Pentagon: Creative Accounting; Commodity Buying; Program Crunch; Reform Pilgrimage
* DoD is infamous for being unable to pass an audit, a situation they’re supposed to remedy by 2017, though whether they will meet that deadline is doubtful. So how do they balance their books with the Treasury in the meantime? According to Reuters, with bogus entries in the books, known internally under a couple euphemisms such as “plugs”, that’s how.
* Data compiled by several consultancies shows that DoD leads the boom in the number of federal contracts being designed as lowest-price, technically acceptable (LPTA), and sometimes use them even for complex products and services. TRANSCOM, the Army and the Navy do it most. DoD Pricing Director Shay Assad counters that he’s not advocating LPTA and that the total dollar value awarded that way amounts to “peanuts.” Lowest price, technically acceptable peanuts, that is. Federal News Radio.
* New program starts during FY15-18 will be squeezed out by the big must-haves – F-35, KC-46, future bomber – and sequestration, according to acting Air Force Secretary Eric Fanning. He curiously describes the future savings telegraphed by the Budget Control Act since August 2011 as “instantaneous.” 24 F-35s are reportedly postponed beyond the tail of the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), which might just be a way to signal there are no sacred cows, but then such plans can always be reversed since US budgets are structurally annual.
* Congressman Mac Thornberry [R-TX, HASC vice-chairman] has volunteered to lead a bipartisan effort to reform defense acquisition, which we’re told involves walking on your knees for miles. Refreshingly, and in true Texan fashion, Thornberry’s approach will involve less regulation rather than more. Video below, before the expected exhausting bruising:
Unfurloughing the Shutdown?
* Congresswoman Eleanor Norton [D-DC, i.e. a nonvoting delegate] introduced a bill with 11 cosponsors (all from her party) that would grant back pay to federally contracted retail, food, custodial and security service workers furloughed during last month’s federal government shutdown.
US Set to Export FMS Model
* The UK is considering adopting an American-inspired foreign military sales program, though it looks like France will beat them to it.
Glonass Angst
* The US State Department would like to allow Russia to build monitor stations for its Glonass GNSS on American soil, while the CIA and DOD think it’s a bad idea. NYT.
Another Invisibility Experiment
* Researchers from the University of Toronto have demonstrated a cloaking device using antennas surrounding an aluminum cylinder to radiate an electromagnetic field, which interfered with the waves bouncing off the cloaked object. Unlike another recent experiment involving a cat and a goldfish, this was done at radio wavelengths and with a tiny object, though it was big enough relative to the incident wavelength. According to George Eleftheriades, the lead researcher, with better antennas this same principle could be applied to light waves, in order to change an object’s perceived size or location, or just hide it from sight. Press release | Paper in Physical Review X.
Afghanistan: All Eyes on 2014 Election
* Major General Jörg Vollmer, the German officer who leads the ISAF presence in northern Afghanistan, sounds genuinely hopeful about the country’s prospects in the video below:
