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 →

WASHINGTON: The most expensive conventional weapons program in history just scored a major win, with the F-35 program’s estimated acquisition costs plunging $11.5 billion. This is no program estimate that critics might savage. This comes from the Government Accountability Office’s definitive annual Assessment of Selected Weapons Report. The GAO did not mince words in identifying… 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 →

Guam is America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in the South Pacific, the fulcrum of the fabled Pacific “pivot.” It’s also kind of a mess. With a GDP per capita less than a third the US average, an earthquake-damaged harbor, geriatric generators that black out the entire island roughly twice a year, drinking water periodically contaminated with… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: The House Armed Services Committee will hold an extraordinary classified briefing Thursday, open to all House members, on the state of readiness in the US military. Rep. Randy Forbes and other HASC members who pushed for the briefing hope it will help convince Speaker John Boehner and other key GOP leaders that the combined effects… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: President Obama’s nominee to be Navy Undersecretary, Jo Ann Rooney, faced a stormy reception this morning, getting a bipartisan hammering by Senators John McCain and Kirsten Gillibrand. In her formal written responses to SASC’s pre-hearing questions, Rooney had demurred on whether the Navy Department could meet the statutory deadline of September 2014 to… Keep reading →

So how hard is the federal shutdown hitting the US military? “Walking around the building, I would say we’re probably at about a third of our staff right now,” said one military officer. (About half the Defense Department’s civil servants have been furloughed, but military personnel are still on duty). Of 26 people in her… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: Bark, it turns out, does not necessarily correlate with bite. The Government Accountability Office is infamous for its often scathing reviews of Pentagon programs, and its latest report on the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship — one of GAO’s favorite targets — says Congress should “pause” LCS procurement until key systems are more adequately tested. But,… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship program is moving so fast it may be too late to hit the brakes without LCS going entirely and expensively off the rails. In a 72-page report to Congress that will be publicly released this morning, the Government Accountability Office makes a strong case that the Navy is buying… Keep reading →

The Navy defended its troubled Littoral Combat Ship in advance of a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on a forthcoming GAO report that advises putting the LCS program on pause and rejected the report’s key recommendation to slow procurement of Littoral Combat Ships to a “minimum,” Rear Adm. Thomas Rowden said. And the service only “partially concurs” with the… Keep reading →