain of sequestration if the automatic budget cuts continue into next year. In a Pentagon press briefing Wednesday, Hagel laid out a "menu of options" for dealing with sequestration in 2014 and beyond, including changes to military pay and benefits, consolidating headquarters staff and a potential modest reduction in military force structure.
The military's two top ranking officers said in a Senate confirmation hearing that the department has been working on the plan for the past two weeks and should complete it by October.
By July 1, the Pentagon will provide the Senate Armed Services Committee its plan for managing reduced fiscal 2014 budget levels, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said in a speech Wednesday. The committee had asked DoD to provide a list of spending reductions after the White House submitted a budget proposal for next fiscal year that simply ignored sequestration, ostensibly in the hope that the automatic budget cuts would be canceled or otherwise avoided in 2014.
Frank Kendall, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics; and Dr. Ash Carter, Deputy Secretary of Defense, recently gave an update on the agency's Better Buying initiative at an event held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
On the In Depth show blog, you can listen to our interviews, find more information about the guests on the show each day, as well as links to other stories and resources we discuss.
The Pentagon will begin tracking how much time its acquisition managers spend performing and responding to oversight in an effort to remove "non-value-added" processes from the procurement system.
Pentagon says it will use its limited budget flexibility to compensate for unexpected war costs, not to blunt sequestration. Services continue to warn Congress about how budget cuts are impacting readiness.
Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter discussed the budget challenges facing the Defense Department and how Pentagon leaders plan to manage through the "era of fiscal uncertainty" in a speech at the National Press Club May 7. Francis played highlights from Carter's speech on Pentagon Solutions.
The Pentagon's acquisition chief said he's planning day-to-day, not year-to-year because of sequestration's indiscriminate cuts and political uncertainty over DoD's budget. In 2014, there will be more opportunities to prioritize, but spending reductions also will lead to cancellation of contracts and downsizing of the military and civilian workforce.
With sequestration now in effect, the Defense Department says it will have to begin to make decisions that cross the threshold between "reversible" cuts to military capability and those that will have long-lasting impacts.