What a difference a week makes. Last week, Congress was about to be “Speaker-less,” had no plan to keep the government’s lights on and was staring (again) at the fiscal cliff. Suddenly – POOF! – all that’s left is NDAA.

OK, it would also be nice to be able to patch a few potholes past November 20th, but, hey, sometimes you just take what you can get.

1) National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2016

Following President Obama’s veto of NDAA 1.0, Congress basically has two options:

Override the President’s veto and force acceptance of the original, or
Change the bill to fit the about-to-be-passed budget bill.

Option one isn’t really an option since House Republicans couldn’t even drum up enough support (final version passed 270-156) to keep the bill from moving on to the Senate. Whip counts in the Senate haven’t been released, but the consensus is there are more than the filibuster-busting 60 votes available to pass the bill. (Just ask Rand Paul.) And, of course, the White House negotiate the deal, so the veto stamp is expected to remain tucked away.

That leaves option two.

Deal architects gave the Pentagon pretty much everything it wanted – minus $5 billion:

“The US House and Senate armed services committees are working to identify $5 billion to cut from the defense budget as part of a larger budget pact between Congress and the White House, leaving procurement programs vulnerable to reductions,” reports Defense News.

No one knows where the cuts will be made. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-TX) remarked, “It will come out of muscle, there isn’t just fat you can chip away and say this doesn’t matter, it will matter, it will be significant.”

Speaking to Federal News Radio, Mandy Smithberger, Director of the CDI Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight, said:

“They are most likely to cut are areas that were unfunded requirements. Some places they could look to cut are the 12 additional F-18s that they added, which cost about $1 billion or the six additional F-35 Joint Strike Fighters they added, which is about $846 million.”

In the same article, Brian Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, predicted, “They are going to take some of that money out of operations and maintenance (O&M) because it’s more fungible.”

However, since the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund will have $59 billion in it for FY2016, Clark thinks the really necessary O&M projects will get funded through OCO. That “war” fund is meant to be reserved for military operations that could not have been foreseen, but, in reality, there are very few limits on the use of those funds.

“If you look at the past three to five years, DoD has put an increasing amount of enduring operations and maintenance, things that are normal day-to-day operations that are not necessarily associated with the wars over in the Middle East … into the OCO budget,” Clark said.

So, when the dust settles, there will be $5 billion in Defense cuts – on paper. The question is: Will anyone notice?

2) Musical Chairs in the House

When Rep. Paul Davis Ryan (R-WI) was sworn in as the 54th Speaker of the House, he said:

“Let’s be frank, the House is broken. We are not settling scores,” he added, “we are wiping the slate clean.”

Fresh start. New beginning. Ahh … The air smells fresher already, doesn’t it?

Well …

Ryan supposedly came into the job kicking and screaming. One of his conditions to even considering the job was that he basically be the “consensus” choice of conservative GOP lawmakers and that they eliminate their ability to oust a sitting speaker by making a motion to “Vacate The Chair.”

What did he give them?

For one thing, adherence to the “Hastert rule,” which was established by the GOP’s longest serving Speaker (and possibly newest prison inmate) Dennis Hastert of Mississippi. The rule states that no bills will be brought to the floor of the House unless they have the support of the “majority of the majority.”

So, nothing gets to the floor that most GOP lawmakers don’t want to debate, like immigration reform, a carbon tax, etc.

Publicly, Democrats are optimistic that Ryan’s pragmatism will enable him to make Congress less dysfunctional. However, mostly following the Hastert rule was one of the key factors in the last government shutdown, President Obama’s reliance on Executive Orders to get anything done, and … the resignation, in frustration and exhaustion, of the recently departed Speaker.

So, “wiping the slate” and “fixing a broken House” are lovely sentiments. But, it’s hard to see how any of that will happen unless Ryan was able to replace the Speakers gavel with Harry Potter’s wand.

Elsewhere in the news …

Congress

Now that Paul Ryan left his “dream job” as Chair of Ways and Means … A new Chairman must be chosen. The race appears to be between Reps. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Pat Tiberi (R-OH). Brady appears to want to ascend to the House’s chief tax architect so he can replace the U.S. income tax with a national sales tax. Tiberi voted against the Recovery Act in 2009 stating that it’s “loaded with Nancy Pelosi’s grab bag of big spending wishes.” Then, he turned around and wrote a letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack in an effort to bring stimulus money to his district. (We miss Ryan already.) [Politico]

Acquisition

According to the GAO’s Director of Acquisition and Sourcing Management, Marie Mark … The DoD has no strategy for obtaining microelectronics from trusted sources in the future if critical problems arise in the supply chain. Testifying before the House Armed Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations, Mark said that IBM had been the only company that provided components from “trusted pools” of suppliers without foreign sources. However, that changed a year ago when transferred microelectronic fabrication to a foreign-owned entity. [Fierce GovernmentIT]
Adam Tarsi, chief of staff of the DoD’s Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office … Told the audience of a PSC innovation event in Arlington Thursday that contracts aren’t the only avenues for bring hi-tech innovation into the government. Tarsi said that FAR allows more creative options like announcements, prizes and challenges to enable companies or individuals with great ideas but without the experience and infrastructure to win contracts to essentially leap over formal procurement procedures to get their ideas in front of the right agency people. [Federal News Radio]

Technology

The Pentagon’s chief information officer says Defense has a big problem … They don’t, yet, move fast enough to deal with the speed at which cyber warfare moves. “I think the big difference in cyber that we’re having the react to is it moves faster than any other warfare,” CIO Terry Halvorsen said. “That’s a challenge. The things we do today in cyber probably won’t be the same things we do tomorrow. It’s accelerated change, and we’re generally not good at accelerated change.” [The Hill]
However, when it comes to cyber warfare … The Marines are ready to make whatever cuts or changes are necessary in other areas in order to grow its capabilities in cyber and information warfare. “We have to be able to look at this future force. We know that in the information warfare area, cyber, leveraging space capabilities, ambiguous warfare, cy[ber] ops; that area there that you are seeing a lot of proliferation in, we know we’ve got to invest in that area,” Deputy Commandant Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh said. Walsh says that through initiatives like Expeditionary Force 21, the Marines are moving past small landing teams and striving to become a “middleweight” force that integrates seapower through communications between land and sea forces. [Federal News Radio]
Researchers in England … Have invented a tractor beam. In a paper published in Nature, their “breakthrough utilizes a formula built around the Gor’Kov potential, named for Russian-American physicist Lev Petrovich Gor’kov, a means of measuring the force of sound on an object in an arbitrary sound field.” Among the many possible future uses for such technology, scientists proposed the ability to stop intruders from penetrating a checkpoint and moving supplies or munitions into an area where you really don’t want boots on the ground. [Defense One]

International

Four Naval fighter jets were scrambled … After two Russian bombers flew within a mile of the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier near South Korea on Tuesday. The Navy said a ship in the Reagan’s strike group tried to contact the Russian bombers, but there was no response. However, Navy Cmdr. William Marks said that a ‘flyover” range of a mile was a “safe distance,” so there was never any real danger. [The Hill]
According to Rear Adm. Paul Becker, one of the ancillary benefits to fighting ISIL … Is gaining combat experience with an enemy that operates more like a network than a traditional military hierarchy. Such knowledge could come in handy if the U.S. was ever pitted against China, for example. [Defense One]
Speaking of China, following the U.S.’s move to send a destroyer near waters claimed by the country … The heads of the U.S. and Chinese Navies spoke with each other for just over an hour about relationships between the two countries, sovereignty and the U.S. mission to ensure that all countries have a right to navigate the open seas. [Defense News]
If you’ve ever wished for a terrific summary of what’s going on in Syria … Your wish has been granted. The Atlantic‘s Kathy Gilsinan did a superb job of providing the who, what, when, where and why of the civil conflict that spawned ISIL. The best part may be the “Syria in 60 Seconds” segment. [The Atlantic]