Posts Tagged ‘mission support/community partnerships’

With the Army already slated to cut its active-duty end strength by 72,000 troops to 490,000 by 2020 and the looming prospect of further personnel reductions if sequestration continues, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno warned against making the wrong bet about the nation’s future combat needs. “The thing I worry about is that in everybody’s declaration that there’s going to be no more ground wars, we need no more ground forces, that we’re going to make the Army too small …

Four Washington think tanks faced with the challenge of preparing 10-year defense budgets under sequestration included funding to carry out additional base closures despite the lack of a short-term payoff. “At some point, it begins to get even too silly for Congress not to do BRAC,” said Clark Murdock, who led the team from the Center for Strategic and International Studies …

Concerns about the impact of encroachment and environmental laws on the use of installations and training ranges is prompting the House Armed Services Committee to direct the Government Accountability Office to review the Pentagon’s efforts to address the potential for such restrictions to hinder military training. “The committee wants to ensure that the department is effectively preventing or mitigating these restrictions to ensure that U.S. force readiness remains high …

Georgia’s three Army installations almost certainly will be affected by the service’s plan to trim its active-duty end strength by 72,000 soldiers by 2020. “You can’t draw down 80,000 [troops] and not impact every installation,” said Gary Jones, executive vice president for economic development and military affairs at the Greater Columbus Georgia Chamber of Commerce …

The Defense Department began sending furlough notices on Tuesday to most of its 750,000 U.S. civilian employees stating they would need to take 11 unpaid days off starting in July. The mandatory furloughs are set to begin July 8 and run through Sept. 30, reported Government Executive. The impact of the mandatory days off will be widespread at defense communities …

A congressionally created commission assessing the Air Force’s structure to determine if and how it should be modified to best fill current and future mission requirements will hold its first public hearing June 4. The National Commission on the Structure of the Air Force was mandated by the fiscal 2013 defense authorization bill as a response to the Air Force’s February 2013 proposal to curtail its force structure, with the most significant impacts falling on Air National Guard personnel and aircraft. The Air Force proposed cutting 3,900 active-duty personnel, 5,100 Guard members and 900 reservists …

The lack of a consensus between the Pentagon and Congress on a range of budget and strategic issues affecting the Air Force, especially changes to its force structure, could jeopardize the effectiveness of the service in the coming decade, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told reporters during his last scheduled news conference. “We need a broader discussion with Congress on the strategic choices we’re going to have to make as a nation to make sure that we retain an effective and capable military and, for us, maintain our role as the best Air Force in the world over the next 10 years …

Rob Wittman, chair of the House Armed Services’ Readiness Subcommittee, began last week’s markup of his panel’s portion of the fiscal 2014 defense authorization bill by highlighting the “readiness shortfalls” of the armed forces primarily caused by the government’s undue focus on deficit reduction. “While the mark represents a good first step toward addressing our readiness challenges, much work remains to be done and the mark won’t completely fix what many have labeled a ‘readiness crisis,’” Wittman said on Thursday. Surprisingly, though, he cited the legislation’s bar on spending by DOD to plan for or carry out a new BRAC round as “one of the provisions that will provide some relief” to the military’s readiness challenges …

A Navy analysis of a plan to station additional DDG-51 class destroyers at Naval Station Mayport, Fla., demonstrated some, but not all, of the best practices for analyzing costs and benefits for decisions involving the allocation of resources, the Government Accountability Office concluded in a new report. The plan to transfer ships to Mayport followed a decision to defer moving a nuclear aircraft carrier to the naval base as well as the scheduled decommissioning of a number of ships currently stationed there. Without moving additional ships to the Jacksonville base, the local ship repair industrial base would suffer a marked drop in workload …

Lobbying revolving around the looming potential for a new BRAC round has emerged as one of the few bright spots for an industry that has experienced a decline in revenue since 2010. The Obama administration’s request this year — along with one last year — for additional base closures has resulted in a spike in new business among the specialized firms that represent states and defense communities trying to keep their regions’ military installations off of a future BRAC list …