Washington Pulse

Sponsors

Washington pulse

October 2007

By Grace Jean, Stew Magnuson and Breanne Wagner

No matter how many billions of dollars the Pentagon ends up spending on mine-resistant armored vehicles, U.S. troops in Iraq will remain at risk because the enemy eventually will figure out how to defeat the armor, said Gen. William Wallace, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command.

“All he [the enemy] has to do is add a little bit more explosive weight to the IED and he can probably begin to counter some of our advanced protective systems like the MRAP [mine resistant ambush protected vehicle] in the not too distant future. And it would be foolhardy for us not to expect that to happen,” Wallace told scientists at a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency conference.

Predator Pilots Needed for Homeland Duties

Customs and Border Protection officials are clamoring for additional Predator drones to help in immigration enforcement and drug interdiction duties. But they may have to wait for a long time. The Department of Homeland Security is buying lots of Predators, but it cannot get enough qualified operators.

“We’re short on people to come fly these things,” says Michael Kostelnik, assistant commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection air and marine division. “Finding pilots is our biggest shortcoming.”

The agency has turned to the Air National Guard for help. But Guard operators are already stretched thin by commitments to support the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Pilot training has been slow because of limited space at schoolhouses.

Kostelnik said he was confident that the North Dakota Air Guard could begin to fly CBP missions in the spring. But that is not going to happen, said Guard spokeswoman Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke. “There are no plans to support CBP with unmanned air systems manpower or equipment from the Air National Guard.”

Defense ‘Acquisition’ Not What It Used to Be

There’s been no shortage of members of Congress fretting about the wasteful ways of defense contracting. “Everyone is trying to fix the acquisition system,” laments one industry insider. Maybe not everything in defense procurement needs fixing, but there is one area that lawmakers will watch closely — the striking rise in the share of defense dollars that goes into “professional services.” Last year, more than half of the Pentagon’s $300 billion worth of contracts went to services, not hardware. So the industry is following the money. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the number of firms in the professional services industry soared by 115 percent to 96,000 during the past five years.

Export Control Experts Wanted at the Pentagon

Before leaving office this summer, former defense acquisition chief Kenneth Krieg approved the launch of a new career track at the Pentagon for those who want to specialize in international export controls.

The move is one of many efforts the Pentagon is pursuing to better manage the export license requests from foreign countries that want to buy U.S. weapons, said Al Volkman, director of international cooperation at the office of the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. These requests now take weeks or months to be processed by the Defense and the State Departments, Volkman said. The Pentagon approval process is laborious. Four committees make export control decisions and they have trouble sharing information, he noted. Another challenge is educating program managers about the export control process, Volkman said, “because they didn’t learn it at the Defense Acquisition University.”

More Foreign Scientists Shun the United States

Foreign-born scientists and engineers comprise a large portion of the defense workforce in the United States, but they are beginning to turn to other countries for jobs, said Jacques Gansler, former undersecretary of defense for acquisition. For the first time, more Chinese scientists and engineers are going to the United Kingdom than to the United States, he said. When given a choice, they try to stay away from the United States, where there is added scrutiny and surveillance of foreign workers, said Gansler. While this is certainly a politically and culturally difficult issue, he noted, the Defense Department is nevertheless “facing a serious crisis,” because it may not be able to benefit from foreign talent in the long term.

Please email your comments to SErwin@ndia.org