Wednesday, March 19, 2025
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 Pentagon on Friday placed orders for 2,214 armored trucks worth $1.1 billion with two firms that build Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle variants favored by the Army, a package that appears to signal the end of U.S. military MRAP orders for Force Protection Industries, whose products helped inspire the $22 billion MRAP program.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Strike Fighter office have asked military cost experts to audit the tri-service program in a bid to provide an "independent" assessment of the effort's true cost, which congressional investigators this week said are spiraling higher.
The Pentagon is enacting fundamental changes to how the military services construct their six-year investment plans, giving combatant commanders unprecedented influence to identify needed new capabilities and adopting a framework designed to allow decision-makers to move resources between service budgets.
Marking a new and more public appeal for resources, a key Army general last week said the Defense Department knows "with a fair degree of certainty" that the ground service requires as much as $260 billion annually so long as troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan remain near where they are today.
The House and Senate committees charged with setting the size of the federal government's fiscal year 2009 budget this week proposed defense allocations in line with what the Pentagon is seeking, signaling that the only adjustments to the Defense Department's spending request are likely to be minor shifts within -- and between -- accounts.
The Defense Department has detected a sharp increase in the use of crude submarines by South American drug cartels who are finding new ways to ferry tons of contraband and avoid interdiction, according to a senior U.S. military official.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates should "exercise strong leadership" during this year's congressionally mandated roles and missions review and use it to clarify the military services' responsibilities for relatively new operational areas including cyber warfare, information operations and unmanned aerial vehicles, according to a key lawmaker.
Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have eaten a $9 billion hole in the Army's prepositioned stocks that will take two years longer than previously planned to replenish, hampering the service's ability to quickly respond to new crises in another part of the world.
The Pentagon is actively considering whether to adopt as a formal position the recent call by some military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to peg annual military spending to a fixed portion of the total size of the U.S. economy.
In a bid to make the U.S. military's civilian workforce more expeditionary, the Pentagon has issued new guidelines designed to increase the Defense Department's capacity to surge non-military personnel in support of operations like those under way in Iraq and Afghanistan.
An ad hoc congressional panel established last year to frame the debate in advance of a sweeping legislative effort to overhaul U.S. national security organizations is set to release a report that explores institutional weaknesses by looking at the roles and missions of the armed forces as well as other agencies of federal power.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey, following an address to defense industry representatives and military officials on Jan. 16, cut short a question from the audience about presidential candidates with a proclamation: "I don't do politics."
The Pentagon has commissioned a task force to investigate acquisition practices linked to staggering cost growth and schedule delays bedeviling some of the military's most important new weapon system programs, including the VH-71 presidential helicopter, the Littoral Combat Ship and the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter.
The U.S. military's marquee radio modernization program experienced significant cost growth at the end of last year, compelling the Pentagon to notify Congress that the total price tag for the effort had grown at least 15 percent above its original $19 billion target.
The Pentagon's No. 2 official cautioned lawmakers this week against a delay that might push funding for fiscal year 2009 war costs into the fall, arguing that such a holdup could saddle the next administration's Defense Department transition team with "budget turmoil" and risk the security of U.S. troops as well as the nation.
As part of its efforts to ensure the industrial base is equipped to properly supply the armed forces, the Defense Department is planning a new program that aims to rectify a shortfall in the private sector's ability to produce low-cost, low-weight, high-strength materials.
Service leaders have compiled "wish lists" worth more than $30 billion to buy additional major weaponry -- including combat aircraft, warships, and a full range of tactical ground vehicles -- that are not funded in the Pentagon's fiscal year 2009 budget request or in the forthcoming war cost spending proposals for FY-09.
Pentagon energy policies are riddled with shortcomings that place critical military installations at "unacceptable risk" of a blackout and foster "unnecessarily high" fuel demands by operational forces, driving up weapon system ownership costs and exposing support units to unnecessary risk, according to a new report.
The Pentagon's No. 2 official today said the Defense Department plans to replace any F-15s found to be structurally unfit with multirole F-35 Joint Strike Fighters rather than F-22A Raptors, which originally were designed to assume the F-15s' air superiority mission for the Air Force.
The Air Force has compiled an $18.75 billion list of weapon systems and programs it says are critical to meeting its "required force" and are not paid for in the Pentagon's fiscal year 2009 budget request.