Quote:
A Mujahadeen guard walks with U.S. military members of the Afghanistan Panjshir Provincial Reconstruction Team during a site visit March 5, in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. (Photo by Staff Sgt. James L. Harper Jr : U.S. Air Forces Central Public Affairs)
Leading newspaper headlines ~ Defense proposed budget announcement, bird strike increases, earthquake in Italy.
Marine News ~ CNN report of CMC visit to Afghanistan http://192.156.19.109/marinelink/videoview.nsf/7fc6a7d8e309d4e085256959005c981c/B5C1AA57B894AD17852575900079B230/$file/CNN_04-06-2009_16.30.10%20General%20Conway%20in%20Afghanistan.wmv
Early Bird ~ Focus on press reaction to Budget proposal. Some headlines:
1. Gates Seeks Sharp Turn In Spending(Washington Post)...Greg Jaffe and Shailagh MurrayDefense Secretary Robert M. Gates outlined sweeping changes to the defense budget Monday that would shift hundreds of billions of dollars in Pentagon spending away from elaborate weapons toward programs more likely to benefit troops in today's wars.
2. Military Budget Reflects A Shift In U.S. Strategy(New York Times)...Elisabeth Bumiller and Christopher DrewDefense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced a major reshaping of the Pentagon budget on Monday, with deep cuts in many traditional weapons systems but new billions of dollars for others, along with more troops and new technology to fight the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. Pentagon Pushes Weapon Cuts(Wall Street Journal)...August Cole and Yochi J. Dreazen...Mr. Gates proposed boosting certain programs, including Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 Lightning fighter jet, as well as a variety of unmanned aerial vehicles.
4. Gates Proposal Reveals His Alienation From Procurement System(Washington Post)...R. Jeffrey Smith...The results were not perfect -- an inspector general's report said later that in its rush, the department overspent by tens of millions of dollars -- but they were effective: Thousands of additional MRAPs flooded into Iraq and fatality rates dropped precipitously. Aides say that the experience was like a baptism for Gates into the weirdness of the Pentagon's weapons-procurement system, which experts have long assailed for buying the wrong arms and paying far too much.
5. Contracting Boom Could Fizzle Out(Washington Post)...Dana HedgpethThe recent surge in the Washington area's defense-contracting workforce would begin to ebb under Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates's latest budget proposal as the Pentagon moves to replace legions of private workers with full-time civil servants.
6. Aerospace Giant 'Hit Harder' Than Peers(Seattle Times)...Dominic GatesBig defense cuts proposed Monday by the Pentagon delivered a budgetary airstrike to Boeing's defense division, which employs almost 9,000 people in the Puget Sound region.
U.S. Marines offload a Light Armored Vehicle from a Landing Craft Air Cushion, launched from the USS Boxer, during an amphibious landing exercise on a beach near Camp Lemonier, Djibouti, April 1, 2009.U.S. Air Force Photo by Staff Sgt. Joseph L. Swafford Jr.
NSPS - Pay-for-performance, the personnel system President George W. Bush advanced in an effort to replace the traditional General Schedule wage scale, has come under tough scrutiny by federal employee unions and their allies on Capitol Hill. The assaults often have been agency-specific -- the Pentagon's National Security Personnel System, for example, was the subject of a congressional hearing last week. But now, eight chairmen and subcommittee chairmen in the House have upped the ante and urged the Obama administration to suspend any further implementation -- government-wide -- of pay-for-performance.
Leading newspaper headlines ~ The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal's world-wide newsbox lead with Defense Secretary Robert Gates announcing major changes to the Pentagon budget that would shift the military's focus away from big, expensive weapons systems so it can dedicate more resources toward fighting irregular or guerilla wars. The budget clocks in at $534 billion, a 4 percent increase from last year, but involves so many cuts to some of the Pentagon's best-known weapons programs that a big political fight seems almost inevitable.
The Los Angeles Times leads with the powerful earthquake that hit central Italy yesterday and killed at least 150 people. The historical town of L'Aquila was near the quake's epicenter, and many of its landmarks, including centuries-old churches and buildings, were damaged or destroyed.
USA Today leads with data from the Federal Aviation Administration that show there's been an increase in the number of aircraft that hit large birds. From an average of 323 such collisions in the 1990s, the number increased to 524 per year from 2000 to 2007. Proportionally, the numbers are quite small. In 2007, for example, out of 58 million flights there were 550 instances of airplanes hitting large birds, and only 190 of them caused damage. But the government data only contain a fraction of total collisions since reporting the incidents is voluntary.
The LAT says the budget outlined by Gates yesterday involves the "most sweeping changes in defense spending priorities in decades." Gates said his goal was to change the "priorities of America's defense establishment" by taking money away from weapons that he described as "truly in the exquisite category" while putting more resources into ones that may not exactly be cutting edge, such as unmanned drones, but are more appropriate toward fighting unconventional battles in places like Afghanistan. Gates would spend more money on intelligence and surveillance programs while making deep cuts to the U.S. missile defense programs and the Army's Future Combat Systems. The cuts would be felt in a variety of military branches. For example, Gates recommended that production should end on the Air Force's F-22 fighter jets, the C-17 cargo plane, and the Navy's new generation of stealth destroyers.
Gates said he's "just trying to get the irregular guys to have a seat at the table." Indeed, despite the tone of the coverage, it's not as if the Pentagon is suddenly ending all preparations for a conventional war. The LAT helpfully specifies that under Gates' plan, 50 percent of the budget would be used to prepare against conventional threats, while 10 percent would go to irregular warfare, and 40 percent to weapons that could be used in both scenarios.
The NYT points out that previous defense secretaries have been prevented from implementing widespread changes by members of Congress who don't want their constituents to lose jobs. "My hope is that members of Congress will rise above parochial interests and consider what is in the best interest of the nation as a whole," Gates said. Although the WP says that the response from Capitol Hill was "restrained" yesterday, there was still some criticism from key lawmakers.
Besides the specific cuts, Gates made it clear that part of his goal is to overhaul "a procurement process that he and congressional leaders have decried as being too heavily influenced by powerful contractors," as the WSJ puts it. In a separate front-page piece, the WP points out that the budget would "reverse a contracting boom" that began after the Sept. 11 attacks, as Gates wants to replace private contractors with full-time civil servants. "The reduction of nearly one-third of the contractor workforce at the Pentagon is going to be a mortal blow to companies that have built their businesses through outsourcing," a defense consultant tells the WP.
Nobody fronts news out of Baghdad, where six car bombs exploded in Shiite neighborhoods yesterday and killed more than 30 people. The WP notes that the "breadth and coordination" of the attacks "bore the hallmarks of a campaign of violence reminiscent of those mounted during Baghdad's bloodiest days in 2006 and 2007." And the LAT points out that the attacks "recalled Baghdad's dark period … when bombings claimed dozens of lives on any given day."
USAT reports that military researchers used live pigs to study the connection between roadside bombs and brain injury. During an 11-month study, the researchers put body armor on the pigs, strapped them to Humvee simulators, and blew them up. The research helped the military determine that body armor doesn't make brain injuries worse and is, in fact, critical to surviving explosions.
The LAT takes a look at how hip-hop has quickly become popular in the Middle East as "the vernacular of American rap music and street culture has infiltrated the lives of young people." Although they cite famous American artists, such as Eminem and the late Tupac Shakur, as influences, the lyrics in Middle East rap often have more to do with everyday hardships than sex and money. Palestinians, for example, often rap about life in refugee camps. "It is the rap not of the gangsta and his trove of drugs and half-naked women," notes the LAT, "but of brash young men whose defiance coexists with tradition."
http://www.slate.com/id/2215585/
Washington PostApril 7, 2009 Pg. 21
Federal Diary
A Wide Assault On Pay-For-Performance
By Joe Davidson
Pay-for-performance, the personnel system President George W. Bush advanced in an effort to replace the traditional General Schedule wage scale, has come under tough scrutiny by federal employee unions and their allies on Capitol Hill.
The assaults often have been agency-specific -- the Pentagon's National Security Personnel System, for example, was the subject of a congressional hearing last week.
But now, eight chairmen and subcommittee chairmen in the House have upped the ante and urged the Obama administration to suspend any further implementation -- government-wide -- of pay-for-performance.
The chairmen, all Democrats, questioned the justification for such programs in a Friday letter to Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
"Proponents of pay-for-performance have argued that such systems are necessary to compete with the private sector for talent," they wrote. But they added that federal law already provides agencies with the personnel tools needed to compete with industry, "while retaining the fairness and transparency of the merit-based civil service system. A well-designed performance management system can recognize and reward high performance without a linkage to compensation."
Pay-for-performance has been repeatedly attacked by most federal employee unions, and they have pushed President Obama to kill it. Many workers do not trust its evaluation process, even though those under the Pentagon's NSPS have received higher-percentage pay increases than other workers.
Last month, the Pentagon announced that it would halt conversion of additional workers into NSPS pending a top-to-bottom review of the program. A few days later, Reps. Silvestre Reyes (D-Tex.) and Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), the chairmen of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Armed Services Committee, respectively, asked the secretary of defense and the director of national intelligence to suspend implementation of the similar Defense Civilian Intelligence Personnel System and include it in the NSPS review.
Rather than being an introduction to a death notice, a review might prove the worth of pay-for-performance programs, some of which are "workable and working in a number of places," said Jonathan D. Breul, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. A review could show there are "cases where it has actually been done rather successfully."
He noted that although pay-for-performance was pushed at big departments such as Defense and Homeland Security during the Bush administration, the first demonstration project began in 1980.
The chairmen's letter urged Orszag "to put on hold further advancement of any pay-for-performance measures in the federal government and conduct a government-wide review to determine the best way forward to improve performance management while preserving merit principles."
Ronald Sanders, the intelligence community's chief human capital officer, said that Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates are considering a similar review for the National Intelligence Civilian Compensation Program. It provides a common framework for pay-for-performance systems in the nation's spy agencies, while allowing each to create agency-specific personnel practices.
"The decision to pause and study is pending," Sanders said.
The letter cited a Government Accountability Office study that reported on employee distrust with pay-for-performance, based on the fear that it will depress wages over the long term.
"Employees have complained about discriminatory pay practices in federal organizations that have moved to these types of systems," the letter says. "The discretion given to managers to set performance metrics and to pay employees accordingly means these systems lack transparency and accountability and could pose a disparate impact on minorities."
Reyes and Skelton signed the letter, along with Reps. Edolphus Towns (N.Y.), Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman; Bennie Thompson (Miss.), Homeland Security Committee chairman; Stephen F. Lynch (Mass.), federal workforce, postal service and District of Columbia subcommittee chairman; Solomon P. Ortiz (Tex.), readiness subcommittee chairman; Chris Carney (Pa.), management, investigations and oversight subcommittee chairman; and Anna G. Eshoo (Calif.), intelligence community management subcommittee chairman.
The letter can be viewed here: http:www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/suspension_govt_pay_performance_systems.pdf.
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