30 juin 2023 | International, Aérospatial
US State Dept. clears $5.6 billion sale of F-35s for Czech Republic
The sale, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, would include 24 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.
16 août 2019 | International, Aérospatial
Plans for a new base closing round may be running out of time: Report
By: Leo Shane III
The next few months could decide whether the Defense Department gets another base closing round in the next decade, according to a new analysis from a conservative think tankwarning military officials not to dismiss the potential looming impact on budgets and readiness.
Officials from the Heritage Foundation, whose policy priorities have helped influence President Donald Trump's administration, have in the past supported a new base closing round to cut back on excess military infrastructure and more efficiently spend annual defense funding.
In the analysis released this week, author Frederico Bartels — policy analyst for defense budgeting at the foundation — said a Pentagon report on the issue being compiled now represents “the best chance for the Department of Defense to make the case for a new round of BRAC” in years, and perhaps the last realistic chance to advance the idea for the near future.
“I think it's the last chance of the Trump administration to make an argument for this,” he said in an interview with Military Times. “Even if he gets re-elected next year, I think it will be hard to go back and make the case if they're unsuccessful this time.”
The military convened six base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commissions between 1988 and 2005, shutting down dozens of military installations and turning over that land to state and local municipalities.
The process has always been fraught with political turmoil, as lawmakers protest any loss of jobs, military personnel and resulting economic benefits in their districts. But the 2005 BRAC round was particularly controversial, as defense officials consolidated numerous service locations into joint bases and massively rearranged force structure in an attempt to modernize the military.
As a result, cost saving projections from that process were significantly below past rounds, and members of Congress have strongly opposed any attempts at another round since then.
In the fiscal 2019 national defense authorization act, lawmakers did include language for a new military infrastructure capacity report — due next February — where defense officials can make the case for the need for additional closures. Similar Pentagon reports in the last few years have shown excess capacity of between 19 and 22 percent.
Bartels said Pentagon leaders have repeatedly supported the idea of another round in recent years, but have done a poor job selling lawmakers on the idea.
“The department needs to make the case for a new round of BRAC based on two key tenets: potential savings and the National Defense Strategy,” he wrote. “A new BRAC round could save $2 billion by reducing unneeded infrastructure. Additionally, a new round of BRAC would permit the department to assess its infrastructure against the threats outlined by the National Defense Strategy, providing a holistic look at all of the infrastructure.”
He warns that naming specific locations will only exacerbate political tensions on the issue, and said defense officials also need to publicly acknowledge problems with the 2005 base realignment round to win back congressional support.
And Bartels argues that the Trump administration must do more to push the issue. Defense officials requested a base closing round as part of their annual budget for six consecutive years before the Trump White House dropped the idea in their fiscal 2019 and 2020 budget plans.
If officials fail to request one next spring, or if the planned infrastructure report is delayed by several months, the department risks pushing the idea back at minimum an entire extra budget cycle and likely several more years down the road. Even if approved, the new BRAC round is likely to take several years of research and debate before any recommendations are made.
“I think there is still support for this in Congress,” Bartels said. “I think there are enough people that are about good stewardship of government funds that this can move ahead, if (defense officials) make the right argument. At least, I hope those lawmakers still exist.”
The full analysis is available on the Heritage Foundation's website.
Sur le même sujet
-
-
19 juillet 2019 | International, Autre défense
This is Knight’s Armament’s new machine gun suppressor
Knight's Armament Company of Titusville, Florida, unveiled a new suppressor at this year's Special Operations Forces Industry Conference where members of the SOF community get to interact with vendors and industry partners to preview and try out the latest and greatest in special operations kit and gear. KAC's suppressor is designed primarily to be used with the company's premier belt-fed Light Assault Machine Gun platform, chambered for 5.56 NATO and marketed more towards the SOF and private military contractor communities than to conventional infantry forces. True to its name, the LAMG is indeed very light, weighing only 8.6 pounds unloaded. In comparison, the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon weighs in at 17 pounds unloaded. According to KAC, one of the LAMG's biggest selling points is its ability to put down a high volume of fire with a low cyclic rate of just around 575-625 rounds per minute, allowing the end user to maintain a greater degree of control over the weapon and concentrate accurate fire on target. The suppressor, delivered in kit form, mounts to a threaded barrel included in the kit, and makes heavy use of a unique Pressure Reduction Technology system, which vents the gasses from each shot forward, preventing the gas from venting backwards into the shooter's face. Additionally -- and probably its best feature -- the PRT system allows the LAMG to keep its factory cyclic rates during sustained fire without any major dips. The LAMG is currently available to defense buyers, which means that the new suppressor will likely only be targeted towards military sales. At the moment, US SOCOM doesn't list the LAMG in its belt-fed arsenal, though it's possible that there are foreign SOF units that make use of KAC's innovative light machine gun platform, and might potentially avail of a sustained fire suppressor. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/gearscout/irons/2019/07/09/this-is-knights-armaments-new-machine-gun-suppressor/
-
31 août 2020 | International, Naval
US Navy solicits input for computer infrastructure-as-a-service initiative
by Carlo Munoz The US Navy is soliciting industry input for an effort to migrate all computer infrastructure supporting the entire surface fleet into an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) construct, one of several strategic shifts navy leaders are implementing as part of the Future Integrated Combat System (FICS) Computing Infrastructure (CI) architecture initiative. The IaaS effort will be a third-party, cloud-based infrastructure where navy information technology specialists will have the capability “to deploy and run arbitrary software, which can include operating systems and applications”, according to the navy's 25 August Request for Information (RFI). In turn, navy officials will not have management authority or control over the underlying infrastructure under IaaS but will be able to utilise the provided processing, storage, networks, and “other fundamental computing resources” as part of the infrastructure, the RFI added. The “common, scalable intermittently connected edge cloud architecture” envisioned for the IaaS will enable the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) construct under the FCIS CI architecture initiative, navy documents stated. “The IaaS and PaaS layers will abstract the mission applications from the physical computing resources and automate the configuration of the entire CI,” which will then support navy surface fleet deployments beginning in 2023, the documents added. Aside from supporting all navy surface combatant fielding under the FICS CI, potential industry participants in the RFI will also help develop “hardware refresh” solutions for the surface fleet. Those solutions will cover “large and small surface combatants, aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, and other related programs including [the] US Coast Guard”, as well as future ship classes and Aegis Combat Systems produces for Foreign Military Sales. Officials from Navy Sea Systems Command's Program Executive Office Integrated Warfare Systems (PEO IWS) are spearheading the IaaS RFP and the overall FCIS CI initiative. https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/us-navy-solicits-input-for-computer-infrastructure-as-a-service-initiative?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=EBB%2008.31.20&utm_term=Editorial%20-%20Early%20Bird%20Brief