Rapid Fire 01-11-11: More Data on Libya | F-35 Costs, Tests | State of Railguns
Nov 01, 2011 09:45 EDTRelated Stories: Africa, Americas - Other, Americas - USA, Budgets, Daily Rapid Fire, Fighters & Attack, Guns - Naval, Legal, New Systems Tech, Official Reports, Procurement Innovations, Science - Basic Research, Simulation & Training, Support Functions - Other, Think Tanks
- The Guardian in the UK has gathered and crunched more numbers on operations in Libya (see also past linkage to Libyan ops debriefing).
- The Pentagon is about to brief Lockheed Martin on how much F-35s should cost. Memos have also been flying back and forth between DoD and the Air Force on whether training should proceed before more test hours could be completed. Meanwhile the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute would like to hear “more forthright and more detailed rationales” to support the F-35 choice.
- FY13 Pentagon budget to reflect a shift to Asia/Pacific? November/December is when the DOD and the OMB jointly work on the next fiscal year’s budget, aiming for the President’s budget February deadline. In the meantime, it would be nice for Congress to actually pass a budget for the current fiscal year since we’re already 1 month into it.
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- Earlier this year Shay D. Assad, Director, Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy & Strategic Sourcing (DPAP – that’s within the US DoD’s acquisition office) released mandatory Source Selection Procedures [PDF] that apply to all negotiated, competitive DoD acquisitions under FAR Part 15, effective for RFPs issued since July 1, 2011. There is no template yet for the Source Selection Decision Document (SSDD) though. The Defense Acquisition University notes that the Army Source Selection Manual [PDF] from 2007 is as good as it gets, but some of the language it uses – such as the risk rating scheme – needs to be adapted to the new procedure.
- Speaking of the DoD’s acquisition online presence, it now has a whole section dedicated to Earned Value Management, or, in a mouthful, an “integrated management system that coordinates the work scope, schedule, and cost goals of a program or contract, and objectively measures progress toward these goals.”
- The Stimson Center released a report [PDF] last week providing a bird’s eye view of defense procurement FY01-FY10, and concluded that, despite very visible cancellations and cost overruns, the US military by and large successfully modernized its capabilities through the past decade.
- A paper by the Center for Strategic Leadership, U.S. Army War College on strategic minerals advises [PDF] to “restock, upgrade and adjust the objectives of the National Defense Stockpile [NDS], including new strategic and critical minerals such as REE [rare earth elements].” Related: this Reconfiguration of the National Defense Stockpile Report to Congress [DoD, 2009].
- In the 1st video below Rear Admiral Nevin Carr, Chief of US Naval Research, discusses directed energy and hypersonics. He notes that railguns can now shoot hundreds of times and are evolving towards more reasonable energy requirements. 33 megajoules (MJ) apparently amounts to the energy of a lot of Volkswagens compacted into a football flying at 100mph. The Navy’s railgun demo from December 2010 (2nd video below) shot a much lighter projectile… but at Mach 7. Anyway, you get the idea, 33MJ is researcher talk for “that’s gotta hurt.”
