WASHINGTON: The day before an embattled president rolls out an overdue budget that defense hawks say is $37 billion short, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee counseled against despair. “As President Bush said in a different context, don’t be guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations,” Rep.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: All hands, brace for disappointment. The president’s promised naval buildup won’t begin in the 2018 budget out next week — or maybe ever. Sure, before the election, candidate Donald Trump promised a 350-ship Navy. Sure, just this morning, House Speaker Paul Ryan repeated the 350 figure. Sure, this week the Chief of Naval Operations… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump may have a clear preference for a “goddamned steam” catapult on the USS Ford and its successors, but his opinion is not based on any detailed Navy briefing about the ship, according to Sean Stackley, acting Navy Secretary. Trump may have derived his remarkably insightful observations about the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL:  Less than two hours after President Trump tweeted that a government shutdown might be a good thing, the conservative Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said, no. either elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the rules now to 51%. Our country needs a good "shutdown" in September to fix… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: America cannot apply Buy America provisions on a widescale basis and buy the best weapons, no matter how much President Trump and his team may feel otherwise. It’s a simple as that. All the competitors for the Air Force’s next-generation trainer, the T-X, include enormous amounts of foreign content, some including the aircraft. The… Keep reading →

Two weeks from today America will either be a laughingstock or Congress will have done the responsible thing, the necessary thing, and passed some kind of useful spending bills. Or, as Mark Cancian, a former senior official at the Office of Management and Budget, suggests, there may be a sort of defense spending bandage to strap… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: If the Navy would buy one squadron of new F-18s (known as the XT, Block 3 or Advanced Super Hornet) instead of the carrier version of the F-35 it “actually improves overall mission capability, while substantially reducing cost.” But the Navy could go even one better and buy two squadrons of the new F-18, which… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Two top Pentagon officials laid out a multi-pronged push to lower the price of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter below $80 million apiece. The chief of the F-35 Joint Program Office, Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, and the director of defense pricing, Shay Assad, are underwhelmed by contractor Lockheed Martin‘s  cost reduction efforts so far.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Until the Trump Administration, one of the standard limits on bureaucratic power was the circumscribed reach of anyone serving in an acting capacity. Unless or until a person was confirmed by the Senate for a senior position in the Pentagon, the argument went, they didn’t possess the political or public authority to make new policy… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: President Trump will nominate Boeing executive Patrick Shanahan for Deputy Defense Secretary, one of six key Pentagon appointments announced today. All six have extensive service in government or, in Shanahan’s case, the defense industry. That’s a stark departure from the two billionaires with no prior government service Trump initially picked as secretaries of the Army and Navy, Vincent Viola and Philip… Keep reading →