President-elect Barack Obama wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp — but how? The Center for American Progress, the think tank run by John Podesta, Obama’s transition co-chair, held a panel this afternoon to discuss closing Guantanamo. The panel recommended a “hybrid” approach: release the prisoners who aren’t dangerous, and try the rest in U.S. courts. Obama hasn’t discussed how he will close the facility. But FedLine wonders how he will handle the complex logistics involved.
Browsing: Defense
If you’re one of the 187,000Â employees under the Defense Department’s performance-based pay system, figuring out how much your raise is going to be next year is sort of like doing your taxes — only worse. There’s no Turbo Tax equivalent for the National Security Personnel System. Luckily (we think), the helpful folks at the Pentagon have just come out with a fact sheet that attempts to bring clarity to the complex pay formula that’s used to determine raises.
While most people who aren’t former Nixon staffers or convicted Watergate criminals agree that Mark Felt did the right thing by talking to Bob Woodward, not all leaks are as cut and dry. Wired posted a blog entry yesterday that says someone has uploaded a classified report to Wikileaks on the military’s Warlock radio-frequency jammers, which soldiers use to cut off signals to remotely detonated bombs used by Iraqi insurgents. (The Wired blog has some profanity.) The four-year old report contains information on how the jammers work, such as what frequencies they stop. Though the models described in the report are…
Elise mentioned last week that procurement reform is a top priority for Defense secretary Robert Gates. Gates expands on that idea in a lengthy article on defense strategy in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs. He notes that “resources are not unlimited,” and argues that current procurement focuses on buying smaller amounts of more and more expensive military equipment. The Defense Department has to consider whether in situations in which the United States has total air dominance, it makes sense to employ lower-cost, lower-tech aircraft that can be employed in large quantities and used by U.S. partners. This is already…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates pledged to give more personal attention to procurement and acquisition challenges as he continues his work under the Obama administration. Here is what he had to say during a media briefing yesterday: I suppose it should go without saying, but I have no intention of being a caretaker secretary. Our challenges, from the budget to acquisition and procurement reform, war strategy, care of wounded warriors, meeting the needs of warfighters, decisions on important modernization and capitalization projects and more, all demand the personal attention of the secretary of Defense and they will get it. When asked…
The Air Force is looking to employ some live birds–falcons to be precise– to protect its metal ones, the Washington Post reported today. The enemy: other birds. Apparently, small birds, like songbirds, pigeons or Magpies, fly in the vicinity of U.S. military aircraft at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, posing a hazard that they’ll be ingested in the planes’ engines and disable them. The Post reports 125 “bird strikes” in the last year, up from 78 the year before. So far, other traditional means of bird control, such as firing shotguns, have not worked. If the military awards the contract,…
…is now $864 billion according to a Congressional Research Service report posted on the blog Secrecy News. That’s just a scant $164 billion more than the government is planning to spend to bailout Wall Street. To be fair, it did take the Defense Department 8 years to get to that level of spending. The CRS figure includes appropriations and supplementals made between fiscal years 2001 and 2009. Three-quarters of the war spending, about $657 billion, funded the war in Iraq. Another fifth, $173 billion, went to the war in Afghanistan. And $28 billion enhanced security at military bases. But what…
It’s Halloween on Friday and as if on cue the Defense Department has released a new acquisition regulation about the use of humans in research contracts. Maybe it’s just me, but government and human testing sounds like the makings of a horror flick or thriller. OK, so the rule is probably not that scary. In fact, the rule is aimed at enhancing protections for human guinea pigs by ensuring contracts contain a clause mandating researchers to follow a stringent set of human research rules, such as obtaining informed consent from participants and receiving approval from a review board. For the curious…