Recently, the House passed the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act with several amendments. While there are many victories, three huge amendments stand out. Mike Hayden, director of the Military Officers Association of America Department and a retired Air Force colonel, talks about the highlights of the defense bill.

Just last fall, we were talking about the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab. Information Week described its capacity as all 7 billion people on Earth each performing 3 million calculations a second. That triumph didn’t last long. The Chinese have a computer twice as fast. Jack Dongarra, a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, has seen it, In this race, he says, advantage Chinese.

Who says the Senate, House and White House never agree? They’ve all come up with just about equal plans for the 2014 Defense budget. But there’s something weird about the proposed spending levels. Tom spoke to Todd Harrison, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment. Harrison explains what stands out in the House version of the Defense Authorization bill.

The Navy is awarding a multi-billion-dollar contract to a team led by Hewlett Packer to modernize its IT network. Federal News Radio’s DoD reporter Jared Serbu has the details on the Next Generation Enterprise Network.

When the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act this week, it paved the way for the military to offer same-sex married couples a slew of employee benefits that had been out of reach. The Pentagon says it will take six to 12 weeks to issue ID cards. After that, same-sex spouses should get access to healthcare, survivor benefits, on-base housing and a lot more.

Whoever thinks federal bureaucrats just sit at cubes and wear dull suits never met Dan Madrzykowski. This National Institute of Standards and Technology engineer has spent much of his career burning down buildings. His findings have led to major advances in firefighting.

View a gallery of Madrzykowski and his fellow 2013 Service to America Medal finalists here.

What’s more likely to kill you: heroin? Cocaine? Or perfectly legal painkillers? Experts say prescription-drug abuse has become an epidemic. Tens of thousands of people die every year from overdoses. But the federal government is working hard to bring the problem under control. Much of the responsibility falls to the Food and Drug Administration.