Due to the inexorable ticking of the millennium clock, the Pentagon would prefer not to submit monthly Year 2000 progress reports to either the Office of Management and Budget or Capitol Hill, Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week.
THE BIG Y2K TENT. Due to the inexorable ticking of the millennium clock, the Pentagon would prefer not to submit monthly Year 2000 progress reports to either the Office of Management and Budget or Capitol Hill, Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last week.
Pressed by Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) about ensuring the flow of Year 2000 information from the Pentagon to the Hill, Hamre invited her to ''sit in on our [monthly] meetings.'' Hamre also extended that invite to other senators and staff members on the committee. Because OMB and the General Accounting Office already send their reps to the meetings, if Snowe and the SASC staff take him up on his offer, Hamre may have to rent one of those very big party tents to hold the mob.
AND A BIG BUSINESS CARD. Late last month Kevin Carroll departed the Communications-Electronics Command Acquisition Center-Washington for the Army Materiel Command to serve as Gen. Johnnie Wilson's hand-picked acquisition reform expert.
In his new job, Carroll has one of the longest job titles in the entire federal bureaucracy: assistant deputy chief of staff for research, development and acquisition— acquisition, contracting and program management.
Because Carroll said he doubts ''the title will fit on a business card,'' I guess this means Carroll, who once had the misfortune to head an agency known as CACWOO, will now be known as ADCRDA-ACPM/AMC. His friends and family can still call him Kevin, however. Monica Godby, head of one of the two acquisition divisions at CAC-W, has replaced Carroll as acting director.
WHERE'S THE NOMINATION? Although the Defense Department officially revamped the ASD/C3I office last week, the nomination of Art Money to take over leadership of the reconstituted widget and info ops shop has not even made it out of the White House, requiring Money to sign all his memos ''senior civilian official.'' When asked about the reasons for the delay, one DOD source looked at me and replied simply: ''Monica Lewinsky.'' Ahh, I finally managed to get her name into this newspaper, which has, until now, been one of the few Monica-free zones on the planet.
ZERO-SUM GAME. That's the bottom line of federal spectrum auctions, according to the Pentagon's Hamre. He told the SASC that to switch frequencies would cost the Pentagon ''about $2.5 billion, or more than [the government] will get from spectrum sales.''
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