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pentagon acquisition reform

Army goes foreign suppliers & reform news

6/30/2016

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The US Army is turning to foreign systems for an interim solution for advanced protection for its combat vehicles against rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank guided missiles and other threats. – Defense News

An F-35 Joint Strike Fighter would be able to use its sensors, weapons and computer technology to destroy Russian and Chinese 5th-Generation Stealth fighters in a high-end combat fight, service officials said. – Scout Warrior
 
Officials from the Bipartisan Policy Center are bringing together a cast of notable defense influencers for a new task force to tackle defense personnel reform, in an effort to prevent morale and benefits issues from cutting into retention. – Military Times
 
Northrop Grumman Corp. is working to convince the Pentagon that it’s solved long-standing manufacturing flaws that resulted in defective wings for the Navy’s new Triton reconnaissance drone, as the service prepares to ask defense officials to approve the aircraft’s production. - Bloomberg
July 07, 2016
A high operational tempo and uncertain budgets have damaged aviation readiness across all four services and have leaders concerned about pilot safety, top brass told Congress Wednesday. – Military Times
 
The rate of non-fatal accidents has doubled in Marine Corps aviation since last year, and the Marines are turning to outside experts to figure out why. – Breaking Defense
 
The Navy fleets have a $500-million ship maintenance budget shortfall leftover from last year that they cannot pay for on their own. Any existing budget slack is already stretched too tight – meaning that $500-million shortfall will likely be pushed into the next year, U.S. Fleet Forces Command officials told USNI News. – USNI News
 
The Navy is hoping to fully resurrect Mine-Hunting technology for the Littoral Combat Ship such that it can find an eliminate threatening undersea mines with drones, helicopters and underwater sonar, service officials said. – Scout Warrior
 
Less than two months after Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited the highly classified Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC), the head of Strategic Command’s space command unit has taken over the war games at Schriever Air Force Base. – Breaking Defense
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Congressional Research service:  report new navy weapons, the 3rd offset

6/28/2016

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USNI
Breaking Defense:  The U.S. Air Force Remains Center of U.S. Nuclear Triad & 3rd Offset
The Senate Armed Services Committee got a boost Tuesday from retired Army Gen. Stan McChrystal, who testified in support of Pentagon reforms the committee backs. – The Hill
 
Mackenzie Eaglen writes: Over the past decade, the Air Force has fallen out of favor with policymakers in the executive and legislative branches for many reasons. As the Air Force’s credibility has declined, so too has its topline. The next chief must seek out and build up champions of the service’s unique capabilities and contributions to the American way of war and way of life at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. Doing so will require focus on these five priorities to begin the service’s long but essential need to rebuild smartly. – Breaking Defense
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east coast missile defense gap

6/23/2016

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New Missile Defense Technology - Hudson Institute
Rebecah Heinrichs writes: The United States has the resources and the technology to deploy a robust missile defense system, including space-based interceptors, but it will require changes to current policy and leveraging the modern technologies that would qualitatively improve our missile defense system. Failure to make this decision is to choose to remain under-defended, and in some instances, undefended. – Hudson Institute
The tethered aerostat designed to defend against cruise missiles is slated to be killed by Congress in fiscal 2017 legislation, leaving missile defense leaders within US Northern Command scrambling to find another way to address the cruise missile defense gap left open on the US East Coast. – Defense News
 
Navy engineers are working to bring new aircraft sensors and new weapons into the Naval Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air (NIFC-CA) architecture, with near-term goals of bringing in the F-35’s radio frequency (RF) sensor and the anti-surface variant of the Standard Missile-6. – USNI News
 
The Navy is developing lighter-weight anti-submarine designed to better enable its Littoral Combat Ship to track, locate and destroy enemy submarines – all while recognizing potential rival such as Russia and China continue to rapidly develop new submarine weapons and technologies. – Scout Warrior
 
While to date “gray zone” challenges have frustrated U.S. efforts to respond, DoD can take a number of practical steps in the areas of policy, strategy and plans, and capabilities and concepts to restore the United States’ competitive edge. While the gray zone is by definition a “whole-of-government” problem, DoD will need to “lead up.” Failure to act invites irreversible strategic consequences. – Breaking Defense
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army, swarms & defense reform news

6/22/2016

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The U.S. Army has identified a “critical gap” in its ability to face swarms of drones that could attack small units of soldiers on the battlefield by confusing radar systems, overwhelming larger aircraft or simply exploding when they reach an assigned target. – Washington Post’s Checkpoint
 
The Marine Corps’ new training regime, meant to emphasize gender-neutral standards for combat jobs, has weeded out 40 male recruits and all but one female recruit since the standards were put in place at the beginning of the year, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. – Washington Post’s Checkpoint
 
Lead staff for the Senate and House armed services committees are readying for what is likely a summer-long conference process to reconcile differing defense policy bills, where the toughest issues are said to be funding, military healthcare reform and acquisition reforms. – Defense News
 
Staff directors for the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Tuesday shed some insight on the upcoming conference between the two panels to hash out their different versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, before sending it back to both chambers for final passage. – The Hill
 
Seven Democratic lawmakers are pushing to allow the military to close excess bases with a bill introduced in the House on Tuesday. – The Hill
 
The classified costs of the B-21 bomber should remain secret because revealing the figure would be “too insightful for the adversaries to get a sense of what they can do (and) what the U.S. can do in building that next generation bomber,” the official in charge of the program said Tuesday. – Breaking Defense
 
Software glitches have plagued the F-35 in recent months, but operators said they noticed a marked improvement during a June deployment where the aircraft did not experience any shutdowns. – Defense News
 
The Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Dan Allyn said the service plans to budget for an 11th Combat Aviation Brigade in South Korea and four Apache battalions for the Army National Guard in the next budget plan, but stressed that funding those formations would come at a price elsewhere. – Defense News
 
A Pentagon policy allowing transgender troops to serve openly is in the final stages of approval and is expected to be released within weeks, according to Defense Department sources. – USA Today
 
Marine Corps pilots are getting a chance to see how the ground-pounders live in a new immersive program designed to bring the air and ground elements of the Corps' fighting machine closer for better collaboration. – Military.com
U.S. Fleet Forces Command will push its fleet experimentation and training towards a new distributed operations concept, in which deployed forces – surface ships, submarines, aircraft and more – are sufficiently linked together so that they can support theater-wide needs regardless of their physical location, the commander said – USNI News
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navy & reform

6/21/2016

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George Nethercutt writes: Bureaucracy, unaccountability, and repetitiveness have plagued our out-of-control budget for the last two decades. It's time we draw the line and identify wasteful taxpayer-funded programs. The Pentagon's practice of blindly funding outdated programs that duplicate others or failing to respond to modern warfare realities must stop. – Defense News
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missiles hitting mortar fire & other projectiles 

6/20/2016

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The US Army has delayed its plans to move forward with a capability it was developing to launch a variety of missiles against rocket, artillery and mortar (RAM) threats, so Lockheed Martin is turning to the international market to sell its Miniature Hit-to-Kill (MHTK) missile designed to combat the worldwide threat. – Defense News
 
Defense Secretary Ash Carter wants to open the door for more “lateral entry” into the military's upper ranks, clearing the way for lifelong civilians with vital skills and strong résumés to enter the officer corps as high as the O-6 paygrade. – Military Times
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air force stress special ops, littoral ships & benefits on reform

6/17/2016

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After a decade and a half of war, one of the most stressed career fields in the Air Force is the battlefield airmen who make up the Air Force Special Operations Command. – DOD Buzz
 
Next year, the Navy plans to use electromagnetic force to launch an F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet up into the sky off of the deck of its emerging next-generation aircraft carrier next year – the USS Gerald R. Ford. – Scout Warrior
 
The new littoral combat ship (LCS) Jackson was showered by spray and shaken by a large explosion June 10 as she endured the first of a series of controlled tests intended to prove the design’s ability to withstand and survive combat and damage. – Defense News
 
Defense officials will make changes to the commissary system, but any change must meet two criteria: it must sustain the commissary benefit, and it must save money, said the official leading efforts to find taxpayer savings in the department’s resale operations. – Military Times
July 11, 2016
The Air Force’s current fleet of aircraft is the smallest and oldest it has ever been, and although a plethora of acquisition programs are slated to update it with new capabilities, service officials are concerned about its ability to control the skies and strike targets at will. – Defense News
 
Two years after the Air Force tried to force its aging A-10 Warthog fleet into retirement, officials are exploring whether to procure a potential replacement for the aircraft famed for its powerful defense of troops on the ground. – Defense News
 
The Joint Strike Fighter is picking up steam as countries like Denmark sign up to the program. But predictions of what one analyst described as "massive carnage" for alternative fighters appear far less likely, with politics as well as the hefty price tag among the key factors driving some potential customers elsewhere. – Defense News
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post bin laden raid navy seal & innovation pressed at department of defense

6/13/2016

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Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said Friday that the retired Navy SEAL who oversaw the U.S. raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the executive chairman of LinkedIn, and a historian who leads a Washington think tank are joining a new board the Pentagon has created to press for innovation. – Washington Post’s Checkpoint
 
The Senate is scheduled to vote on the annual defense authorization bill [this] week amid parliamentary fights that stalled debate on most amendments. A vote to advance the bill passed Friday, 68-23. – Defense News
 
As the Senate nears completion of its version of the National Defense Authorization Act, Defense Secretary Ash Carter continues to warn against “micromanagement” coming from the Hill. – Defense News
 
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Friday pledged to revive a fight over military spending when the Senate takes up its defense funding bill. – The Hill
 
The upgraded frigate variant of the Littoral Combat Ship isn’t much of an improvement over the controversial original, the Government Accountability Office says, because the Navy was too focused on keeping costs down and production lines humming. – Breaking Defense
 
The Navy is now finalizing the weapons, sensors and technologies it plans to engineer into a new, more survivable and lethal Littoral Combat Ship variant designed to perform anti-submarine and surface warfare functions at the same time, service officials said. – Scout Warrior
 
Trust your robots. Trust your tech industry. Trust your troops. Let go of traditional mechanisms of control — be it a human pilot in the cockpit or a formal requirements document for a program — that increasingly serve to slow you down. That was the message between the lines when Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and his protégé, Strategic Capabilities Office chief William Roper, spoke Friday afternoon at the Defense One Tech Summit. – Breaking Defense
 
Despite key votes in Congress, it remained unclear Friday whether the United States is closer to an historic move requiring women to register for the military draft. – Stars and Stripes
 
Stephen Rodriguez and Dan Mathis write: In the private sector, companies that opt for incremental versus radical reform often end up being overtaken by a challenger. In the matter of national defense, such an outcome would have catastrophic consequences. – War on the Rocks
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rare performance:  u.s. has 4 strike carrier groups in theatre & more. . . 

6/7/2016

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For the first time in nearly four years, the US Navy has four aircraft carrier strike groups deployed at the same time. Two more carriers are carrying out local operations, making for six of the fleet’s ten active carriers underway — an unusually high percentage. And another is preparing to go. – Defense News
 
The U.S. Air Force plans to announce the name of the new B-21 stealth bomber at the Air Force Association’s annual conference in September, the service announced. – Defense Tech
 
The only way to entirely eliminate taxpayer funding for commissaries is to shut them all down, according to Pentagon officials who have explored a number of alternatives. – Military Times
 
Eli Lake reports: The Pentagon’s reliance on Russian rocket engines will be at the center of a debate this week in the Senate when lawmakers take up a bill to authorize the 2017 U.S. defense budget. Senator John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, is proposing to phase out America’s reliance on the Russian rocket engines. – Bloomberg View
 
Mackenzie Eaglen writes: Special set-asides slipped into 2,000-page bills are a sleazy way for one company to use its elected officials to corner the market for up to $300 million in taxpayer money a year — with no tangible benefits for the troops forced to wear the shoes. – Real Clear Defense
The Navy is sending out more aircraft carrier strike groups lately, with six of the service's ten carriers carrying out operations at sea, Defense News reports. Four of those carriers are deployed abroad. The USS Harry S Truman is carrying out airstrikes against the Islamic State from the Mediterranean and the USS Dwight Eisenhower is headed towards the Gulf. In Asia, the USS Ronald Reagan recently set sail from Japan and the USS John C Stennis is in the South China Sea. Two other carriers, the USS Carl Vinson and USS George Washington, are engaged in training operations off both U.S. coasts. The U.S. hasn't seen this high a level of carrier activity since 2012.
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promotions, benefits & reform

6/2/2016

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U.S. military troops may be able to sidestep the Pentagon's entrenched "up or out" promotion system under sweeping new proposals being unveiled Thursday, aimed at keeping high-tech experts or other specialists on the job, according to defense officials. – Associated Press
About 3,000 senior noncommissioned officers will soon leave the Army under new retention rules designed to boost promotion opportunities for mid-grade soldiers. – Military Times
 
Despite worries that the new F-35 would be louder than the Netherlands’ F-16s, recent testing has shown Dutch residents don’t hear much of a difference. – Defense News
 
The Defense Department has begun to educate military leaders, rank-and-file service members and their families about the coming changes to its retirement plan, a months-long effort to provide personnel with enough financial literacy to confidently, competently navigate this new "blended" system. – Military Times
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