BREAKING NEWS:Northrop Grumman/EADS...the KC-45/A330.
Huge win for US/EU team.
-- Christian
MORE:
Pentagon picks EADS/Northrop for tanker contract: report (AFP)
The Pentagon has chosen Europe's EADS, parent of Airbus, and US partner Northrop Grumman for a massive refueling tanker aircraft contract, the Wall Street Journal said Friday.
The newspaper, citing a person familiar with the situation, said the partnership won a heated contest against US-based aerospace giant Boeing for the contract of some 40 billion dollars.
Boeing, the second leading US defense contractor after Lockheed Martin, has been considered the heavy favorite to snare the contract to provide 179 twin-engine planes that essentially are flying gas stations, used to refuel in-flight war planes and troop transporters.
The contract is one of the Pentagon's largest in recent years and the first order on a tanker market estimated at more than 100 billion dollars in over 30 years.
The outcome of the competition is being closely watched not just because of the enormous size of the contract. There are domestic and geopolitical implications at issue in the US Air Force's choice between an all-American contractor or a mainly US team that includes a foreign contractor.
An EADS victory would give the European firm its first major foothold in the world's largest defense market.
Boeing proposed a version of its long-haul cargo plane the 767-200.
EADS offered a modified version of the Airbus 330. The commercial plane would be militarized by Northrop Grumman and its American partners to prevent the transfer of sensitive technology to a foreign entity.
When my air conditioning broke in mid-July I was very nervous about the repair costs, but I remember that my real estate agent purchased a home warranty for my home. I called Nationwide Home Warranty and within a few hours my a/c was fixed for only a service call fee. My realtor really helped me out.
Be sure to check out first impressions from the annual Association of the U.S. Army Winter Symposium on the unveiling of BAE Systems/Navistar's Joint Light Tactical Vehicle prototype.
Our friends at Aviation Week have an army of reporters down there (oh, darn...in Ft. Lauderdale in February) covering the latest in Army equipment. You all know I'm a big fan of the JLTV and I'm glad it was saved from the budgetary axe due to some sober minds prevailing over MRAP buys.
And be sure to check out the promotional video of the truck below...One criticism: why the flat undercarriage?
-- Christian
You can look this one up. See FY 09 budget request, justification materials, US Air Force, Aircraft procurement-Vol. 2, page 71.
You'll find on that page a detailed description for not one, but two potential mechanical problems that could cause a B-2A to crash.
Here's a sampling (read highlighted text):
The problem is caused by the B-2A's distorted engine inlets.
The distortion causes excessive wear on the stage 1 fan blades for the F118-GE-100 engines. Take that and an unplanned "foreign object damage event", and, voila, your $1.1 billion bomber may experience a "catastrophic in-flight emergency".
But there's another problem. A loose fan blade also can spark an "uncontained titanium fire". According to the same document, the titanium fire -- whatever that is -- may cause a "Class A event", or what normal people call a "crash".
The problem is listed in the budget justification documents because the USAF is buying repair blades this year to fix the problem. I'm sure it will be interesting for the investigators to find out whether the "Spirit of Kansas" had received the repairs before the crash, among other items of interest, of course.
Killing off your [erstwhile] allies...?
Our friend Aharon Etingoff sends me this from the JP:
'Arabs helped Mossad kill Mughniyeh'
Syrian sources claim that several Arab nations conspired with Mossad to assassinate Hizbullah chief of operations Imad Mughniyeh earlier this month, the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi daily stated on Wednesday.
According to the report, which could not be confirmed by any official source, Syria was making significant progress in the investigation of Mughniyeh's death, and would publish the results of its inquiry following the Arab league summit in Damascus in March.
Meanwhile, Kuwaiti newspaper Al Seyassah reported Wednesday that Hizbullah was preventing Syrian investigators from questioning three senior members of the organization, fearing that Syria would blame the Lebanese terror organization for the assassination.
The paper asserted that Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah may have had a motive to have Mughniyeh killed, due to what it said was an attempt by Iran to strengthen the latter at the expense of Nasrallah following what Teheran termed Hizbullah's "failures" under Nasrallah during the Second Lebanon War.
This seems to me to be the most plausible explanation so far. And the most conspiratorially Machiavellian....
-- Christian
My former colleague at Marine Corps Times, Gordon Lubold, has a great story that ran a couple days ago in his new paper, the Christian Science Monitor.
He's taken a look at an initiative dreamed up on Capitol Hill to redistribute the nearly half-trillion (if you don't count wartime supplementals) DoD budget away from roughly equal shares and dole out more funds to the service that deserves them most.
Lubold writes:
A bipartisan House panel is nudging the Pentagon to begin a conversation on how to reform itself in many ways. But at the Pentagon, talk of change usually has a budgetary impact.
And, despite the past several years of "nation-building" and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been virtually no change in the way the defense budget is carved up in at least 40 years, says Rep. Jim Cooper (D) of Tennessee, who chairs the panel.
"That right there is a statistical indictment of the process," Representative Cooper says. "There had to be a year in which there were greater needs in one area or another, and the system was unable to accommodate it."
The fiscal 2009 budget request released this month, for example, shows the Army requesting a 27 percent share, the Air Force asking for a 28 percent share, and the Navy, which includes the Marine Corps, wanting a 29 percent share of the proposed $515 billion budget.
Cooper's seven-member panel is expected to release a study this week on each of the branches' "roles and missions" that may threaten services that are seen to perform more conventional warfare. With the focus on the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that makes some in the Navy and Air Force worry.
There's a part of me that thinks this is a good idea...that it's kinda f-ed up for the Army to get a smaller share than the Air Force or Navy.
But, by the same token, I can understand the argument that Air Force planes and Navy ships are more expensive than most Army gear. And I'm not one of those ascetics that thinks the Air Force should only fly A-10s and F-16s and the Navy should trash its aircraft carriers for small patrol boats.
Lubold continues:
Cooper hopes the study will spark a broader debate about the need to reform national security, with new emphases on cybersecurity and nonmilitary government agencies. The panel isn't recommending specific changes to the budget as much as it is raising concerns about the Pentagon's historical aversion to change. More specifically, some services are clinging to a version of warfare the panel believes is dated.
"There should be vociferous support from inside the services, since the military has been left carrying the burden of the failures of our national security institutions," reads a draft of the report, to be released Thursday. "Instead, our military has resisted change just as they have past efforts at reform. The Air Force and Navy are reemphasizing more traditional threats and downplaying the unexpected threats we face today."
In fact, the Navy has tried to emphasize its so-called soft-power capabilities to combat terrorism, and senior Air Force officials seek to remind Congress that conventional threats, like those presented by China, still remain.
Congress is asking the same questions that many in and out of uniform have raised for some time. "After seven years of war, that we haven't budged one inch away from the cold war apportionment of the budget to me is Kafka-esque," said Robert Scales Jr., a retired Army major general, speaking last week at a think tank. "I just can't explain it. I don't understand."
The Pentagon has begun its own internal review of roles and missions. But with budgetary planners essentially in limbo until a new administration arrives next year, it's unclear how much impact such discussions will have, says Loren Thompson, a senior analyst at The Lexington Institute, a think tank outside Washington.
It may serve to create a debate in anticipation of the broader effort to review the nation's strategic planning document, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). But when all is said and done, it's likely that things will remain largely the same, Mr. Thompson says.
Insofaras Cooper is trying to spark a debate on reapportionment of the DoD budget (one I'm sure the 4-percenters will want in on), it's a great move and long in coming. I'm a huge fan of Bob Scales and am tracking with him when it comes to budget frustration.
But don't count the Iron-Triangle out...they don't want any part of it.
But such talk of budgetary reform can sound like fighting words to some inside the Pentagon, as Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged earlier this month during hearings on Capitol Hill.
"What I worry about in this ... is that, not done well, it has a tendency to turn services against each other," Admiral Mullen said.
And moving money from one service to another can be politically insurmountable. Each service, with its own political constituency on Capitol Hill, carefully guards what belongs to it.
You got that right.
-- Christian