[updated Wednesday 12/5] WASHINGTON: Top executives from four major defense and aerospace firms sent a message to Congress and the Obama administration today: the nation expects its elected leaders to lead and the well-paid executives are willing to accept higher personal and corporate taxes on the path to find a solution to the nation’s fiscal… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The stalemate over sequestration just got deeper today with horribly predictable political posturing over the tardy release of the Office of Management and Budget’s congressionally-mandated report on how the drastic automatic cuts would be implemented. The 394-page report set the stage for the mutual denunciations in its preamble, declaring House Republican proposals to avert… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: In a poll sure to be read with some trepidation on Capitol Hill, a Harris poll has found that almost 80 percent of “likely voters in critical battleground states” want lawmakers to do something to avoid the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration. The poll, commissioned by the Aerospace Industries Association as part of… 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 →

WASHINGTON [updated 4:30 pm]: At an Aerospace Industries Association event to roll out a new report estimating that sequestration would cost the country more than two million jobs in 2013 — one million from Defense cuts, as previously reported, plus another million from cuts to non-defense agencies — Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Sen.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: As jetlagged aerospace executives and defense reporters head home from a frankly discouraging Farnborough Air Show, Washington is gearing up for storm of stop-sequestration events this coming week. What it will actually accomplish is an open question. Sequestration has hardly been a quiet topic this past week, with a pointed, partisan, and unproductive exchange… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Just when United Technologies’s Pratt & Whitney subsidiary seemed to have put the troubles with its F135 engine for the Joint Strike fighter behind it, there comes news that the company violated the so-called Tianamen sanctions and illegally sold engine control software to China for use in an attack helicopter. Perhaps worse than the… Keep reading →

Marion Blakey, president of the Aerospace Industries Association The Obama administration has assured the American public that any cuts to defense spending would be part of a reasonably balanced package of reductions, would help reduce record budget deficits, and will be “reversible” if future contingencies require it. Now that the Pentagon has released the president’s… Keep reading →

Washington: The defense industry has clearly decided looming budget cuts pose such a grave threat to its future that it must abandon its usual quiet, behind-the-scenes efforts to influence the American public and go national, using social media as well as its usual combination of education and money. Today, the Aerospace Industries Association unveiled its… Keep reading →

When Secretary Panetta visited troops in Afghanistan and Iraq last month, press reports heralded his “rough and tumble” rhetoric and “salty” exchanges with the troops. But beneath these lighthearted personal moments lies a serious truth: short of the president, no one bears greater responsibility for the safety and well being of our military volunteers than… Keep reading →