Defense Procurement News

A nice article in the UK’s The Guardian paper, here, discusses how the trend in the US defense industry is mergers & acquisitions and protests. This as the article points out is a product of fewer, bigger contracts. Much of the increased defense budgets of the last 8 years have gone to personnel, operations and maintenance, and the reset of existing equipment. Very few large procurements have been ordered, in fact, many of the large programs are winding down such as the C-17 and F-22. The Navy also is buying less ships as they get more and more expensive and the DDG-51 class transitions to the LCS and a new destroyer. In the Clinton years you saw the same process but that was due to the decrease in budgets from the Reagan years leading to less work requiring less companies. Protests were common as there was only so much work to go around. Now it is the same in that once a contract is awarded there is little hope for another one for several years. Whether these trends accelerate with a new administration or not we will have to wait and see until Feb, 2009. It may be like in 1992 there will be two budgets submitted to Congress. One on time by the outgoing President and then an update in the summer.

Your humble correspondent had an article published at Seekingalpha.com on Boeing. The link is here.

This article in The Weekly Standard is an excellent discussion of the problems facing the Army with their officer corps. Due to the heavy rotations of tactical forces through Iraq and Afghanistan you now have company grade and field grade officers, those who lead small groups of troops, with a lot more combat experience then their senior officers.   Read the rest of this entry »

In another demonstration of why moving the headquarters of their company to Chicago was a good idea, Boeing gets Jesse Jackson to publish an editorial in The Washington Times in favor of them winning the KC-X contract. See the essay here. The Air Force is supposed to announce the winner by the end of the month.   Read the rest of this entry »

The US Military possesses great amounts of precision firepower. Just go on YouTube.com or LiveLeak.com and search for various weapon systems. The ability of the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force to deliver accurately lethal force has increased in leaps-and-bounds since 1991. Compared to the last major action in Vietnam it has been exponential. This has been due to the availability of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The focus of US weapon developers the last thirty years has been to increase accuracy, to the point where the size of the payload has been decreasing. Unfortunately, if you don’t have good targeting information then accuracy doesn’t matter.   Read the rest of this entry »