Rapid Fire: 2010-08-11

• “War on Waste” – DoD CIO and Business Transformation Agency, along with JFCOM, will be casualties of Defense Secretary Gates’ $100 billion effort to trim the defense budget; support contractors will be cut by 10% per year over 3 years. But will it really save money, while delivering the same readiness?

• India’s military continues to find it difficult to spend its procurement budgets, thanks to endless delays from a deeply broken process. (Case in point: artillery modernization). Note that 10 crore is currently about $2.15 million.

• Funding Iraq: US Congress should fully fund Pentagon’s $2 billion FY 2011 request for Iraqi security forces, says outgoing commander of US forces in Iraq; Senate Armed Services Committee chairman disagrees.

• Stealth failure: Former Northrop Grumman engineer found guilty of helping China build a cruise missile by providing stealth exhaust nozzle technology.

• US DSCA announces [PDF] Israel’s official request to buy up to $2 billion worth of unleaded gasoline, JP-8 aviation fuel, and diesel fuel.

• Another Arjun? After a torturously long and expensive process to field the Arjun tank, India’s DRDO wants to start from scratch. Instead of making incremental improvements on Arjun now that the bugs are finally out, it wants a whole new design, and sets a goal of 50t, which runs counter to existing trends. Anyone else see another expensive disaster of under-delivery in the making?

• Healthy tobacco: Canadian biotechnology company Medicago to build $21 million DARPA-funded facility in North Carolina to develop H1N1 vaccines using tobacco plants.

• US Navy submarines no longer allowed to use alcohol-based hand sanitizers on board. That’s good news for at least one firm.

DoD Supercomputers: Speeding Along the Digital Highway

Four teams get up to $100 million in DARPA funding to develop superfast supercomputers. (Aug 6/10)

The US Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) was set up in 1992 to modernize DoD’s supercomputing capabilities. The HPCMP was assembled out of a collection of small high performance computing departments run by the services, each with supercomputing capabilities independent of the others.

The HPCMP brings these capabilities together. The program provides supercomputer services, high-speed network communications, and computational science expertise that enables the DoD labs to develop new weapons systems, prepare US aircraft for overseas deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and assist long-term weather predictions to plan humanitarian and military operations throughout the world…