* The US GAO found that a new requirement to justify $20M+ sole-source contracts awarded under the 8(a) small business program had been poorly implemented by the services during FY2012. In any case the number and value of such contracts dramatically fell since about the time that requirement was added to federal acquisition regulation. A case of correlation meaning causation?
* Daniel Goure at the Lexington Institute thinks [PDF] the Pentagon should consolidate its contracting following examples set by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) with Tailored Logistics Support Program or Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) with SeaPort-Enhanced.
* DARPA will host a Proposer’s Day for the Shared Spectrum Access for Radar and Communications (SSPARC) program on February 26 in Arlington, VA. Their goal is to improve performance when spectrum is shared between military radars and civilian or military communications systems. Feb. 21 update: presolicitation.
* US Marine Corps Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Jr. assumed command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) yesterday.
* The Financial Times reports that the FBI is looking into corruption allegations in Saudi Arabia involving GPT, a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of EADS under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office in the UK since last August.
* BAE Systems intends to ramp up the number of apprentices it will recruit this year in the UK to almost 400, most of them in submarine and shipbuilding.
* India’s Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses tries to parse a recent statement by the Defence Minister talking about a forthcoming budget cut. For a variety of fiscal and accounting reasons, the ministry-funded but autonomously-run think tank reckons the minister really meant a decrease in the budget’s growth rate. This specific semantic distortion is unfortunately common in governmentspeak all over the world.
* China officially denies having locked a Japanese ship on January 30 with a fire-control radar from one of its frigates. The Japanese say they have evidence.
