NATIONAL PRESS CLUB: As war funding goes away, Marines must learn to live with “good enough” in an era of austerity, Commandant James Amos declared today at the National Press Club, saying that even top-priority programs like the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter and the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor face the budget axe. Even without sequestration, the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Sequestration would force the Defense Department and other federal agencies to lay off workers long before the defense industry had to, said a report released today by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Though big defense contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, have warned that the threat of sequestration might require them to send… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The defense spending bill passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee today keeps Block 30 Global Hawk drones flying, instead of letting them be warehoused as the Air Force had planned, a congressional source confirmed to Breaking Defense. That is arguably the final flourish on Congress’s utter rejection of the Air Force’s proposed cuts in… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL [updated 12:40 with Feinstein, Inouye remarks and results of amendment vote]: Sequestration drama roiled an otherwise pro forma mark-up of the Senate’s defense appropriations bill this morning, with a precious flicker of bipartisanship over the need to avert the sequester soon overtaken by disagreement over the legalities of layoff notices. If the automatic… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: Air Force Secretary Michael Donley warned Congress today that if it blocks cuts to the Air National Guard this year, it will just be “doubling down” on cuts required in 2014 — maybe not to the Guard, but somewhere in the Air Force — even if sequestration is averted. If sequestration does take… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: The chairman of the board of the Aerospace Industries Association, Pratt & Whitney President David Hess, expressed guarded optimism today that industry is getting through to Congress about the danger of sequestration. “We’ve been very active — Marion [Blakey, AIA’s CEO], and the AIA staff, and the member companies of AIA — [conveying]… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: Gen. Mark Welsh, the next Air Force Chief of Staff, admitted that the service’s fiscal 2013 budget was “simply not executable” in the face of Congressional opposition over cuts to the Air National Guard. Welsh vowed to work with Congress, the Guard, and governors “so we never end up here again.” Welsh also… Keep reading →

While the active-duty Air Force and the National Guard are at odds over budget cuts in Washington, the relationship seems smoother at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, where an Air National Guard officer assigned the an active-duty 33rd Fighter Wing became the first Guard pilot to fly the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the controversial product… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: “Trust us.” That’s the last thing an irate Congress is ready to hear from the Air Force right now, but it’s the essence of what a three-star general told legislators today in a hearing on the administration’s hugely unpopular proposal to cut the Air National Guard. A Senate-proposed commission on the size and… Keep reading →

Washington, DC is echoing with a chorus of “sequester fear.” It is an election year and the cacophony is deafening: sequester is a budgetary Pearl Harbor, a “doomsday machine” that will shred our national security. The Pentagon says it, members of Congress from both parties say it, and the defense industry is jumping up and… Keep reading →