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 Army's top uniformed officer says the ground service could use nearly $4 billion more in fiscal year 2009 to buy new capabilities for the Army National Guard, including new light and heavy tactical vehicles, logistics equipment and intelligence tools.
The Pentagon is again seeking to establish a Rapid Acquisition Fund in its base budget to quickly finance the development and fielding of technologies that warfighters say are needed immediately, arguing in stark terms that without such an account select military missions will fail and place American personnel at serious risk.
The Marine Corps has tallied up $3 billion worth of key projects that were not funded in the Pentagon's fiscal year 2009 budget request, including a $1.7 billion warship, a down payment on seven aircraft and more than 1,000 new light tactical vehicles.
NEW YORK -- The Defense Department's top officer is directing the Joint Staff to assess the significance of the U.S.
NEW YORK -- A weak dollar, rising oil prices, escalating inflation rates and growing health care costs are pecking away at the U.S. military's purchasing power, forcing the Pentagon in fiscal year 2009 to spend billions of dollars that might have been spent on modernization on other priorities in order to keep pace with changes in the global economic landscape.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates today revealed the Pentagon's $515.4 billion spending request for fiscal year 2009, a total that is $4.4 billion larger than the U.S. military expected last fall but includes only $183.8 billion for weapon system modernization, $3.8 billion less than what the Defense Department expected last year.
The Pentagon is gearing up for a high-stakes review this year over the division of labor among the armed services, an assessment that aims to assign "core competencies" to each branch and create designations expected to be used as a basis for allocating resources and funding acquisition plans.
A new report by an influential Defense Department advisory panel calls for "a commitment not yet seen" to winning the war of ideas in the U.S. government's global counterterrorism campaign, including the creation of a permanent Pentagon leadership position to oversee strategic communications efforts.
The Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force are drawing up wish lists of weapon systems and other priorities not funded in either the Pentagon's base budget request for fiscal year 2009 or the FY-09 supplemental spending request being crafted to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Army plans to stand up new units focused on enhancing the capabilities of foreign armies, an effort by the ground service to enhance its contribution to the Defense Department's ambitious policy of policing ungoverned spaces around the globe where terrorists might seek refuge.
Boeing officials say they are putting the KC-767 tanker built for Japan through a final round of evaluations in a bid for Federal Aviation Administration certification permitting the aircraft to carry personnel and cargo -- a designation the company failed to secure last spring, forcing a one-year delay in delivery of the first aerial refueling tanker to Tokyo.
The Army cannot adequately justify the $70 billion price tag for its seven-year plan to "grow the force," according to a top congressional investigator who warns in a new assessment that the ultimate cost of the service's end-strength increase could balloon once a range of additional factors are accounted for, including health care costs and facilities to accommodate new units.
The Defense Department has divvied up the 3,126 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles that it ordered Dec. 18 -- the single largest block of blast-proof trucks purchased to date -- directing nearly 90 percent to the Army.
The Bush administration is giving the Pentagon's fiscal year 2009 spending request a slight boost to offset higher-than-expected fuel and health care costs, tacking as much as $5 billion onto the $511 billion base budget allocation set in 2006 by the White House and reaffirmed as recently as late November.
The Pentagon plans to delay the delivery of its fiscal year 2009 war cost estimate until at least the spring and will transmit only its base budget request to Congress next month, according to Defense Department officials.
The Army and Marine Corps plan to formally invite industry to submit proposals for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program "on or about" Feb. 1, setting in motion a competition for a 27-month technology development effort that would commence in June with contract awards to two or more firms.
A year ago last fall, the Pentagon chartered a think tank to chew over a problem that was largely academic: What sort of capabilities and posture are required to prevent state failure and collapse in nations that are "crucial" to the U.S.-led global war on terrorism, including those possessing weapons of mass destruction?
Armored truck builders produced 1,187 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles in December, according to an internal Pentagon document, just shy of the year-end monthly production target of 1,280 vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert Gates set in July.
An influential Pentagon advisory panel that aims to improve U.S. military capabilities through new uses of technology is training its focus toward social sciences in a bid to determine whether a push for greater cultural awareness across the Defense Department demands new technology projects.
In a bid to imbue the U.S. military's massive humvee-replacement program with as much innovation and competition as possible, the Pentagon's acquisition executive is advocating no fewer than three industry teams receive development contracts for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program.