PENTAGON: It’s official — the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will begin operational test and evaluation next month, marking one of the most significant transitions for the closely watched program. Next summer, presuming no show stoppers appear during OTE, the program will move to full production. “On October 2, 2018, Undersecretary of Defense Ellen Lord convened… Keep reading →

Congress and China have emerged as the primary culprits for the weakening the US defense industrial base. Those are the most striking findings of a new White House report that takes a deep-dive into the state of defense manufacturing in the United States, sounding alarm bells over the decline in capability and the rise of China’s industrial might.

President Trump approved a major study of America’s national security economy last week after meeting with Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan. But Hurricane Florence might have something to say about when it’s released!

WASHINGTON: A long-time State Department official who oversees critical security assistance programs is heading to the Pentagon, a move that may usher in another big change in the reworking of the acquisition and arms exports programs at the Defense Department. The unexpected announcement was made by Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment,… Keep reading →

A slew of new civilian officials are settling in at the Pentagon, adding muscle to promises of change in how the military develops and buys technology, and how fast it can put that gear in the field.

Some 35 years after Ronald Reagan’s famous Star Wars speech, the Pentagon’s R&D chief said that space-based missile defenses are technically feasible and reasonably affordable.

These single points of failure already limit military modernization and potentially could disrupt operations in a crisis. That’s especially true if production needed to ramp up urgently for a major war, a subject the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, has publicly angsted about.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, told a small group of reporters here Friday morning that her office is trying to put rules in place to protect against buying “software that has Russian or Chinese provenance, for instance, and quite often that’s difficult to tell at first glance because of holding companies,” that move the software through the open market.

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 →

The relationship between India and the U.S. is one both sides want to nurture, but Russian military sales, the demands both sides are making over production, and and other tough issues remain to be ironed out.