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Defense Spending No ‘Sacred Cow’ As Republicans Look For Cuts
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.
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Pentagon’s Drone Surge Includes $5.3 Billion For General Atomics
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.
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Deadline Passes for Army Humvee Recapitalization RFI Responses
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."
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Army Targets Battle Damage and Orders More Armor-Kitted M-ATVs
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."
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Satellite Firms See Opportunity in Pentagon
Commercial satellite and space firms are hoping the Pentagon’s increasingly tight budgets will translate into more business as military officials seek faster and cheaper options.
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Foot Patrols Boost IED Detection
Troops on foot patrol in Afghanistan are finding an increasing number of makeshift bombs before they explode, helping to defuse the effectiveness of the Taliban's No. 1 weapon, military data show.