From Scott Chandler, War on the Rocks: “The defense acquisition system is clearly broken. It equips the most powerful military in the world, but the process alone devours far too much time and one third of procurement dollars. Writing for War on the Rocks, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said “our broken defense acquisition system is a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.” The Defense Department’s own Defense Business Board made its number one recommendation to “zero-base the entire system, including all directives and regulations.” Or as Arnold Punaro suggested for the thousands of pages of acquisition regulations: just “[p]ut a match to it.””
- Birkey: No, you can’t replace the F-35 with a comparable F-18
- Older fighter jets such as the F-16 and F/A-18 will never match the F-35, an Air Force general said. Brig. Gen. Scott Pleus, a former F-16 Fighting Falcon pilot who directs the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program’s integration office, said even upgraded versions of the fourth-generation fighters simply can’t compete against the newer aircraft’s stealth superiority. – DOD Buzz
- Donnelly, Schmitt and Eaglen on the future of defense spending
- Kroenig, Gray and Payne, and Dodge on nuclear weapons
From Patrick Tucker, Defense One: “Future nuclear missiles may be siloed but, unlike their predecessors, they’ll exhibit “some level of connectivity to the rest of the warfighting system,” according to Werner J.A. Dahm, the chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. That opens up new potential for nuclear mishaps that, until now, have never been a part of Pentagon planning. In 2017, the board will undertake a study to see how to meet those concerns. “Obviously the Air Force doesn’t conceptualize systems like that without ideas for how they would address those surety concerns,” said Dahm.”
Legacy Vs Modern Command & Control
From Defense Systems: "As the Department of Defense (DoD) seeks to modernize, its agencies are employing custom modern applications that do not play nice with legacy apps from bygone military eras. Aside from being larger and more difficult to manage, legacy applications often lack the scalability that is required in today’s cloud-based environments. The existing applications were independently designed, require their own custom configured runtime, and must be managed and configured individually. This makes routine management activities such as resource allocation, scaling, and monitoring particularly burdensome to developers, administrators, and operations teams."