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In his waning days as secretary of defense, Robert Gates is proposing historic changes to what he calls a "rigid, one-size-fits-all approach" to military pay and retirement benefits/.../

The surge of troops sent to Afghanistan encountered soaring numbers of bombs hidden in paths and roads over the last year — and a corresponding jump in casualties. But as insurgents increased their use of these simple and inexpensive homemade weapons, international forces patrolling on foot became far better at finding them, the latest Pentagon figures show. The makeshift bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, cause most of the injuries and deaths of international forces in Afghanistan/.../ “There is an ever-present, constantly evolving competition between those who make and emplace IEDs and those who must find and neutralize them. As one side develops a technique, the other side accounts for it and modifies its approach to regain the upper hand,” said Dakota Wood, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a retired Marine lieutenant colonel. For instance, to stump metal detectors, insurgents make bombs with little or no metal.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates in January proposed a five- year spending plan with $78 billion of net savings from canceling some programs, reducing troop numbers and cutting overhead. Republicans backed Gates’s goal in a budget plan that passed the House in April./.../Gates’s proposed reduction represents about 2.5 percent of Pentagon spending over five years and is little more than a “light cut,” said Todd Harrison, a defense analyst with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment research group in Washington.

The number of aerial drones with combined strike and surveillance capabilities, such as General Atomics’ Reaper, will more than triple over the next decade, according to the U.S. Defense Department’s 2011 Aircraft Procurement Plan.

Last week was the deadline for industry to respond to the Army's request for information regarding humvee recapitalization proposals/.../ Dakota Wood, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, recently told ITA that he believes recapitalization will become a popular option for military leaders and lawmakers who want to push for cheaper modernization. "Recapitalization  is the name of the game these days, and i think the services will push in this direction even more as the nation's fiscal realities become harder to ignore or to kick further down the road through creative bookkeeping," he wrote in a May 19 email. "As the defense budget comes under more pressure, the services will be pressed to extend the utility of what they already have. I think this will be a significant issue once Mr. [Leon] Panetta takes the helm, at Defense."

The Army recently ordered 177 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicles with additional underbody armor kits from Oshkosh Defense to address the number of vehicles that have been damaged in the Afghan theater, according to the MRAP program office/.../Dakota Wood, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the M-ATV's armor order trend indicated that forces in Afghanistan continued to encounter improvised explosive devices that were getting more and more deadly. "I'm not surprised to hear that M-ATV's are needing supplemental armor," he wrote. "Military officials have been talking about the expected uptick in violence as the 'Spring fighting season' develops. U.S. forces would seem to be experiencing an increased level of IED attacks, with these attacks matching or exceeding the original capabilities of the M-ATVs sent over in the first wave or two."