There’s not a lot of confidence out there about the prospects for a 2020 budget agreement. “A stripped down mini-NDAA may be all that could pass this year for defense,” says one long-time budget watcher.

The Texas Republican, who supported Pentagon reform, bigger budgets, and Trump’s border wall, is joining several other conservatives is walking away from Capitol Hill.

When Washington heavyweights like Peter Levine, former Democratic staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Bill Greenwalt, former deputy undersecretary of Defense for industrial policy and longtime Republican acquisition expert on the SASC, say you got something wrong, people listen. That is especially the case if you were the folks who Levine and… Keep reading →

As the US and its allies scramble to stay ahead of China and Russia, a bold proposal for a massive revamp of tech sharing emerges.

Every word is worth reading to find out what the 809 Panel did right and what needs to be done to fix some of its missteps. Read on! The Editor.

WASHINGTON: One of the time-honored tenets of many Pentagon observers is that senior officials should not benefit from their experience working for or with the military when they leave government service because it’s unethical, drives costs up and is just, well, not right. (And same goes for them leaving industry to work for the government…)… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The JEDI cloud computing contract may be one of the most controversial deals the Pentagon hasn’t even awarded. Worth up to $10 billion over a decade, the Pentagon’s attempt to build its first true enterprise-wide cloud has sparked charges that the deal is designed to go straight to Amazon, which already supplies the CIA… Keep reading →

  I’ve been covering Pentagon acquisition policy for more than 15 years and this is a first for me. The Government Accountability Office offers below a critique of Bill Greenwalt’s sharp criticism of a recent GAO protest decision. For those of us who watch Pentagon procurement, most protests are obscure and boring. Then come ones… Keep reading →

Bill Greenwalt is sort of the Pied Piper of military acquisition policy. Where he leads, others often follow. After he wrote a series of op-eds for Breaking Defense recommending major changes to the Pentagon’s acquisition system, Sen. John McCain lured Bill back to his old job at the Senate Armed Services Committee. Greenwalt rewrote the laws, shaking up Defense Department acquisition. Bill is back, pointing to new acquisition problems, this latest one with his former employer — the Government Accountability Office. It’s a doozy, as you’ll see.

AUSA: Ellen Lord, the former Textron executive now heading the Pentagon’s acquisition shop, revealed today in her first public appearance since her confirmation that she is making fundamental changes in how the Office of Secretary of Defense starts and manages military weapons programs. This comes on top of internal Army reforms announced here by the… Keep reading →