Over the last few months, the aerospace industry has become a thespian, staging a drama of fear about the impact of a sequester on defense. Lockheed CEO Robert Stevens warned his employees that as many at 10,000 Lockheed jobs …
Defense Contractors
What Defense Cuts?
The fear-mongering about impending defense cuts is becoming deafening. Yet even if sequestration happens in January, the Congressional Budget Office says the Pentagon will still be spending as much as it did in 2006. While the cuts may be crude – that is how Congress wrote the law imposing it – they are not draconian.
Here’s a …
Iraq: The Steaks Were High
Major Bryan Cecrie spent much of 2005 in Iraq’s “triangle of death” south of Baghdad. The horrors of war were real, and meals were supposed to be an opportunity to take the edge off, he told the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in this April interview:
The cooks always think they are doing you a favor when
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Sequestration’s Shadow Darkens
House and Senate Republican leaders released a letter Friday — the 13th — that will effectively kill an increasingly favored option in Washington to temporarily delay the onset of sequestration (automatic budget cuts) by three or six months.
It comes on the heels of President Obama’s former campaign manager floating the idea …
Dari + Pashto = Big Bucks
Why Building Stuff in Afghanistan Costs So Much
Here’s part of the reason we’re spending so much money in Afghanistan. Just take a look at some of the pieces of a solicitation seeking a Swiss-Army-Knife complex to house a Ministry of Interior Supply Point, Fire Department, and Uniformed Police District Headquarters, in Nimroz province in the southwestern corner of the …
How the F-35 Nearly Doubled In Price (And Why You Didn’t Know)
On June 14 — Flag Day, of all days — the Government Accountability Office released a new oversight report on the F-35: Joint Strike Fighter: DOD Actions Needed to Further Enhance Restructuring and Address Affordability Risks. …
Parting Gift?
Having flown on the C-17 many times, Battleland knows it’s a good airplane. Production of the cargo aircraft for the U.S. Air Force is all but done; the Pentagon stopped listing it in its regular cost reports back in 2009. That …
A Quarter-Billion Dollars?
What does the Pentagon get for that kind of money these days? Well, according to a Navy contract announced Tuesday, it gets five years of
…leadership teams, providing expertise in change management, barrier identification and
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Chinese Takeout: Powered by Pratt & Whitney
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin probably never uttered or wrote this quote often attributed to him:
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
Unfortunately, you can’t say the same thing about the Justice …
Mongers
Sequestration continues to loom. That’s the law Congress passed last year, duly signed by the President, that requires $1.2 trillion in automatic deficit-reduction cuts over the coming decade. They’d come from discretionary spending if lawmakers and the President can’t come up with a better idea by Jan. 2.
Half of those cuts …
Probably Not Vanilla Wafers
From Monday’s contract announcements:
The Boeing Co., Huntington Beach, Calif., is being awarded a $36,197,205 firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to produce 12 modified wafers for the Minuteman III missile system. The location of the performance is Orange County, Md. Work is to be completed by Aug. 31, 2015.
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