Rapid Fire April 26, 2012: Prime Financials, Q1 2012

* Q1 results are in for L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. They are all showing more topline resilience than Northrop Grumman. Quick summary table of their sales and backlog at the bottom of this entry.

* Lockheed Martin’s CEO Bob Stevens will retire and be replaced by current President and COO Christopher Kubasik effective January 1, 2013. Kubasik is an alumnus from the Defense Acquisition University.

* US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta leaned on Brazil in support of Boeing’s F/A-18s for the ongoing F-X2 competition. Panetta discussed technology transfers with his counterpart Celso Amorim. Dassault is working the local cooperation angle too [in French].

* Defense contractors are not the only industry lobbying against sequestration: groups batting for hospitals or subsidized housing are in it too.

* GD NASSCO has delivered the T-AKE 13 supply ship to US Military Sealift Command, where it becomes USNS Medgar Evers after the slain civil rights leader.

* US Army Contracting Command – Warren has changed how they make technical data packages available. The new method is less convenient but more accurate, by their own admission.

* The Air Force Research Institute published Airpower for Strategic Effect [PDF] by Colin s. Gray, a book that tries to define airpower, covers a lot of historical ground, and argues in favor of settling the theory:

“There is no need to wait on events, anticipate further technological change, or test more hypotheses. The century-plus from 1903, more realistically 1908, to the present can tell all that we need to know for us to make sufficient strategic sense of airpower.”