Procurement
Thar She Floats!
The Army has finally got its football-field-sized Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) airborne over the Jersey coast. The huge unmanned spy platform is designed to give the U.S. military “more than 21 days of unblinking stare,” contractor Northrop Grumman says.
Not all of its numbers are so stupendous: it boasts a …
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
…
Beijing Doubling-Down on Stealth Fighters
If a single stealth fighter is good, two must be better. The U.S. military, after all, thinks so: look at its F-22 and F-35 warplanes.
And now China is apparently joining the two-stealth-birds-in-the-hand are worth …
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 …
Blast Effects
War is action v. reaction. The insurgents got the upper hand in Iraq with their improvised explosive devices. We countered with $40 billion worth of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. That worked for a while.
But the advantage is shrinking. Six U.S. troops, all inside a single MRAP, died Sunday in Afghanistan in the blast of a …
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 …
Make That Airman a General!
The Schriever Sentinel reports that an (unfortunately unidentified) airman at Colorado’s Buckley Air Force Base wondered earlier this year how come the reverse sides of signs on post needed to be painted brown. After all, he reasoned, the base could save money if they were left in their original galvanized state.
Bingo! His …
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
…
Courage Services, Inv. (as in, Invisible)
The outsourcing of what used to be thought of as vital governmental functions continues. Public Intelligence posted this last week on its website. It’s basically a 2009 intelligence report done for the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity by an outfit calling itself Courage Services, Inc. Its nifty corporate logo appears on the …
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 …