Daily Rapid Fire: 2011-09-19 | Reliability Planning; FPIF Contracting

• Did the White House lobby military officials to downplay concerns that the broadband satellite firm Lightsquared, owned by a major campaign donor, would disrupt GPS signals within its coverage? See Daily Beast article, House Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing video embedded at the bottom of this entry.

• Michael Gilmore, Director of DoD’s Operation Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) published his latest presentation [PDF] on the key issues with program delays and reliability growth. His conclusions: testing by itself doesn’t cause program delays, has low relative costs (in most cases 1.5% or less of total costs), and though planning to increase reliability has improved in recent years, this has not translated yet into increased reliability.