CAPITOL HILL: Chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services committees take pride in the fact their panels have gotten 53 annual defense bills in a row through the often tortuous negotiations required to clear Congress. And Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has often made known his view that the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The presumptive Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, has told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the most pressing areas of concern for the US military are its cyber and space capabilities; modernizing its nuclear weapons and their delivery systems; and assuring that American forces can penetrate any set of defenses anywhere in the world. He also… Keep reading →

Robert Hale, former budget god (comptroller) at the Pentagon, is good with numbers, especially defense budget numbers. And he speaks about them in clear, simply structured and well expressed English. Here he tackles one of the two or three thorniest issues facing the leadership of the US military: how to rein in the enormous growth… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Army officers and officials hit Capitol Hill this afternoon to brief congressional staff on the coming round of personnel cuts. We’ve known for over a year that the Army would cut 40,000 active-duty soldiers — going down from 490,000 troops to 450,000 — but now the service is finally saying which units get cut. Further,… Keep reading →

UPDATED with Thornberry response CAPITOL HILL: The $612 billion National Defense Authorization Act for 2016 passed the Senate by a vote of 71 to 25 today. The final version could emerge from a House-Senate conference in “early July,” Senate Armed Services chairman Jon McCain said boldly at a press conference this afternoon. That would be… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: Who buys the bandwidth? Today the military has two separate, unequal, and inefficient systems for acquiring communications. But Congress is pushing hard to consolidate — probably at the expense of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). “I have been in situations where we needed to have SATCOM [satellite communications] and we didn’t have… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: The Pentagon’s top acquisition official, Frank Kendall, and the head of Air Force acquisition, Bill LaPlante, have just completed a review of the Long Range Strike Bomber program. “We looked at the design to make sure it’s at the level of maturity it’s supposed to be,” Kendall told me in an interview in his… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Sen. John McCain wants the four services chiefs to have more power to buy weapons efficiently and cheaply. Frank Kendall and his colleagues who oversee Pentagon acquisition, technology and logistics (ATL) have made it pretty clear they don’t think that’s a good idea. So I asked the chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Senate Armed Services Committee has joined the push to give the Army a much larger role in the Pacific. The hard part, ironically, may be getting the Army to go along. Why should soldiers do more in the Pacific, a theater traditionally dominated by pilots, Marines, and, above all, sailors? The Pacific, obviously, is… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: With new missile threats proliferating worldwide, both the House and Senate versions of the annual defense policy bill push new approaches to missile defense such as laser weapons and “boost phase” defenses that shoot down missiles just after launch. That’s also why one of Washington’s foremost thinktanks has launched a new program on the problem.… Keep reading →