Comptroller: Instability Affects Readiness, Civilian Workforce

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 18, 2013 - The Defense Department has assumed a substantial level of risk to military readiness and to its civilian workforce because of the long-term instability of its budget and the budget process, Pentagon Comptroller Robert F. Hale said here last week.

Speaking Nov. 14 at the Defense One Summit, the department's chief financial officer told interviewer Tom Shoop, editor in chief of Government Executive, that DOD had to cut $37 billion in 2012, $20 billion of that in its operating budget.

"Unfortunately, last year we also underestimated somewhat our wartime budget, so we faced a $30 billion shortfall in our operating budget with six months to go -- about 15 percent," he added. "And we did have to jam on the fiscal brakes."

DOD officials slashed facilities maintenance, froze hiring, laid off temporary and term workers and made major cuts in training and maintenance, Hale said, causing the Air Force to stop flying and the Army to stop training brigade combat teams.

"That has taken a toll," the comptroller said. "We clearly have degraded readiness in the military right now."

Hale told Shoop that he likens defense to an insurance policy.

"What we've done is greatly raise the deductible," Hale said of the 2011 Budget Control Act's severe budget cuts known as sequestration. "If you never have to make a claim, you won't notice it. [But] if you have to make a claim, if there's a major contingency operation, I think we'll regret what we've had to do in terms of military readiness."

Hale said he also worries about the civilian workforce, 650,000 of whom were furloughed for six days this summer without pay and then again during the government shutdown in October. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel arranged for many DOD civilians to return to work during the shutdown, and all employees eventually were paid for the work days they missed in October.

"I think low morale, which is clearly the case right now in our civilian workforce, is going to hurt productivity throughout our support activities," Hale said, "so I'm quite concerned about our civilians, and I'm hoping things stabilize so we can treat them the way we want to."

Hale said if the department has to do "more bad things" to the civilian workforce, he's concerned DOD could lose its best employees and might not be able to recruit the best.

"We haven't been recruiting all that much because of the hiring freeze, but that's going to change," he said. "And I don't know what will happen when we compete with private industry in an economy that's beginning to pep up a bit, so it's a worry. I think it's a worry to all of us."

Uncertainty is one of Hale's biggest challenges, he told Shoop.

"We're not only facing uncertainty on the fiscal 2015 budget, but we're facing uncertainty on the fiscal 2014 budget, and we're a month and a half into the fiscal year.

"At the moment we're looking at ranges, because we don't know where we're going to end up," Hale said. 

The difference between the president's budget level and the sequester level required by the Budget Control Act is about $50 billion in fiscal years 2015 and 2016, Hale said.

"We're trying to plan across that range," he added. "And we're taking a good guess at where we will end up in fiscal 2014, since it, too, could experience a range of ... at least plus or minus $20 billion or $25 billion. So [we have] enormous uncertainty -- I think unparalleled. I've been at this a while, and I don't ever remember a time when we faced as much uncertainty as we do at this moment."

So far in fiscal 2014, which began Oct. 1, the Defense Department and every other government agency are operating under a continuing resolution instead of a budget for the full fiscal year.

"Continuing resolutions are tough -- a kind of 'Groundhog Day' approach to budgeting when you can't figure out what to do, so you do the same thing this month you did last fiscal year," Hale said. "Essentially, we have elected to start executing at the continuing-resolution level, which is around $30 billion lower than our budget request, or even a bit below that because of the enormous uncertainty we face -- particularly for the operating accounts where you spend a twelfth of the money every month."

The comptroller said his department wanted to be at a lower level so they didn't have to face a situation in two or three months when they'd have to jam on the fiscal brakes as they had to do last year.

"We need some budgetary stability out of the Congress," he said. "I hope it comes about."

Director: DARPA Focuses on Technology for National Security

By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 15, 2013 - Projects undertaken by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency may have some immediate applications, but what program managers there really look to do is blow open new sets of opportunities from deep research, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said here yesterday.

Speaking to a large audience at the Defense One Summit and to viewers online, the electrical engineer with a doctorate in applied physics described DARPA-funded work underway to help the warfighter in information technology and brain function.

"Our focus is always breakthrough technologies for national security. We want to show that radically new things are going to be possible," Prabhakar told interviewer Barbara Starr of CNN.

"I also think this is a great example of much broader societal issues that come up when you're working at the forefront of these kinds of technologies," the director said, naming synthetic biology, new materials and privacy concerns related to "big data" as DARPA research topics deserving of public debate.

For the warfighter on the ground today, DARPA research in information technology is more about using the kinds of capabilities readily available in civilian apps and smartphones in the combat theater, Prabhakar said. When soldiers on patrol in Afghanistan are trying to understand the local environment, she noted, they do that largely with paper maps.

"Yes, we have a lot of information about what's going on," Prabhakar said, "but it's not down in the hands of the soldier."

In the last few years DARPA initiated a program called Transformative Apps that dealt with some of the hard security and other challenges of using Android smartphone technology in theater, Prabhakar said.

"What we did essentially," she explained, "was get these Android devices in the hands of soldiers who were going out on patrols every single day and gave them the ability to carry a lot of map data to know where they were, track what was going on in the local community, and share that information with each other."

But DARPA went further, the director added.

"We've now got that ability in theater, so soldiers come back and say, 'This really worked, I need this app. But what would be great would be this next capability.' And our developers are working with them in real time to develop those new apps, so our capability keeps growing," Prabhakar said.

Soldiers tell DARPA that what would be useful for the next generation of capabilities are things like getting records of what other foot patrols find as they do their work and combining that information into a data picture, she said.

"Or," Prabhakar imitates a soldier explaining his or her needs: 'I talked to this farmer, and I found out what crops he was growing and I want to be able to track that. But now I have information I know I can hand off to the next patrol that's coming in for the next period of time.' Those were the kinds of very pragmatic things that were extremely helpful once they got this basic tool," she explained.

At the other end of the research spectrum, for the warfighter on the ground tomorrow and beyond, DARPA is funding research that combines its work in prosthetics and its research into brain function.

"I think we're just at the beginning of a very long and interesting journey," Prabhakar said. "There has been such an interesting set of advances in neuroscience in the last few years, and DARPA has started putting some of those advances to work."

Some of the work is driven by DARPA program manager and physician Dr. Geoffrey Ling, an Army colonel who retired last year and who has been working for several years with DARPA on prosthetics for wounded veterans, the director said.

"Geoff returned from theater convinced that we had to find a way to advance prosthetics capabilities for our wounded veterans," Prabhakar explained. Ling was trained as a neurointerventionist, she added, a surgical specialty in which doctors treat conditions and diseases such as cerebral aneurysms, head and neck tumors and strokes.

"To him, the starting point was to understand the brain," she said. "He launched a program that did two different things we're now bringing together. One was to develop a very sophisticated prosthetic arm. The other was to do the animal work to understand where the signaling for motor control happens in the brain and how we can start using those signals to control the world around us."

Based on that work DARPA began human trials in the last year. One of the earliest patients was a longtime quadriplegic named Jan, Prabhakar said, describing how the woman volunteered to have a small array implanted on the surface of her brain.

At the conference, the director showed a video in which Jan, five months after surgery, used ports on the top of her head from which electrical signals are taken to use her thoughts to control a robotic arm linked to a computer.

In the video, Jan showed an amazed reporter that she could easily move the arm left and right, up and down, then shake his hand and even give him a fist bump as she sat smiling but motionless on the bed.

"Can you imagine," Prabhakar asked the audience, "if we can do that kind of control of prosthetics -- very natural, graceful control, not one finger at a time, but the way we move our limbs today? Then, as you start thinking about what we're learning, think about how we might build all kinds of complex systems because of what we understand about how the human brain interacts with them."

Asked about applications of such technology beyond restoring lost limbs, the DARPA director recalled being on a Virginia-class submarine and watching its operation, which involved multiple large screens and interactive touch displays.

"Imagine if we could move beyond that in the future, without having ports on top of your head, but perhaps wirelessly going directly from brain signal to a very sophisticated level of control. Rather than pushing buttons on a screen or moving levers, being able to orchestrate a very complex system," Prabhakar said.

"That is the door that is opened by this kind of research," she added, "and frankly, it's both exhilarating and terrifying."

Still, she said, DARPA must continue to push the frontiers of
technology.

"That is literally our day job and our core mission," she said. "We also try very hard to raise these broader ethical issues and societal issues, because well beyond the period of our research, society has some important choices to make."

(Follow Cheryl Pellerin on Twitter @PellerinAFPS)