Future Combat Systems

Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, members in good standing of the neoconservative cabal to eat your babies and conquer the world and then eat more babies, have an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing against Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ program cuts. While they don’t really like the budget, they [...]

Brian Beutler at TPMDC is on a Howard Beale-esque rampage against journalistic portrayals of the Gates defense budget’s program cuts as cuts in the total defense budget. This is really, really simple. As I reported yesterday, we don’t know if the cuts will actually result in savings, since we don’t know the price tag of [...]

For when you tire of my piecemeal approach (ahead of my forthcoming wrap-up), Noah Shachtman at Danger Room has you covered:

The presser is still going on, but here’s Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ statement about what defense programs he’s cutting, halting and continuing. Big news: theater-based missile defense will continue, but there won’t be an increase in ground-based missile defense capabilities; the F-22 program is done after the current 187 planes; and the Army’s Future Combat [...]

Abu Muqawama, reading a story from The Washington Post about the cost overruns of the Army’s/SAIC’s/Boeing’s Future Combat Systems, remarks:
SAIC’s executive vice president for government affairs, Arnold Punaro, is rumored to be the next Army Secretary. It is my understanding that Punaro is a great American, but frankly, I do not see how his potential [...]

In my piece yesterday I mention several big-ticket defense platforms beloved by the military services that have featured chronic cost-overruns. One of them is a sprawling Army modernization program called Future Combat Systems, which is a bunch of tech-heavy weapons and vehicle upgrades. (It’s kind of hard to come up with a shorthand description for [...]

OK, so I’ve now read S.454, the Weapon Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009, introduced today by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). And it does appear, to my inexpert eye, to have some real teeth when it comes to curbing cost overruns on Pentagon procurement.

The Wall Street Journal files from that parallel universe today: Thanks to the financial crisis and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon must make some crucial spending decisions. Should money be spent preparing for counterinsurgency, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, or buying state-of-the art weapon systems to fight more a conventional war with [...]