For American drivers, $4-a-gallon gasoline is painful: It bites deeply into household incomes at a time when millions of people are stretched to a breaking point. But for the U.S. military, the cost of fuel is a magnitude greater--and a matter of life or death. Fuel shipments account for the majority of the supplies trucked through Afghanistan, and militants attack the convoys almost daily. At least one member of the armed forces is killed for every 24 fuel convoys that snake their way along Afghanistan's dangerous roads; hundreds of troops and contractors have died protecting the trucks. All of that ramps up the cost of a gallon of military gasoline to stratospheric levels. Gen. James Conway, the former Marine Corps commandant, estimated in 2009 that gas sometimes cost his forces $400 a gallon once all of the expenses were taken into account.
Because of the military's vast energy needs, senior Defense officials say that reducing those costs is a national-security imperative. On its own, the U.S. military is the single largest industrial consumer of oil in the world. It requires approximately 125 million barrels annually--more oil than 85 percent of the world's nations consume. Every ...
By
Aliya Sternstein
//
May 27, 2011
For half a decade, the Homeland Security Department did not collect cost-justification information for invoices from contractor Boeing Co., before paying the company for services rendered on a $1 billion failed, virtual border fence, federal auditors concluded.
DHS envisioned the Secure Border Initiative Network as a surveillance system comprised of interconnected towers, intelligence databases and communications equipment that would scan the southwest border for illegal activity. But much of the technology, including cameras, proved unreliable in the harsh desert climate. In January, after a yearlong review, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano canceled construction of the system beyond a 53-mile segment already deployed.
Now Government Accountability Office auditors are reporting that Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection did not require Boeing to submit invoices with enough data to substantiate costs. The billing statements did not contain supporting details beyond a list of itemized costs, including direct labor, direct materials, major subcontracts, other direct costs, overtime premium, overhead, travel, and general and administrative expenses.
On one invoice, for instance, the company did not provide the travel dates and destinations, so contracting officials had no way of knowing if the lump sum of $108,148.57 Boeing charged for travel between Sept ...
Primoris Era, after being under investigation by the Defense Department, is back on Twitter and the Internet at large.
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By
Bob Brewin
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May 20, 2011
Initial tests of a controversial cellular broadband network planned by LightSquared showed the company's system knocked out Global Positioning System receivers used by first responders.
LightSquared of Reston, Va., tested its system last month at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., with the participation of state police vehicles and county ambulances, both of which experienced outages from the company's cell tower, according to Bill Range, director of the State of New Mexico E911 program.
LightSquared cell system operates in the 1525-1559 MHz and 1626.5-1660.5 MHz bands, and the Federal Communications Commission directed the tests to determine if the network interfered with GPS systems that operate in the nearby 1559-1610 MHz bands.
Range, in a May 11 letter to Col. Bernard Gruber, director of the Air Force Global Positioning Directorate, said the results of the April tests, "substantiate concerns that the LightSquared network will cause interference to GPS signals and jeopardize 911 and public safety nationwide."
The New Mexico State Police reported that when parked directly under the tower, their GPS equipment experienced "system failure," and while driving around near the test site in Alamogordo, N.M., they "continued to incorrect during the test period."
GPS receivers ...
By
Aliya Sternstein
//
May 19, 2011
An Interior Department payroll processing center that provides services to several agencies unintentionally exposed the full names and Social Security numbers of nearly 4,000 Securities and Exchange Commission employees earlier this month, according to Interior officials.
On May 4, a customer support contractor inadvertently replied to a routine question from an SEC employee in an unprotected email format, and a device that was supposed to block outbound emails containing personal information failed to catch the error. A second detection system immediately notified the center's staff about the problem, however, Interior spokesman Drew Malcomb said.
Officials have no indication any information was intercepted by intruders during the approximately 60 seconds the data was in transit. Nor was sensitive information from other agencies or employees affected by the lapse at Interior's National Business Center, a shared services facility that handles administrative work for the Transportation and Defense departments, among others.
The employee responsible is now barred from dealing with personal data. Interior has launched an investigation into the matter and will hold accountable workers who were at fault, Malcomb said.
In addition, all outgoing files with sensitive information now must be approved for release by federal supervisors before they ...
The Defense Department is soliciting technologies that could help field medics retrieve information more quickly.
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By
Bob Brewin
//
May 13, 2011
Correction: This story has been corrected to more accurately describe the GD300.
The U.S. Special Operations Command is shopping for radios that can hook into Android smartphones and tactical cellular networks to transmit broadband data for a next-generation communications system.
In a request to industry earlier this month, SOCOM said it is looking to acquire a nondevelopmental radio for team members with a range of just over a mile. Requirements include the capacity to plug-and-play with Android devices through a USB or serial port and also to run on either a Windows or Android operating system.
SOCOM said it wants a radio that can transmit voice and data at the same time and comes equipped with both commercial and GPS receivers. The equipment also must be capable of running military applications, specifically applications like the Tactical Ground Reporting system, a map-based tool developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and now widely used by the Army in Afghanistan.
In a related request for information in late April, SOCOM asked industry to participate in developing Special Operations Wireless Connectivity Capability systems based on commercial cellular third- and fourth-generation broadband data standards.
The command said it wants to demonstrate the ...
By
Joseph Marks
//
May 13, 2011
Correction:This story has been corrected to reflect the accurate cost of hosting a foreign exchange student in the United States.
It takes about $20,000 to fund a single foreign exchange student for a three-week stay at a high school in the United States, but for roughly $1,000, one State Department program brought together a dozen U.S. and Egyptian architecture students for a three-month project.
The joint project, which took place in the virtual world Second Life, was aimed at figuring out what to do with several miles of underused desert real estate between the outskirts of Cairo and the pyramids of Giza.
The architecture students from Ain Shams University in Cairo and the University of Southern California began by debating appropriate land use and building designs, but ended with solid friendships that played out on Facebook and elsewhere on the Web and ultimately in transatlantic visits, according to William May, director of the State Department's Office of Innovative Engagement.
The Cairo 2 Kansas project, named for a line in President Obama's landmark 2009 address to the Muslim world, not only struck a low-cost blow for intercultural understanding, May said, but it also opened up ...
A lawmaker in upstate New York is looking to get a Defense center for nanotechnology for the Albany region.
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By
Aliya Sternstein
//
May 12, 2011
Obama administration officials rejected an intelligence authorization bill set for a House vote Thursday, saying it undercuts funding and demands that the director of national intelligence roll out an insider threat detection system by an unreasonable deadline.
The technology, intended to prevent classified information disclosure on the scale of the WikiLeaks breach, would have to be partially operational by October 2012 and fully deployed by October 2013.
A statement of administrative policy that objects to the legislation, H.R. 754, reads, "The administration is concerned with the unrealistic timelines required by this provision for the program's operational readiness, and strongly requests that the provision be amended to grant the DNI flexibility in implementation timelines of the program."
Upon releasing the statement Wednesday, White House officials did not dispute that such equipment is necessary: "The administration wholeheartedly agrees with the need to be vigilant and proactive in trying to detect, mitigate and deter insider threats, and supports a comprehensive insider threat detection capability. The administration is currently working toward its implementation."
The appearance of a digital trove of sensitive military and foreign affairs documents on the anti-secrecy WikiLeaks website over the past year has renewed a debate over information sharing ...
