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August 2011
The U.S. Air Force's pilot training program relies upon an obsolete Eisenhower-era jet that may soon be too unsafe to fly. The T-38 Talon was the world's first supersonic training aircraft when it debuted in 1959, but half a century later the average plane has logged 15,000 flight hours -- over twice
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Date:
8/31/2011
Anticipating a brutal outcome from the deliberations of the deficit super committee, the military is already planning for very deep reductions in force structure. Published reports suggest that the Army may give up 15 of its 45 Active Component brigades. The Army’s current end-strength is about
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Date:
8/31/2011
I love perusing recommended readings whether they are provided by friends and colleagues, professional associations or scholars and wise men. They often point me down intellectual paths I had failed to recognize. They also say a lot about the mindset of those making the recommendation, so when I
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8/30/2011
Last week saw a continuation of the recent drumbeat of bad news about defense spending, with many experts predicting that outlays for weapons will fall steadily in the years ahead. So of course the equities of the biggest military contractors sold off, right? Wrong! According to Byron Callan
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Date:
8/30/2011
Unmanned aircraft have become the signature weapon of America's global war on terrorists. Just last week, a CIA drone strike killed al Qaeda's second in command. But unmanned aircraft have limitations. First, they are usually defenseless against attack. Second, they are fragile. Third, their
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8/29/2011
Deep reductions in defense spending, however ill-advised, seem all but inevitable given America’s fiscal condition. In order to realize up to $100 billion in annual savings in the worst-case scenario, the Department of Defense will be required to go where the money is, namely people and operations
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8/29/2011
In normal times, the defense secretary's support for his department's biggest weapons program would be taken as a given. But these are not normal times. The federal government is borrowing billions of dollars each day, and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was put in charge of the Pentagon with
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8/26/2011
The August 16 issue of Flight International contains a provocative story about the aspiration of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) founder Elon Musk to help humanity become a "multiplanet species" by opening the way to colonization of Mars. I think Musk is right about humanity
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8/25/2011
Since the President probably is still working on the big economic proposal to be unveiled in September, I would like to offer him a few thoughts. Over the past two and a half years the administration has put forward one spending initiative after another. It is difficult to remember them all or to
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Date:
8/25/2011
Washington as a whole and defense experts, in particular, are bracing for massive reductions in defense spending coming out of the deliberations of the Congressional super committee. If automatic budget cuts are triggered, defense could see budgets decline by around $1 trillion over the next decade.
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8/24/2011
The Department of the Navy is probably the nation's best-managed major military organization. Under the leadership of Secretary Ray Mabus and Under Secretary Robert Work, the service has put its ship construction and aviation plans on a sound footing while making the tough choices required to stay
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8/24/2011
Over the past two decades, the list of major defense acquisition programs that have been cancelled after years of development or pushed to production only to have their numbers cut has become distressingly long. It doesn’t matter which service is sponsoring the effort or which contractor is involved.
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8/23/2011
With the usual tools for stimulating a weak economy largely exhausted, the Obama Administration may be belatedly considering how weapons spending by the Pentagon contributes to growth. It appears that weapons outlays have a sizable impact on job creation, export performance, and economic competitiveness.
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8/22/2011
As Libyan rebels solidify their control over that country's capital and the Gaddafi regime appears on its last legs, pundits are already rushing to talk about managing the post-rebellion political situation. Their time might be better spent considering the military lessons of the Libyan campaign
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8/22/2011
Way back in the Stone Age -- 1994 -- the well-respected accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand did a study of the impact of government regulations on defense contracts. They found that DoD paid on average a regulatory cost premium of 18 percent of contract value. The regulatory “tax” for advanced technology
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8/19/2011
White House budget director Jacob Lew released fiscal 2013 guidance to government departments and agencies on August 17 that has reinforced the pessimism of many in the defense sector. The guidance directed federal managers to submit budgets for 2013 that were five percent and ten percent below
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8/19/2011
One way to look at the creation of the deficit super committee of twelve Congressmen and Senators is that this was the only way for the leadership in Washington to deal with the radicals in the Democratic and Republican parties. The Far Left wants to soak the rich and the corporations with tax increases
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8/18/2011
Earlier this week, the Associated Press released a story on the outlook for military contractors that ended with an absurd observation by Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O'Hanlon. The widely quoted military analyst said, "the era of manned airplanes should be seen as over," and he went
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8/17/2011
Over the past two years, the Obama Administration’s plans to improve the economy by taking contracts and jobs away from the private sector and insourcing them to government workers has suffered a number of setbacks. This has particularly been the case when the Pentagon went on an orgy of insourcing
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8/17/2011
As the Department of Defense prepares for the possibility of major spending reductions, budget analysts inside and outside the Pentagon have turned to their perennial pastime of predicting how many aircraft carriers the Navy will have to give up. I say the service won't give up any -- at least,
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8/16/2011
The Department of Defense is deep into repetitive budget drills, trying to figure out what kind of force structure will remain if the Pentagon has to absorb $600 billion, $800 billion or even $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade. The White House and OSD are trying to be clever by requiring that
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8/16/2011
One of the silliest statements coming out of the various deficit reduction discussions is that “everything is on the table.” This is usually taken to mean political sacred cows such as Social Security, Medicare, defense and tax increases. But there are other items, not easily quantifiable, that
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8/15/2011
Defense News reports today that the Obama Administration will turn down Taiwan's request to purchase 66 new F-16 fighters, aircraft the island nation says it needs to counter a regional military buildup by the People's Republic of China. China has challenged the legitimacy of Taiwan's government
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8/15/2011
It is clear now that significant, possibly draconian, cuts in defense spending are coming. The size of the potential reductions is so great that it cannot be addressed by trimming programs at the edges, the so-called salami slicing technique. Nor can it be resolved by cutting procurement. The reality
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8/12/2011
The U.S. economy is currently enduring its slowest recovery since the Great Depression. One reason for the modest rate of recovery is that consumers are deleveraging from the excessively optimistic spending patterns of the past decade. They hardly have a choice, since a weak housing market has
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8/12/2011
A Defense Business Board task force chartered by the Secretary of Defense has concluded that the current military retirement system is unfair to many service members, unaffordable due to rapidly rising financial obligations, and inflexible at a time when change is needed. The task force of seven
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8/11/2011
I would like to say that the turmoil in Washington is over, that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress and the administration will resolve their differences over the federal budget and deficit reduction allowing the various departments and agencies of the federal government to establish a rational
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Date:
8/11/2011
All but ignored amidst the whirlwind of bad news coming out of the United States is the reality that Europe is broke. European leaders met late last week and cobbled together its third bailout of Greece. No one believes that this will be the final bailout or Greece can avoid, in the end, default.
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Date:
8/10/2011
There's a high likelihood that when Congress grasps the impact of the deficit agreement it embraced last week, legislators will move to modify the law. With the economy faltering and interest rates at near-record lows, it's a lot easier to borrow more money right now than live with the fallout
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Date:
8/10/2011
Analysts are warning that the bipartisan deficit reduction deal could gut defense and undermine U.S. national security. No one disagrees over the math. Defense has already been tagged with over $800 billion in spending cuts since the Obama Administration took office. These include almost $400 billion
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8/9/2011
Last week's deficit agreement clearly didn't do much to restore market confidence, but it did send a clear signal about the likely direction of future defense budgets -- down. The agreement put in place a two-step process that in the first installment would cut military outlays by about $350 billion
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Date:
8/9/2011
The debate in Washington today is not whether or not to reduce defense spending but how much to cut. Never mind that defense spending as a share of GDP is at its lowest level since World War II or that as a share of federal spending defense continues to decline. Nor does it seem important to deficit
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8/8/2011
If the U.S. economy doesn't start growing much faster, the federal government's fiscal problems can't be fixed. Although last month's debate over deficit reduction measures painted the fiscal challenge as a choice between tax increases and spending cuts, no combination of those approaches can reasonably
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8/8/2011
War is the real mother of invention. The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts are notable for, among many things, promoting the development and deployment of a wide range of innovative military weapons systems, products and processes. Some of these are unique to the circumstances of our two current conflicts
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8/5/2011
Even before major budget cuts hit the Department of Defense, the next generation of combat systems has begun to disappear at an alarming rate. Over the past four years, about half of the biggest weapons programs that the Pentagon was planning to equip the joint force with after 2020 have been killed
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8/5/2011
I must confess that one of my not-so guilty pleasures is to read The Economist from cover to cover as soon as it comes in the mail. I learn a great deal from its articles on foreign policy, economics, technology and even British politics. I even have an app for The Economist on my
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8/5/2011
When the people flying aircraft are incapacitated, one option is to put the plane on autopilot. It keeps the plane aloft for a while -- as long as there are no mountains dead ahead -- but it can't land the plane. That requires having a real person in charge.
It appears that the debt agreement
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Date:
8/4/2011
The U.S. strategic deterrent consists of a triad of nuclear-armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) in buried silos, submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and nuclear-capable bombers. Each of these are very complex weapons systems. There is, of course, the nuclear warhead or bomb,
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Date:
8/3/2011
One of the best defense logistics programs you probably never heard of is called Theater Express. This is a program begun in 2006 under which the military uses commercial airlift to move non-sensitive cargoes to recipients throughout the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility, including
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Date:
8/2/2011
Chalk up another victory for House Republicans. They struck a tentative deal on raising the debt limit that focuses only on spending cuts, includes Medicare in programs vulnerable to sequestration and requires an up or down vote on the balanced budget amendment. They got all this while giving up
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8/1/2011
The debate over how to deal with the deficit is not, as many pundits have argued, a fight between a strong defense and a strong economy. At its core this debate over the deficit and spending reductions is a fight between national security and human security. National security spending is almost
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Date:
8/1/2011