WASHINGTON: House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon seethed with frustration at Senate Democrats today when asked about Senate Armed Services chairman Carl Levin‘s proposals for a “grand compromise” to avert sequestration. McKeon doubted any kind of grand bargain could happen this year, before or after the election, and said that the best plausible scenario… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Air Force has relieved the commander of its 8th Special Operations Squadron “because of a loss of confidence in his ability to effectively command the unit” in the wake of a tiltrotor CV-22 Osprey crash June 13 that injured all five crew members and destroyed the aircraft. Col. James Slife, commanding officer of… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Nixon, Ford, and Carter aren’t anyone’s three favorite presidents. But defense policymakers today could learn something from how they handled the hard times of the 1970s: They shifted costly security burdens to foreign partners while pulling US forces out, and they cut defense budgets generally while protecting long-term investments in “seed corn” technologies that… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: When Bob Stevens, CEO of Lockheed Martin, delivered his now annual speech before the Farnborough or Paris air show, he didn’t talk much about international sales or the Joint Strike Fighter or the military threats America faces. Instead, Stevens talked mostly about the mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration and the “fog of uncertainty”… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: How much will it really cost to shut down the Army’s ill-fated Future Combat Systems program? Up to $1.5 billion, potentially three times the “special termination cost” reported by Inside Defense on Friday. Three years after then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cancelled the sprawling FCS program — the Army’s ambitious attempt to build a… Keep reading →

UPDATED: Lockheed’s Skunk Works Confirms It’s Their Bird (Tuesday 1 p.m.) OK. Let’s get this out in the open. Neither you nor I are likely to learn the truth about the image of that thing that might be a plane under the white covering. But there’s this website called Open Source Geoint and it has… Keep reading →

A second, “small” fire broke out at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on Saturday night, in the drydock where the fire-ravaged USS Miami is under repair, the shipyard’s public affairs office announced at noon today. There was no new damage to the Miami itself, and in fact a quick-thinking shipyard employee put out the blaze with a… Keep reading →

MOSCOW: Could this be the make-or-break negotiation in the Iranian nuclear crisis? Iran meets with the United States and five other nations in Moscow on Monday over its nuclear program. It is their third session in three months in the latest round of an almost decade-old attempt to answer fears that Iran seeks the bomb.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: An Army general was named Friday to head plans and policy at Cyber Command, based at Fort Meade, Maryland. Maj. Gen. Jennifer Napper is moving from Fort Huachuca, where she headed Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, to Fort Meade, where she’ll be the director of plans and policy — staff section J-5 — for… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: This is a deflating month – literally — for Mav6, a small Mississippi defense company that’s been working five years to complete a massive military airship, the unmanned M1400 Blue Devil II intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) craft. On orders from the Air Force, “We’ve started to disassemble the airship,” reports David Deptula, CEO… Keep reading →