When House Armed Services Chairman Thornberry proposed eliminating seven agencies and reducing personnel by 25 percent, he faced strong opposition. In the HASC’s draft bill, he scaled the proposal back to eliminating just three agencies. But that didn’t work either. During the committee’s markup of the House defense policy bill, members still pushed back.

The Navy hasn’t done a two-carrier deal since the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, when the Nimitz-class carriers being built, the state of the industrial base, the size of the budget, and the statutes governing shipbuilding were all very different. So how would it work today?

UPDATED with Harrison & Hunter analysis WASHINGTON: To prevent a repeat of last year’s lethal accidents, Senate authorizers Roger Wicker and John McCain want to give the Navy unprecedented flexibility to retain experienced officers and spend readiness funds. But the provision to let the Navy spend Operations & Maintenance money as late as in the fiscal… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: After Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took the extraordinary step today of appearing at the White House to praise the just-announced Senate budget deal, the first thought that came to mind was — can this pass the House? Mattis was asked if he knew whether the House Republican leadership was enthusiastic about Senate deal. He… Keep reading →

This is a list of the most important stories and opinion pieces we ran at Breaking Defense in 2017. It’s a bit like our coverage: freewheeling, often unexpected and, hopefully, poking at the spots where policymakers in the US, NATO, Australia, Japan, South Korea and our other treaty allies and partners need to look. We… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has asked legislators to repeal an obscure statute that he says hinders Navy readiness in the Pacific, where accidents this summer killed 17 sailors. Armed Services committee leaders seem receptive, but it’s the appropriators who’ll have to change the provision in question, which was written by their late, great chairman… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: Navy Secretary Richard Spencer wants to change the law that’s governed the armed forces since 1986, the Goldwater-Nichols Act, to restore more autonomy to the services. Only by letting the Navy say “no” to joint combatant commanders’ insatiable demands for deployments can the fleet get adequate training, ship maintenance, and crew rest, argues the… Keep reading →

We’re partnering with the Center for Strategic and International Studies to bring you their fab Bad Ideas series through the Christmas holiday season. They produced three today. I’m betting Sen. John McCain will most enjoy the first of the three, this one by Andrew Hunter, on why it’s so damn complex and often difficult to know just… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: The Pentagon, clearly looking ahead to bolster the defense industrial base, is taking steps to ease and speed Foreign Military Sales, and it has a pilot program underway to reduce the time it takes to execute program acquisition. But let’s be clear: this is not an acquisition reform story; it’s an acquisition improvement… Keep reading →

The defense community is abuzz with talk of strategy and force expansion as the Pentagon develops the Trump Administration’s National Security Strategy. Talk is nice but, as budgeteers like to say, “If it ain’t funded, it ain’t”. Building the forces the services say they need—with the readiness and modernization to support them— requires large budgets,… Keep reading →