The bill to fix the USS Miami SSN after it caught fire last month could amount to $400M. Another fire was reported this morning but thankfully it turned out to be a false alarm.
Mike Petters, President and CEO of Huntington Ingalls Industries answers a good question: how long would it take the shipbuilding industry to grow throughput if the US faced a naval conflict? Shipbuilding is itself a big, slow ship to steer.
The people behind the Air-Sea Battle concept come to its defense and try to clarify its intent and meaning.
India’s Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses thinks the US has the upper hand on Pakistan in their ongoing negotiation to reopen ground lines. As we have covered in this space over the past months, American backlogged Coalition Support Funds and future aid funds provide strong leverage, and the NDN has been secured as an effective plan B. Rick ‘Ozzie’ Nelson at the CSIS think tank advises the two countries to reset their relationship around strategic shared goals. Meanwhile US Defense Secretary Panetta intends to tighten the US defense relationship with India.
A paper [PDF] published by the U.S. Army War College argues that the US-Japan alliance needs to evolve to adapt to China’s emergence.
The Stimson Center released a report trying to estimate what the US spends on nuclear weapons. While American defense spending is more transparent than in most other countries, that is not necessarily saying much given the high opacity prevalent around military spending.
The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) published a number of Level III (i.e. rather material) Corrective Action Requests (CARs) sent by the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) to several prime contractors over 2008-2011.
We have raised this issue in the past, but it bears repeating that someone at the FBO.gov website needs to tackle the spammers using the Interested Vendors List as a backdoor. See how no less than 3 entries in the ongoing Light Air Support (LAS) Aircraft recompete start with an exclamation mark to come up before everybody else – including a “bid protest attorney” (!Frank, we believe the interested parties already have representation…).
The German Bundeswehr is buying 110 ZETROS transport trucks from Daimler AG, with fielding scheduled to be completed within 2 years.