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Rapid Fire 2011-09-26 | UK MOD UAS Doctrine; Top 2010 Contractors

Sep 26, 2011 08:00 EDT
Related Stories: Britain/U.K., Budgets, Daily Rapid Fire, Issues - Political, Official Reports, UAVs
  • British MoD publicly released its joint doctrine approach to UAS’s [PDF]. Why define UAV doctrine? Well, from the introduction: ”[i]n the absence of any higher level policy, all UAS currently used by UK armed forces have been procured or leased under the Urgent Operational Requirement (UOR) process.” See table on page 3-13 for a flowchart to assist the key decision: is manned or unmanned the right choice given any specific mission?
  • Aviation Week Intelligence Network crunched the numbers about top defense contractors for 2010: Lockheed Martin comes top at $12.5B through more than 6.3K contracts, followed by Boeing at $8.3B.
  • Pay reimbursement for all private execs may get capped at $694K if a bill passed by the US House of Representatives is approved by the Senate. Senator Grassley (R-IA) thinks the underlying formula to calculate the executive compensation cost ceiling should be reformed.
  • US Senate debates continuing resolution today (Monday) after it rejected the House’s own stopgap bill on Friday (see what its impact would be on short-term defense spending). 5 days to work things out before government shutdown.
  • Last Friday the Senate confirmed Ashton Carter as Leon Panetta’s deputy. Question: who will lead Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (AT&L)? Presumably Frank Kendall is acting in that capacity for the time being until the Obama administration makes a decision.
  • The US House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Republicans have an analysis in hand of what would happen to defense spending if automatic cost cutting were to be triggered by a lack of deal coming out of the Supercommittee before its deadline, says Politico.
  • A video of last week’s HASC hearing on Defense Financial Management and Auditability Reform is embedded below. Key milestones have been missed for 4 out of the 11 ERPs meant to get DoD where it needs to be. Sadly this was predictable.
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