Friday, April 19, 2024
Jason Sherman is a reporter for Inside Defense. For more than two decades -- including stints with Defense News and Armed Forces Journal -- he has covered the Pentagon, defense industry, the military budget, weapon system acquisition and defense policy formulation as well as reporting on technology, business, and global arms trade. Jason has traveled to more than 40 countries, studied medieval history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and lives in Brooklyn.
The House as soon as next week is set to take up a $165.4 billion war-cost spending bill packed with $51.8 billion for new weapon systems, including $2.3 billion for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities and $3.7 billion to counter roadside bombs, two capabilities that are top priorities for Pentagon leaders.
The Pentagon's top officer has directed his staff to size up the national security implications of what many experts believe is a global food crisis, the latest development in a wider push by Defense Department planners to increasingly factor non-military dynamics with the potential to disrupt international order into contingency plans.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead is establishing a permanent Pentagon office to fight the sea service's political and resource battles during the high-stakes internal Defense Department assessments set to come around every two years, requiring a defense of Navy roles and missions as well as long-term weapon systems and force structure investment plans.
The Defense Department is forming seven working groups to examine "priority" roles and missions issues, a few of which could plunge the military services into bitter internecine turf battles and give the Bush administration's Office of the Secretary of Defense a parting opportunity this summer to realign the defense bureaucracy.
The Defense Department's weak enforcement of procedures designed to protect classified technologies on the Joint Strike Fighter program may have resulted in a security breach that allowed the unauthorized transfer of advanced aviation and weapons technology to foreign defense companies, according to the Pentagon's inspector general.
The Pentagon has updated the early warning system it uses to monitor the health of companies that produce weapons for U.S. forces, adding new fidelity to its analysis of financial and economic data in an effort to improve its picture of the viability of key defense industry sectors.
A proposed framework for a major internal Pentagon review of U.S. military roles and missions is undergoing a high-level critique by senior uniformed officials who hope by mid-May to secure an agreement among key four-star generals and admirals on the scope of the potentially contentious assessment, according to Defense Department officials.
In 2007, the federal government blocked just one of 54 domestic industry merger and acquisition deals involving companies that do business with the Pentagon while allowing all 39 proposed acquisitions of U.S. firms by foreign companies, according to a new Defense Department report.
MARIETTA, GA -- Anticipating a need to modernize the U.S. military's fleet of intra-theater airlifters and looking to keep its production line here busy into the next decade, Lockheed Martin has submitted to the Air Force an unsolicited offer for a multiyear contract to build 120 C-130Js between fiscal years 2011 and 2015.
A powerful Pentagon office responsible for critiquing the military service's six-year investment plans last week handed down a sweeping set of recommendations for new capabilities the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps should buy, a move that reflects the growing role of combatant commanders in shaping the Defense Department budget.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to meet tomorrow with the service chiefs and civilian Pentagon leaders to attempt to reconcile differing views on the scope of a roles-and-missions review the Defense Department is preparing to launch, according to military sources.
A new initiative designed to ensure that all ship, aircraft, satellite and truck programs included in the Pentagon's six-year investment blueprint are fully funded is expected to result in some program terminations this spring, as Defense Department leaders aim to craft a sustainable modernization program predicated on realistic cost estimates.
Pentagon leaders this week moved to strike a delicate balance in launching a congressionally mandated military roles and missions review that aims to satisfy lawmakers without triggering a full-blown bureaucratic turf war between the services, according to Defense Department officials.
Concerned over a senior Army official's warning about the adverse effects of a delayed war-cost spending bill, 25 Republican lawmakers are urging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to act quickly on the balance of the Pentagon's fiscal year 2008 supplemental spending request.
The Army says it faces a $33 billion equipment shortfall across its five-year investment plan, far less than the $56 billion shortfall service leaders said the ground force faced at the outset of hostilities against Afghanistan in 2001.
The Bush administration this week directed the Defense Department and the rest of the federal government to draft plans for a fiscal year 2010 spending request that allow the next administration maximum opportunity to influence the final budget proposal.
The price tag for the U.S. military's premier shoulder-fired, anti-armor missile surged unexpectedly in fiscal year 2008, forcing the Pentagon to notify Congress this week that the Javelin program is in "significant" breach of unit cost thresholds set by Nunn-McCurdy laws, legislative provisions designed to flag procurement efforts that are in trouble.
The Pentagon's weapon system modernization accounts are poised for a slight boost in fiscal year 2010 but projected to decline steadily through FY-13, according to newly disclosed details from the Defense Department's investment blueprint.
The Army is laying plans for a significant expansion of its Stryker vehicle fleet as part of a wider combat wheeled vehicle strategy that is still in development in a bid to add as many as 2,000 of the eight-wheeled combat vehicles to the Pentagon's six-year acquisition plan, according to sources and documents.
The Air Force says that fiscal year 2008 funding for the KC-45 program will not be raided this summer to pay for other Pentagon priorities if Boeing's protest of the decision to award the tanker contract to Northrop Grumman is denied by the Government Accountability Office.