Winslow Wheeler

The Defense Budget Is Even Larger Than You Think: part two of two

Given the warped measures that high-spending advocates and the Defense Department use to calibrate past, present and future defense spending (described here …

The Defense Budget Is Even Larger than You Think: Part one of two.

The Pentagon’s budget has increased, over time, much more than the Defense Department tells Congress, and the public.

The vast majority of people in …

Part 5 of 5

Each year the Defense Department’s comptroller, the Pentagon’s chief financial officer, publishes a report: Program Acquisition Costs by Weapon System.

The public and Congress have a right to expect these …

Part 4 of 5

All good fighter jets are designed to climb into the sky. Unfortunately for the F-35, its price tag — as we have pointed out this week — is joining in the ascent as its fiscal wingman.

And it doesn’t matter …

Part 3 of 5

Because of the “learning curve” and other problems in the Pentagon’s Selected Acquisition Reports (discussed in my prior post), objective observers need to find better data for measuring the cost of an …

Part 2 of 5

The cost of an F-35 is currently increasing, more than likely to remain high, and very unlikely to even approach the low levels being articulated by Pentagon managers and documents.

But F-35 costs are clouded by …

Part 1 of 5

There has been a lot of good news for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter recently. No longer are top Department of Defense officials covering their bets by casting aspersions at it; they are rallying to its defense, …

Budgets are important documents: they are the ultimate expression of policy by a President or Congress.

Budgets are also a useful revelation of the character and competence of those who put them together.

President Obama’s …

[WARNING: For serious national-security budget experts only. May cause headaches, blurry vision and heart palpitations among normal taxpayers. The editors.]

Pentagon budget rollouts are always part fact, part fiction, with …

The Marines issued a flashy press release last week: “first operational F-35B conducts initial Vertical Landing.” It was an amateurish, somewhat slimy piece of hype.

In one important way, the press release contradicted …

There’s a new and disquieting Pentagon report on the troubled $400 billion tri-service F-35 fighter.

It includes stunning pilot comments about the aircraft’s survivability (“Aft visibility will get the pilot gunned [down] …

Watching the Senate Armed Services Committee interact Thursday with former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel—President Obama’s candidate to be secretary of defense—was a profoundly depressing experience.

Hagel’s …

It’s old, and likely thoroughly forgotten now, but last summer the Washington Post ran an excellent article on the U.S. military‘s “pivot” toward Asia, its origins, and its budget implications. It presented some meaningful …