From the category archives:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to announce in a Pentagon press conference today the elimination of U.S. Joint Forces Command, based at Norfolk, Va., as part of a broad restructuring aimed at cutting costs. He will also announce a 10 percent reduction in the use of contractors next year, according to news reports. DoD has set a goal to reduce its costs by $100 billion over the next five years, primarily through reductions in overhead.
– Greg Grant
The RAF’s 120 strong Tornado GR4 fleet may be the next victim in the major defense cost cutting exercise underway in Britain, according to leaked reports to the BBC. From the sounds of it, the British military is about to be gutted by forced government austerity measures as Britian suffers through a sluggish economy.
Britain’s Ministry of Defense is undertaking a “mother of horrors” cost cutting review aimed at realizing somewhere between 10 to 20 percent savings, says defense secretary Liam Fox.
“According to the whisperings from the Ministry of Defence the army may have to give up whole brigades, armoured formations and artillery units; the air force is considering abandoning maritime surveillance aircraft and retiring its fleet of Tornado strike aircraft and Harrier jump-jets; the navy may be made to give up the Royal Marines and amphibious landing ships; and the submarines carrying the nuclear deterrent may be cut from four to three.”
Chop the Royal Marines? I don’t see how the UK pulls off any overseas deployment besides the barest of presence missions if real muscle is cut as the Economist suggests. It’s not like the Brits are capability heavy to begin with; for the past few years, the British Army has struggled to maintain a capable fighting force in southern Afghanistan.
As independent panel reports go here in Washington, D.C., this one just released by the Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, co-chaired by former Bush administration National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Clinton-era defense secretary William Perry, is really awful.
It recommends buying more of pretty much every weapon system or at least replacing the current inventory on a one-to-one basis, maintaining ground forces at current levels, expanding the Air Force, greatly expanding the Navy’s battle fleet and to pay for all of that the panel recommends increasing the defense budget.
For an example of how unserious this report truly is, the panel took as its force planning default the 1993 Bottom Up Review. How a strategic analysis conducted in 2010 can look backwards 17 years to come up with a force planning model is beyond me. Has the strategic landscape not changed dramatically over the past two decades?
As frenetic stock-picking, carnival barker Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money, says: listen to company quarterly earnings reports, you can learn a lot. On Lockheed Martin’s 2nd quarter conference call yesterday, CEO Bob Stevens told Wall Street analysts (transcript here) the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program was at a “critical juncture” as it transitions from development into production.
The systems development and demonstration phase is about 80 percent complete, he said. Of the 19 planned test aircraft, 15 have been delivered; only 13 will actually fly, the others are for structural tests. Nine of the “flyers” have so far completed a total of 136 test flights: the F-35A has flown 56 times; the F-35B short-takeoff and landing version has flown 74 times: and the carrier variant F-35C has flown six times.
While the 74 test flights of the F-35B might look impressive, its actually behind schedule; it was supposed to have flown 95 times by now, Stevens said. “Higher than predicted” failure rates of component parts have grounded some F-35B test aircraft. Stevens described the failing parts as sub-components, not major parts such as the engine, which has been performing well.
“The components that are failing are more of the things that would appear either smaller or more ordinary like thermal cooling fans, door actuators, selected valves or switches or components of the power system.”
Yet, testers have had to pull the engines out to access those failed components and the follow-on maintenance has taken far longer than expected, Stevens said. Lockheed and its suppliers are trying to figure out whether the problems lie in botched manufacturing (Friday jobs), whether the design of the parts must be changed or whether the program needs to buy more spares. Stevens said the problem is fixable.
Although feeling the pressure from aircraft manufacturers in China spitting out passable knock-offs of its own designs, Russia will maintain its second place position behind the U.S. in global fighter sales at least until 2013, according to a Moscow think tank.
Russia sold 476 fighters worth $27.7 billion from 2006 to 2009. That number is expected to double in the next four years with the global demand for Sukhois and MiGs rising to nearly 200 planes a year. India is the top buyer of Russian fighter jets. Russia’s state arms exporter Rosoboronexport says Russia could sign its first contract for the export of the Su-35 Flanker-E by the end of the year.
Russia has begun to restrict the export of some advanced aircraft components, mostly engines and avionics, to China, as Chinese manufacturers steal market share away by offering Russian knock-offs at far less cost. China currently sits in third place in terms of aircraft exporters, followed by Britain, Sweden and France.
– Greg Grant
Saudi Arabia plans to buy 84 new F-15s along with some 72 UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, defense officials tell Bloomberg. Navy Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), said Congress will be notified of the sale in the next couple of months.
We reported on the pending sale last September; Boeing reps told us then that the sale would most likely be the F-15SG configuration, an advanced version of the F-15E fitted with Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar and a third generation Lockheed Martin SNIPER targeting pod.
Pentagon sources told us the sale had been held up at the State Department by concerns over maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge (QME) over its Arab neighbors. The Obama administration wants to sell advanced military hardware to the Saudis to counter Iran’s growing power. Since U.S. military aid to Israel is specifically intended to maintain that QME, and since the U.S. is also such a large supplier to the Saudis, it’s always a political dance when making sales to either countries.
– Greg Grant
Raytheon married-up a 32 kilowatt solid state laser to the Navy’s Phalanx close-in defense system and used it to shoot down four aerial drones off the West coast. Laser Phalanx detected, tracked and shot down all four target drones, Raytheon’s Mike Booen tells DOD Buzz’s Colin Clark. Check in often over at DOD Buzz for frequent Farnborough Air Show updates. Colin’s initial take: a black rain cloud of declining U.S. and European defense budgets has settled over the show.
– Greg Grant
Could a downshift in requirements for the Air Force’s new search and rescue helicopter, the CSAR-X, herald a new acquisition era? Well, we are living in the Robert Gates era at the Pentagon so most anything short of reinstituting the draft seems possible.
This one is pretty significant: Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin are teaming-up to bid a modified Blackhawk helicopter for the CSAR-X, basically a recapitalization of the current fleet of 112 HH-60G Pave Hawks. That would mark a pretty serious departure from a $15 billion new build fleet of Chinooks to rescue downed pilots.
Scott Starrett, president of Sikorsky Military Systems, tells DOD Buzz’s Colin Clark that the era of “gold plating” weapons systems with the latest and greatest technologies, which usually translates into escalating costs and program delays, may be at an end. Dan Spoor, aviation systems vice president at Lockheed Martin, said the government’s “focus now is on low-risk and off-the-shelf capability.”
– Greg Grant
BAE Systems is showing off a prototype stealthy, unmanned combat air-vehicle (UCAV) named “Taranis,” after the Celtic god of thunder. The drone test-bed is scheduled to begin flight tests some time next year. Details on range, speed, weapons load-out, actual low-observableness, etc. are a bit sketchy. Although, a BAE rep told reporters it took a million-man hours and cost $215 million (if my online currency conversion tool is working right) to build, so I guess that’s something.
– Greg Grant
The era of rapidly rising defense budgets has ended; its time to end the waste and abuse that became standard practice while the money spigot gushed over the last decade; its also time for defense firms to stop charging outlandish sums for late and underperforming weapons systems; we’re going to “incentivize” industry to be more productive and efficient; oh, and expect more program cuts going forward.
That was the message delivered to defense industry executives yesterday by the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer Ashton Carter, a message he relayed to military acquisition officials and then to the press later in the day. Read Carter’s memo here.
He questioned why weapons systems always increase in cost every year when in the private sector most products and services prices drop over time. “Your computer costs less every year, why not defense weapons?”
Its all part of Defense Secretary Robert Gates effort to wring savings out of the defense budget top line that can then be reinvested into weapons for the wars we’re fighting today. Gates’ ambitious target is to realize 2–3% annual growth in spending on “warfighting capabilities” without increasing the DoD budget.
“We want our managers to acquire weapons for what they should cost,” Carter said, and his office will use historically informed independent cost estimates to arrive at that “should-cost” figure.
On all new weapons programs, “affordability and not just appetite must be designed in from the start.” Carter said affordability will be the mandate in new programs such as: the SSBN-X, the presidential helicopter, the Ground Combat Vehicle, and the Air Force/Navy long range strike family of systems.
