Earlier this week I noted that a Senate hearing would likely be one of the last where Peter Teets, the acting Air Force secretary and director of the NRO, would appear. That indeed is the case: the Defense Department announced today that Teets has submitted his resignation, effective a week from today. Teets had been acting secretary of the Air Force for only couple of months; he had been the Undersecretary of the Air Force, as well as the DOD’s “Executive Agent” for space, since 2001. (Teets previously had been president of Lockheed Martin, retiring in 1999.)
The departure of Teets, who was the top-ranking official with the DOD primarily associated with space, threatens to create something of a power vacuum for military space issues within the DOD. Robert Dickman, who had been the deputy for military space within the office of the Undersecretary, left the Pentagon last month to become executive director of the AIAA. All this comes at a time when many major military space programs (like Advanced EHF, SBIRS, space-based radar, etc.) have come under considerable Congressional scrutiny.
