* Since a spat between India’s ministers of Commerce and Defense erupted publicly earlier this month, little clarity has emerged about what the ceiling for foreign participation in defense joint ventures would be. It looks like going beyond 26% and up to 49% might be left to case-by-base approval by cabinet committee. That sort of fuzziness is sure going to speed up and ease India’s acquisitions.
* Raytheon sales for Q2 2013 [PDF] were up 2% Y/Y to $6.1B. Their total backlog is down by 10.5% from where it was at the end of 2012, to $32.4B (68% funded). However the company says their 2013 bookings are weighted more towards the second part of the year, so the backlog will presumably catch up. Their Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) division is the one that fare best through the quarter. This mirrors the stable sales but declining backlogs announced earlier this week by their peers/competitors.
* Thales is also doing OK so far this year, with sales up 4% and bookings down 3% for the first half of 2013.
* “Coup” or not, the US has postponed the delivery of 4 F-16s to Egypt.
* There’s an overwhelming number of compulsory hoops to jump through in the US defense acquisition process, but issuing draft RFPs is not one of them.
* Soldiers from 3 US Army units are evaluating holsters for the M320 grenade launcher (M320GL) from 3 different vendors. Troops find that carrying the launcher with a sling is inconvenient.
* The US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute offers a framework [PDF] for restructuring the military retirement system.
* Joe Pappalardo discusses his article in Popular Mechanics on US Marines training in the video below. The Corps wants to go back to their expeditionary warfare roots and train with near-peer enemies in mind, rather than low-tech insurgents:
