ARLINGTON: The digital dam has burst. It took the Army three grueling years to set up a new, more secure network at its first site in San Antonio, which went live in fall 2014. Now a dozen more installations have gotten the upgrade, exulted the Army CIO this morning, and another 20 will go live… Keep reading →

HUNTSVILLE, ALA: The Army plans to stockpile equipment in Vietnam, Cambodia, and other Pacific countries yet unnamed that will allow US forces to deploy there more rapidly, because key supplies and gear will already be in place. The new caches will be well inside what China considers its sphere of influence. Army Materiel Command chief Gen. Dennis Via emphasized… Keep reading →

AUSA: The Honorable Shyu, as everyone in the military calls the head of Army acquisition, is often bright, humorous and insightful. Today, she got passionate in public, clearly frustrated at the painful limits that the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration have forced her to adopt. American military power has traditionally rested on technological overmatch. We… 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 →

On Monday, the top spokesman for General Dynamics Land Systems, Peter Keating, told me GDLS could not compete for the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (APMV) program unless the Army changed how it ran the competition. Today, as even Keating expected, the Army officially denied the GDLS protest. Breaking Defense obtained a copy of the decision just… Keep reading →

UPDATED Friday April 4th: Army denies General Dynamics protest General Dynamics Land Systems cannot and will not compete for the Army’s largest surviving weapons program, the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, unless the service changes how it is handling the program, GDLS’s senior spokesman told me yesterday afternoon. A GDLS withdrawal would be yet another embarrassment for… Keep reading →

AUSA WINTER, HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: Fear is in the air. “The commercial base will disappear,” Boeing executive James Moran believes. It’s not just sequestration, the retired brigadier general said this morning at the Association of the US Army’s winter conference. There is real anxiety among defense contractors that as budgets tighten, the Army will starve private… Keep reading →

  The military can move in mysterious ways, especially when it comes to the arcane and often-dysfunctional bureaucratics of buying gear. But in our combined 31 years of covering the Defense Department, we here at Breaking Defense had never seen this one before: a defense contractor getting busted for trying to sell the government its… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: As the wars draw down and budgets shrink, the massive Army Materiel Command — 70,000 military and civilian personnel at arsenals, depots, and other facilities in all 50 states — is shifting gears and taking on new missions. Some longstanding efforts are winding down, explained Lt. Gen. Patricia McQuistion, AMC’s new deputy commander, at… Keep reading →