EADS: Bavarian Consolidation?
* A month ago EADS CEO Tom Enders started talking about coming redundancies. More recent reports in the German press have been mentioning up to 8,000 potential job cuts next year, as the group rebrands itself as Airbus and streamlines its defense business. Some jobs are expected to be moved to the Ottobrunn site near Munich, while Cassidian’s Unterschleißheim plant will reportedly be closed: Merkur | Süddeutsche Zeitung [both in German]. The group won’t release details before a works council scheduled on Dec. 9.
* Meanwhile Cassidian Optronics just opened a subsidiary in Brazil.
* General Atomics is likely to face job cuts in its UAV production workforce unless they land more, bigger foreign orders soon, or a budget materializes at the Marine Corps.
The Limits of UAV Simulation
* You might think a UAV ground control station could be repurposed to create a perfect simulation environment, but it turns out there are physical phenomena, such as those occurring at very low altitude, that cannot be simulated accurately yet. Using cheaper surrogate UAVs is part of the answer for UAS pilot training.
Corruption Cripples Hard Power
* A court has ordered the return of a strategically important naval fuel installation to the Russian Navy, after the Murmansk site was allegedly sold off by a key suspect in a massive property scam. No wonder the effectiveness of their military rearmament plans is being questioned. This begs for the cross-breeding of old-school internet memes: In Soviet Russia, All Your Base Are Belong to Us.
* Meanwhile some Chinese criminals impersonate PLA officials to try and pull off a variety of scams.
* Thomas Friedman – an insufferable columnist at the New York Times (excuse the redundancy) – may have infected the mind of Chinese officials, with the “Chinese Dream” phrase making it onto the bridge of the Liaoning aircraft carrier, a few days before starting sea trials in the South China Sea. Maybe the PLA is right to be concerned about cultural infiltration from the US!
Françafrique
* France’s Operation Serval in Mali continues unabated [in French], with dozens of aerial sorties per week and the dismantling of some weapons caches.
* Foreign Affairs minister Laurent Fabius confirmed that France will send an about 800 troops, in addition to 410 soldiers already there, to the Central African Republic to help deal with what he described as an “appaling situation.”
Navigating the Persian Gulf
* The Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) has a round-up of corvettes operated by various countries in the Persian Gulf.
2013 David Packard Award
* This year’s award winners for excellence in DoD acquisition were JLTV, AMDR, HC/MC-130J, and the Defense Information Technology Contracting Organization and Air Force National Capital Region Information Technology team. USD(AT&L) Frank Kendall and outgoing deputy Secretary Ash Carter spoke for the occasion, in the video below:
