There are basically three reasons to cancel an acquisition program. In no particular order, the reasons are:
We can’t afford it.
We don’t need it.
It doesn’t work.
This means Defense Department leaders have to continually ask three important questions throughout the development of a new military system:
Now that we have West Coast missile defenses to protect us from ICBMs North Korea doesn’t have, the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee wants the Pentagon to consider building an East Coast shield to protect us from ICBMs Iran doesn’t have.
Here’s the language from its slice of the proposed 2013 …
There’s a lot of criticism these days of a practice called concurrency, an engineering approach the DoD implemented a reform or two ago. Concurrency was supposed to help move things to the field faster. Unfortunately, like many …
These are the first two contracts in the Pentagon’s Tuesday list (click on them to enlarge). They’re for changes to be made to the F-35 fighter’s design. Even though the planes already are coming off Lockheed’s Fort Worth assembly line (the machinists’ strike launched Sunday nonwithstanding), changes in the $400 billion program’s …
This simple graphic, from a Government Accountability Office report released Friday, shows how weapons should be developed:
After all, it makes sense: you don’t start building something until you’ve developed the technology it needs to work. Then you develop the weapon. Only after those two steps do you begin bending metal, as they say, …
So the Air Force announces this contract Friday afternoon. The only description of what’s being bought and/or upgraded are “pods.” C’mon Air Force: Aim High, and tell us taxpayers what you’re buying for $53 million.
Northrop Grumman Technical Services, Herndon, Va., is being awarded a $52,848,888 fixed-price-incentive-firm,
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The Oxbridge lads at the Economist write an editorial this week on the world’s costliest weapons system ever: the Pentagon’s own F-35 fighter. And while it doesn’t quite rise to sublime Benny Hill quality, it’s pretty close to Monty Python.
…a repeat of the embarrassing B-2 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during NATO’s 1999 war on Serbia. The Pentagon awarded this “experimental serious games” contract (for $9-million-plus, it had better be serious) Thursday (click on it to enlarge). Just in time, too. Wouldn’t want to blow the Chinese Embassy in Tehran …
For a good example of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex’s (MICC’s) value system — which is hardware before ideas and people — read this New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof.
Note his opening paragraph:
Here’s a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this
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Laser, née L.A.S.E.R. – for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation – might as well stand for Late And So Extraordinarily Recondite (adj., meaning mysterious, esoteric) at the Pentagon. Defense officials talk …
Once again, there’s something – no one will say just what – that the Air Force’s $15 million Massive Ordnance Penetrator can’t do, or can’t do well enough. That’s the 15-ton, Boeing-built bomb the U.S. now has on hand to use against deeply-buried bunkers in places like Iran.
On Thursday, the Air Force awarded this …
“They'll go dead about the time that we wake up.”
That’s a nautical term, but it can apply to the skies as well. The Pentagon’s new aviation-spending plan shows that the number of warplanes in its inventory will be “relatively constant” from now until 2022. It’s going to cost us $770 billion over the coming decade to maintain a force of this size, which includes a 50% …
