This week, the Republican Congress is expected to unveil its fiscal year 2016 budget resolution just as House defense authorizers start marking up their annual bill. What will that mean for the US military? Bottom line, the Pentagon should realistically expect no more than $569 billion from Congress in the final, enacted 2016 budget between base…
By Mackenzie EaglenAI can make logistics data as valuable as intelligence or operational data for mission success
Valuable intelligence insights can be gleaned from logistics or flight-test data when artificial intelligence or machine learning is applied.
After two weeks of covering the 2015 defense budget, I can assure you it is confusing. Every budget includes fudges, silliness and an enormous amount of information. They are hard to make sense of and often their import doesn’t become clear for a year or two. But this budget may be the most complex one…
By Mackenzie Eaglen
She’s baaack! After having the temerity to give birth to a child and thus deprive us of her insights for several months, Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute has penned an op-ed on the 2015 budget. She casts it in a fairly gloomy light, pointing to the haunting possibility of a hollow force in the…
By Mackenzie Eaglen
Bill Greenwalt worked for almost a decade as the professional aide in charge of arms export policies at the Senate Armed Services Committee. Under the Bush administration he took the lead on industrial base issues as deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy. Now Bill has moved to a gig where he can speak a bit…
By Bill Greenwalt
WASHINGTON: If “this potential operation” against Syria continues into October, when the new fiscal year begins, the Navy’s going to need more money. That, in turn, means Congress has to act. Ideally, legislators would pass a supplemental spending bill, Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert said this morning. Failing a supplemental, though, Greenert said…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
When you add up the defense budget shortfalls for the next few years, it quickly becomes clear Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s recent Strategic Choices and Management Review (SCMR) looks to become just what he did not want: actions he will have to implement instead of a menu of options. Pentagon leaders must now consider most if…
By Mackenzie Eaglen
How to unlock innovation and savings for DoD: “commercial,” not COTS
Overmatch is fleeting and while traditional acquisitions can’t always keep up with new threats, a different and approved practice can.
As sequestration forces the Pentagon to consider truly transformative cuts to the U.S. military, the knives are coming out even more readily than usual in a town known for fierce infighting. Today’s budget environment has created an open season on traditional concepts of roles and missions. Service leaders have become far more vocal in warning…
By Michael Auslin
WASHINGTON: Turmoil, fear and a certain resolute grimness marked this week at the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. The military scrambled to cope with a range of new threats as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and the Pentagon leadership begin to grapple with the grim future posed by the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration. Put it all…
By Colin Clark
By voting to raise troops’ pay at almost twice the rate the Pentagon has requested, the House of Representatives risks suffocating other defense priorities, from combat training to much-needed weapons programs like the Army’s flagship Ground Combat Vehicle, Chief of the Staff of the Army Gen. Ray Odierno said today. “We made a recommendation this…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.[updated Wednesday with remarks from Sen. Ayotte, Sen. Kyl, and James Carafano] Tomorrow morning, one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, will kick off a new project co-sponsored by two of its long-established institutions, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The official agenda of the “Project for the Common Defense”…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.America likes the idea that we have made a solemn promise to generously compensate our military service members. After all, the argument goes, how can we ever fully repay them for risking their lives for us? Providing benefits like low-cost premium health care, comfortable pensions, housing allowances, grocery discounts, tuition assistance, tax breaks and much…
By Mackenzie EaglenUPDATED THROUGHOUT WITH COMMENTS FROM CAPITOL HILL EVENT CAPITOL HILL: In an extraordinary letter to defense lawmakers and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, experts from nine Washington think tanks on the left and the right call for fundamental fixes to the defense budgets that, left undone, “threaten the health and long-term viability of America’s volunteer military.” The…
By Colin Clark
CAPITOL HILL: The best case for sequester is still a disaster – but we’re not going to get the best case. That’s the common denominator from a range of budget options rolled out today by an extraordinary alliance of four thinktanks. Their consensus recommendations to cut military readiness, Army brigades, Navy carriers, Air Force ICBMs,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Bill Greenwalt knows acquisition like few people on earth. For more than a decade he wrote acquisition laws — and fought off some — while a staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Then he went to the Pentagon, where he oversaw industrial base issues, which often included acquisition policies. Bill, now a wise man…
By Bill Greenwalt