This morning, a House Armed Services subcommittee passed its markup of its part of the annual defense bill that would — among many other things — freeze some funding for the Army’s Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle Program. AMPV is the service’s biggest weapons program left standing after sequestration’s budget cuts, and contractor General Dynamics had protested the competition… Keep reading →

The Pentagon’s civilian workforce is too big and has been virtually untouched since defense budgets started falling four years ago. It’s grown so much, in fact, that the Air Force’s civilian workforce is just 1,400 people shy of matching the entire Air Force National Guard and Reserve combined. It’s time to shrink the Defense Department’s… Keep reading →

[UPDATED with Army & Senate responses] WASHINGTON: After convening in Washington for briefings on the Army budget and how to implement it, the state-level commanders of the National Guard have instead launched a new offensive against the Army plan to cut their forces, flooding Capitol Hill with letters and PowerPoint slides (embedded below). Their immediate goal:… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: National Guard attack helicopter units just can’t be as battle-ready as full-time regular Army ones, Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox has been telling the Hill. That’s why the Guard should give all its AH-64 Apache gunships to the active-duty force to replace older aircraft lost to budget cuts. “Combat elements must be in… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: General Dynamics has pulled back from the long-shot path of formal protests over the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV), but its quieter campaigns on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon will continue — and those efforts may have better odds. At stake is the Army’s largest weapons program to survive sequestration (so far), its $6 billion replacement for… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Stealth is being outpaced by software, radar and computing power, so electronic warfare and cyber attacks are growing in importance. While the F-35 may possess excellent — if circumscribed — electronic attack and cyber capabilities, it needs help from the Navy’s EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft. That means, Boeing and the Navy are arguing,… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: One of the most screwed up programs in Pentagon history, the airborne tanker, may have turned a corner, with the KC-46 program cutting more than half-a-billion dollars from its projected costs, with $386.9 million of those savings coming in fiscal 2015. Some of these details will doubtless be discussed at the Wednesday afternoon House Armed… Keep reading →

UPDATED 1:35 pm Wednesday with more details from Lt. Gen. Glueck WASHINGTON: The Marines are about to move out sharply with their once-stalled Amphibious Combat Vehicle, the smallest service’s biggest program. After years of uncertainty and a last-minute change of course that came too late to make it into the administration’s budget request for 2015,… Keep reading →

After more than two months of escalating conflict, the powerful National Guard Association of the US downshifted today and took a markedly more conciliatory tone towards the Army leaders it had been savaging just last week. As Army Sec. John McHugh and Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno testified before the House Armed Services Committee,… Keep reading →

Sometimes dark clouds really do have silver linings. The winding down of two wars and the automatic spending cuts called sequestration have been brutal for the Army budget. The service recently had to cancel its top-priority weapons program, the tank-like Ground Combat Vehicle. But even if sequestration continues, said one leading analyst, ground vehicle spending… Keep reading →