Platoon Of Generals Take the Hill

There's just under 20 generals from all four services testifying on Capitol Hill today, according to a handy list put out by the Defense Department press shop, along with a handful of assistant or under secretaries, which put the number of top Defense managers on the Hill today well above 20.

I'm glad we have good relations with Canada, as a less friendly neighbor might view this as a good time to attack with all the bosses absent.

Some IT highlights from all this testifying include plans to deploy a biometric access control system at all military installations in the United States, as detailed by Air Force Gen. Eugene Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command, who appeared before the House Armed Services Committee.

Renuart said NorthCom wants to install a networked and interoperable biometric access system at all U.S. bases, which would vett and then issue ID cards to a range of contractors and visitors at domestic military installations.

This is a system already used at overseas bases, according to a September 2008 briefing by Army Col. James Brown, chief of the command's Force Protection at the Mission Assurance Division. He envisions using fingerprint scanners for access control.

Renaurt also put a plug in for the troubled Transformational Communications Satellite system to meet NorthCom's communications requirements. Renaurt told the committee that TSAT "continues to offer the most viable course of action to satisfy our requirements for high speed, secure protected dynamically-allocated and efficiently utilized communications."

Marine General James Mattis, commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, took a cautious approach to satellite communications in his testimony. Mattis told the committee that Defense must guard against an "over reliance" on space based command and control systems and instead develop a triad of space, air and ground systems that provide redundancy and reliability.

Mattis said JFCOM plans to use a service-oriented architecture to migrate the current and service-specific Global Command and Control Systems to the new Net-Enabled Command Capability program, which the Defense Information Systems Agency is developing.

Army Gen. William "Kip" Ward, commander of the U.S. Africa Command, testified his command plans to use an Adaptive Logistics Network to meet its logistics needs on the African continent, modeled, according to this brief, on the Coca-Cola distribution network in Africa.

We won't know until April if any of these projects will make the final proposed budget; Defense Comptroller Robert Hale told the House Budget Committee that they will have to wait until then to get the details. But he did say Defense Secretary Robert Gates has "tough choices" to make between now and then on which programs get chopped and which ones survive.