Sunday, May 12, 2024
The government must develop a comprehensive national strategy for the aerospace industry that offers a 20-year vision instead of a fixation with next year's budget cycle or the next Quadrennial Defense Review, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) said today.
The new chairman of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, Norm Dicks (D-WA), took aim at assertions made by Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn today and in the Quadrennial Defense Review that the Pentagon is comprehensively assessing the status of the manufacturing base.
By the end of the year, the U.S. military expects to have "very robust" tools in Afghanistan to counter improvised explosive devices geared toward the fight there but never used during the war in Iraq, a senior defense official said today.
Pentagon acquisition czar Ashton Carter said today he is concerned a congressional report urging the Pentagon to expand a new performance assessment office created last year in a bid to revamp the defense acquisition system may create more hurdles instead of introducing a new management tool.
The Pentagon must revamp its acquisition system by emulating the way the Government Accountability Office routinely identifies problems, according to a congressional report due out today.
As the United States draws down its combat strength in Iraq, the U.S. transitional force there will continue to support efforts to keep the peace along "Arab-Kurd fault lines" in the northern part of the country as long as Baghdad wants it to, a U.S. defense official said today.
Once rising violence linked to the flow of additional U.S. forces into Afghanistan begins to wane, the military can move away from the "enormous" challenges of resupplying troops by air and look more to ground transportation, a senior logistician told defense reporters today.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates should create two bipartisan commissions to address rising military health care and high infrastructure costs while strengthening the Pentagon's human capital capacity, according to a draft Defense Business Board report.
Egypt, the No. 4 buyer of U.S. weapons and military equipment, has requested defense-related items worth more than $1 billion ranging from engine upgrades to missiles, according to Defense Security Cooperation Agency notifications issued this month.
European countries are looking to the United States to act on Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Aug. 30 assessment on the war in Afghanistan, a waiting period that hinders the overall continental debate about increasing allied troop strength in the country, a senior Pentagon official said today.
As part of the Quadrennial Defense Review, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is directing U.S. forces in South Korea to determine the number of American troops needed in the country over the next 20 years, Army Gen. Walter Sharp, commander of United States Forces Korea, said today.
The Defense Science Board this week urged the Pentagon to formalize a dual acquisition path to meet troops' urgent needs in two to 24 months and to create a new equipment-fielding agency.
The Quadrennial Defense Review will address cybersecurity in a variety of ways as the threat of network attacks against the Pentagon grows, Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn said today.
The North Korean government's decision to conduct nuclear and missile tests this week underscores "a very real danger that their example will be contagious" to other nations, former Defense Secretary William Perry said today.
The Defense Department is considering adopting a cost-saving recommendation that would factor in the actual fuel costs of a weapons program -- the so-called "fully burdened cost of energy" -- as work begins on a new system, Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter said today.
The entire Future Combat Systems program has "been ended, but modernization of the Army can't end," Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter said today.
France plans to issue a request for information for a new tanker fleet that must be interoperable with U.S. and allied equipment, Maj. Gen. Gratien Maire, the French defense attaché in Washington, said today at a breakfast with reporters.
Proposed cuts to key military programs will be offset by other service gains and likely will not hurt the defense industrial base, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today.
The Senate Armed Services Committee today amended a bill to reform the weapons-acquisition system, making it more flexible on the handling of organizational conflicts of interest but declining to heed all of the changes proposed by the Pentagon and industry -- including pleas to drop certain amendments to the so-called Nunn-McCurdy law.
Building civilian capacity will be one of the main thrusts of the Quadrennial Defense Review, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy said today.