“Proven” and “affordable” are words you hear a lot these days from sellers of military aircraft and other weapons systems in this dawning era of tight defense budgets.The word you don’t hear so much is “new,” which worries some key lawmakers, Pentagon officials and defense contractors.Deep cuts in defense spending, they say, are threatening American industry’s ability to maintain its technological edge and causing a loss of intellectual capital that will be hard to get back/…/
“U.S. defense firms … have no economic incentive to continue funding out of their own pockets design capabilities for military-unique product lines in which they have little hope of even having a near-time opportunity to compete for a new program, much less of winning one,” the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments said in a report released Wednesday. “It is not unrealistic to foresee a day in which the U.S. defense industry no longer possesses the design or production capabilities for certain weapons systems.”
The report by Barry Watts and Todd Harrison recommends the federal government implement a strategy to preserve sectors of the defense industry that are critical to national security, with adequate funding for that purpose.