Rapid Fire March 14, 2013: Afghanistan Drawdown Leads to MRAP JLI Cancellation

Mar 14, 2013 11:40 UTC by Defense Industry Daily staff
  • Patty Murray [D-WA], Chairman of the US Senate Budget Committee, introduced the first Senate budget proposal in years with a plan that seeks to replace sequestration with smaller budget cuts mixed with tax increases. This outline professes to save “$240 billion by carefully and responsibly reducing defense spending while giving the Pentagon enough time to plan and align the reductions to time with the drawdown of troops from overseas.”
  • But there is significant light between Murray’s outlook and the one earlier introduced in the House by Paul Ryan. That President Obama had a cordial closed-door meeting with Congress Republicans does not seem to make the two parties any closer. Republicans sound rather convincingly ready to live with the sequester rather than yield on taxes.
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  • That’s for FY14 and beyond. In the meantime, whether some version of HR 933 will be approved in the Senate and then reconciled with the House bill in conference depends on the content of all the additions made by Senate appropriators to the House bill. There are two weeks left before the end of the continuing resolution, but any differences should be relatively easy to resolve after some congressional haggling. The bill stays on the Senate floor today after a few amendments were already agreed to or rejected yesterday.

  • The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) explains the various ways time and money are wasted because of continuing resolutions.

  • The US Army is cancelling [PDF] its MRAP Joint Logistics Integrator (draft) RFP because of “early site closures in Afghanistan and closure of the MRAP Sustainment Facility (MSF) in Kuwait with all sites projected to be closed by December 2013.” The incumbent is SAIC via a bridge contract, and work on an MRAP JLI RFP to recompete these services had started in July last year.

  • Magnesium alloys are very light but also typically weak, which limits their defense/aerospace use. The metal’s ductility provides interesting damping properties, but low strength limits structural use. That may change, as American and Chinese researchers found a new mechanism to induce high-strength Mg alloys of up to 600 MPa. That is more than the lower range provided by titanium, though still far from the strongest structural titanium alloys, but then magnesium is much lighter.

  • Elbit’s 2012 revenue was up by 2.5% to $2.9B, and their backlog grew slightly faster by 2.8% to $5.7B. Meanwhile Embraer’s 2012 revenue [PDF] grew by 6.4% to $6.2B. Their defense business grew by 24% to a little more than $1B. The total backlog lost almost $3B in a year though, to $12.5B (a rather meaty 19% drop).

    • Categories: Budgets, Corporate Financials, Daily Rapid Fire, Pre-RFP, RFPs, Science - Basic Research

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