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September 2010
The Army's effort to trim its modernization portfolio is starting to produce a lot of casualties outside its ranks. Earlier this year the Army decided to kill its "non-line-of-sight" launch system even though development of the program was 90 percent complete, leaving the Navy to go it alone on what
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9/30/2010
Retired HH-3 helicopter pilot Roger "Sprout" Wentworth sent Lexington Institute a response to Loren Thompson’s September 20 blog posting about the Air Force's search-and-rescue efforts. Wentworth raised a number of concerns that we thought were worth sharing with a broader audience, so the full
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9/29/2010
The U.S. economy grew at an annualized rate of 1.6% in the second quarter, far below the pace seen in previous recoveries. Republicans are predictably blaming the Obama Administration's "tax and spend" fiscal policies, which they say are stifling economic activity. But that isn't the real reason
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9/28/2010
On September 14, Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter released guidance to his staff concerning execution of the defense department's efficiency drive. The efficiency drive is supposed to save many billions of dollars over the next five years by professionalizing weapons-purchasing practices
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9/27/2010
The Bushehr nuclear reactor, widely believed to be part of Iran's nuclear-weapons program, was supposed to power up in August. It didn't. One Iranian official blamed the weather. Now a more likely cause has emerged: the Stuxnet cyber worm discovered last June to have infected thousands of industrial
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9/24/2010
The Department of Defense announced yesterday that the government and prime contractor Lockheed Martin have signed a long-awaited contract for the fourth production lot of F-35 joint strike fighters. According to Andrea Shalal-Esa of Reuters, the fixed-price contract for multiple variants of the
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9/23/2010
The Sydney Morning Herald reports today that the chief executive officer of Australian shipbuilder Austal is resigning after only two years on the job. Nobody outside the company seems to know why he is leaving. Normally, few people in Washington would care why the CEO of a modest ($500
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9/22/2010
It's a longstanding complaint of scientists and engineers that national political elites schooled in the humanities don't grasp the consequences of the technology choices they make. C. P. Snow wrote an essay lamenting the gulf between the "two cultures" -- science and the humanities -- in 1956,
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9/21/2010
It must be a tough job running the U.S. Air Force these days. It's still the most powerful aerospace force in the world, but every week its leaders participate in choices that eventually will call that status into question. First its family of future radar planes was killed. Then the revolutionary
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9/20/2010
If you want to find a good case study of what's gone wrong with the federal government's support for new technology over the past generation, you probably can't do better than NASA's human spaceflight program. Sending astronauts into space was one of those signature missions that made America different
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9/17/2010
Reports coming out of the Pentagon indicate that the Office of the Secretary of Defense and specifically the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L), Dr. Ashton Carter, had a major hand in forcing the Army to withdraw its request for proposals for the new ground
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9/17/2010
There is no question that the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, is a smart man. Nor is there a doubt that he means well. His efforts to drive excess costs out of the defense budget and to find ways of reining in the skyrocketing prices for new weapons systems is admirable. However, in many ways
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9/16/2010
Human beings search for patterns. It's one of the traits that makes us different from squirrels. But sometimes we insist on finding patterns that are not really there. A case in point is the notion that defense spending follows a mechanistic pattern of boom and bust cycles. This idea is explicitly
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9/15/2010
Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter today unveiled guidance that will help drive the Pentagon's $100 billion efficiency drive over the next half-decade. The guidance is distilled from insights provided by hundreds of professionals both inside and outside the defense department, and seems to
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9/14/2010
Not long ago, modernization of the U.S. Army centered on the Future Combat System (FCS), a networked collection of 18 ground and aerial, manned and unmanned platforms tied together by a network. When most of that program was cancelled -- except for some near-term elements that would support the
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9/14/2010
Unable to get much of its agenda for reshaping the U.S. economy past even a Congress dominated by Democrats, the Obama Administration is now seeking the same ends by manipulating the government contracting process. The federal government spends some $500 billion a year on contracted services and
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9/13/2010
It's a good thing that Raytheon's overseas sales are growing fast, because business conditions in its home market look less than rosy. A case in point is the company's recent victory in its competition with Alliant Techsystems to build the most accurate artillery shell in the world. Raytheon won
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9/13/2010
The juiciest rumor to come out of the Thomson Reuters aerospace and defense summit this week was speculation that Boeing may be considering a bid for some or all of Northrop Grumman. The head of Boeing's defense business, Dennis Muilenburg, declined to rule out the possibility of a large-scale
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9/10/2010
The British Government is about to complete its Defense Review 2010. Scheduled under the former Labor government, the review is taking place under the guiding hand of the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government and in the midst of the most severe economic crisis in Britain’s post-war
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9/9/2010
A major part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ legacy may be his efforts to reform the weapons acquisition system. The Secretary has repeatedly lashed the acquisition system for being unresponsive to the needs of the warfighter, too slow and too expensive. The defense landscape is littered with
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9/8/2010
This week's Defense News contains a story by Asian correspondent Wendell Minnick that raises troubling questions about the behavior of former Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Adm. William Owens. The story suggests that Owens is being used by retired members of the Peoples Liberation Army to help
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9/8/2010
One might argue that the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program has had more than its fair share of challenges. First there was the difficulty of carrying along two very different ship designs, one by a Lockheed Martin-led team (LCS 1 and 3) and another by a General Dynamics led team (LCS 2 and 4).
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9/7/2010
When Joanne Maguire was growing up in a family with 12 children during the 1960s, her mother and father didn't play favorites. Everybody had to pitch in on doing the laundry and the dishes, and the kids decided among themselves what to watch on television or who got to sit by the window in the
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9/7/2010
The United States cannot afford its national security strategy. Which may be a fortunate thing since it is the wrong strategy. It is the wrong strategy because it assumes that the U.S. is the centerpiece of the strategic universe and, as a result, must have a role to play in every political-military
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9/3/2010
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on Monday that the United Auto Workers local representing 2,750 employees at Oshkosh Corporation has voted unanimously to reject a one-year contract extension proposed by management. The company offered workers a generous package -- stable healthcare
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9/3/2010
In June the Pentagon launched an efficiency drive aimed at freeing up money for military modernization. Faced with the prospect of flat defense budgets in the years ahead, defense secretary Robert Gates said he wanted to eliminate waste and redundancy in military spending so plans to buy the next
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9/2/2010
Since the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan morphed into a lengthy battle of attrition with insurgents, the majority of U.S. and Coalition casualties have come from improvised explosive devices (IEDs). These have come in every type, shape and size from very simple fertilizer bombs in plastic jugs
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9/2/2010
At this moment we can take pride that the last combat-assigned brigade has left Iraq and that the country itself is at a point where it may be able to rebuild itself economically and politically. Operation Iraqi Freedom has had a profound impact on everyone associated with it, most importantly,
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9/1/2010