* Airbus Military delivered 29 aircraft in 2012 – 20 light and medium military transport, 4 P-3 conversions, and 5 A330 MRTTs – and received orders for 32 planes: 28 C295s and 4 CN235s. The backlog stands at 220 aircraft: 174 A400Ms, 17 MRTTs, 5 CN235s, 20 C295s, and 4 P-3s.
* France’s AFP [AFP] says that according to unnamed sources “close to the talks” between India and Dassault, an option for an additional 63 Rafale jets could be added to their buy-in-progress. First they need to finalize the contract, agree on what will be manufactured in India, and at the moment the country is decreasing its defense budget. But this could make sense if their 5th-gen option keeps getting postponed.
* Nicholas Guertin continues to push for increased competition in the US Navy’s acquisition programs. The last slide of his presentation [MS PPTX] during this week’s Surface Navy Association symposium shows how he maps intellectual property and data rights by component/subsystem to know where vendor lock-in is more likely to occur.
* The US State Department is trying to negotiate with Kyrgyzstan the extension of their lease at the Manas air base, an essential hub in and out of Afghanistan. Russia worked that out for their own base in September last year.
* On a website officially sponsored by the Chinese military and conveniently published in English to give the Western reader pause: soldiers should prepare for war. The content is not as scary as the headline, but it does reflect a paranoid, homegrown rewriting of facts mixed with an openly hawkish posture.
