Do Buy… Airliners
* Day 1 of the Dubai airshow broke records yesterday in the airliner world, but on the military side the UAE still hasn’t decided which jets to acquire, despite hands-on business development help from UK Prime Minister David Cameron.
Defense Employment Trends
* Data compiled by consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas puts job losses in the defense sector at 30,000 jobs so far this year, and 160,000 jobs over the past 5 years.
Woe Is Me: FYDP FUD
* The services seem to be leaking preliminary FY15 budget data to either try and protect their share of the budget, and/or test whether they might get away with cutting programs they’re less interested in keeping. First we hear that LCS numbers are going to be cut, then the Air Force is allegedly not going to get funding for CRH and will de facto have to give up on Combat Search And Rescue (CSAR)? Whatever the motivation, we call PPBE shenanigans on such stories which tend to surface up in the November/December timeframe.
Not So Amicable
* A call to have the American Mathematical Society sever all ties to the NSA is sparking debate in those circles – is the London Mathematical Society/ GCHQ next? Meanwhile, the NSA’s destruction of its own brand is costing Silicon Valley money, and their opposition is ratcheting up too.
French Disquiet
* French officers are supposed to refrain from publicly expressing political opinions (similarly to Hatch Act restrictions in the US), and for the most part they comply. After all the French military institution is known as “the Great Mute”, as military personnel were denied the right to vote between 1872 and 1945. However top-ranking officers have been uncharacteristically vocal in recent months, from blogs to op-eds. General Jean-Claude Thomann decries [in French] a military “dismantled by politicians.” Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian counters [in French] that France will have Europe’s biggest military by the end of the decade. Which is not necessarily saying much.
Afghan ORBAT
* The Institute for the Study of War updated its Order of Battle [PDF] for the Western troops in Afghanistan.
DoD Waste
* Kurt Allen Bennett, a former Apache pilot in the US Army, was sentenced to 3 years of jail by a federal court for the theft of more than $1M worth of goods while he was deployed in Iraq in 2008-09, then later in Afghanistan with the complicity of another solider.
* The video below from Reuters is denouncing billions of dollars of waste at the Pentagon, from failed IT programs to bloated inventory management:
