Defense Department

  • Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey discuss the Navy Yard shooting. Hagel says he's employing a broad communication strategy and conducting multiple security reviews.

    September 18, 2013
  • Key senators on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee are seeking answers into how the contractor employee responsible for the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard that killed 12 people obtained his security clearance. In a Sept. 18 letter, Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.), requested the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general look into what type of clearance the shooter, identified as 34-year-old Aaron Alexis, held as well as what federal agency conducted his background investigation.

    September 18, 2013
  • New legislation introduced by Sens. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) pushes the Pentagon toward being ready for a full financial audit by restricting spending on major weapons programs if DoD fails to get its books in order.

    September 18, 2013
  • Senior uniformed Air Force leaders have agreed it's time to give more authority to the service's chief information officer. The CIO is drafting plans that will give it more say-so over planning the overall IT environment and the dollars targeted toward individual projects.

    September 18, 2013
  • In the wake of the shooting in which 12 civilian and contract employees were gunned down at the Washington Navy Yard Monday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a review of security procedures at all Defense Department bases worldwide.

    September 17, 2013
  • A profile is emerging of Aaron Alexis, the man identified as the lone gunman in the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., that left 13 people dead Monday, including the shooter himself. Alexis was a former Navy reservist, a Defense Department contractor, a convert to Buddhism and a student of aeronautics. But he also had flashes of temper that led to run-ins with police in Fort Worth, Texas, and Seattle.

    September 17, 2013
  • The Federal Bureau of Investigation said that 34-year-old Aaron Alexis used a valid pass to enter the Navy Yard premises Monday. Alexis worked for The Experts, a subcontractor on an HP Enterprise Services contract to refresh equipment used on the Navy Marine Corps Intranet network. He was able to obtain a valid pass to the Navy Yard through his work as a contractor.

    September 17, 2013
  • Military services and agencies have 120 days to draft strategies for shutting down their own email systems and migrating to DISA's enterprise email offering. The DoD CIO ordered the move to begin no later than the first quarter of 2015.

    September 13, 2013
  • The Center for Strategic and International Studies examines DoD's operational energy for the upcoming decade as military branches restructure and draw down in the Middle East.

    September 11, 2013
  • If confirmed by the Senate, Beth Cobert would become the DDM and lead the second term management agenda. Obama nominated deputy secretaries at VA and Education, and senior officials at the Navy and State.

    September 10, 2013
  • Federal Drive's Tom Temin lives a life-long dream as he soars above the Maryland countryside in a B-17 bomber. The aircraft, operated by the Liberty Foundation, is one of the few such bombers still flying.

    September 05, 2013
  • Like everything else, the Pentagon expects to cut procurement and research spending under a second year of sequestration. But DoD's acquisition chief said modernization programs will be a bill-payer for other areas of spending that are harder to reduce quickly.

    September 05, 2013
  • On this week's edition of Agency of the Month, Navy Rear Admiral Sean Buck, director of the 21st Century Sailor Office, joins host Sean McCalley to discuss the prevention of sexual assaults and suicides within the Defense Department.

    September 04, 2013
  • The Defense Information Systems Agency believes it can save the military services big bucks on data storage, processing and communications by becoming a one-stop-shop for IT in the continental U.S. Under a new Pentagon plan, it's the military's only provider for large data centers.

    September 04, 2013
  • The Army says it has more next-generation network capacity than it needs, and the Air Force has the opposite problem. A new agreement to share infrastructure will save the Air Force more than $1 billion.

    September 03, 2013