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  12 mars 2019 | International, Terrestre

  The US Army is preparing for major changes to force structure

  By: Jen Judson Update: This story has been updated to reflect Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley's correct title. WASHINGTON — The Army is preparing to make what it deems as necessary, and major, organizational changes to its force structure within the next five years, according to the Futures and Concepts Center director. “There is going to be a fundamental change in the organizational structure to fight the way we are describing,” Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley told an audience at the Center for a New American Security in Washington on March 4. “The Army has relied on counterinsurgency operations over the past 15 years that depended greatly on the Brigade Combat Team. But now, with a new focus on large-scale ground combat operations anticipated in the future operating environment, “that will require echelons above brigade, all of which will solve unique and distinct problems that a given BCT can't solve by itself,” Wesley said. A new organizational structure is necessary, according to Wesley, to align better with the service's new warfighting doctrine under development — Multidomain Operations or MDO. The Army rolled out the first iteration of its new doctrine over a year ago and debuted a revised version — MDO 1.5 — shortly after the Association of the U.S. Army's annual convention in Washington last fall. The new doctrine addresses how the service plans to operate in the future against adversaries that have learned to engage in provocative behavior in a gray zone that doesn't quite classify as conflict, and who have gone to school on U.S. capabilities, developing equipment and operating concepts that threaten the U.S.'s long-standing capability overmatch. The Army is now focused on ensuring that its capabilities match its new doctrine, standing up a new four-star command in Austin, Texas — Army Futures Command — to accomplish such a goal and syncing its other major commands together to focus on six top modernization priorities. Wesley noted that the organizational realignment needed would “probably be even a bigger problem than the materiel requirements" to create a force designed for multidomain operations. “You will see us seek to build out echelons above brigade — the Division, the Corps, even potentially a field Army — to get into theater that can manage these theater problems that otherwise wouldn't be achieved,” he added. The Army will likely have to make trades across the active and reserve forces, Wesley said, “so we have the ability to have a force posture that can rapidly transition if necessary.” But with all of these other dramatic changes, it's inevitable that the force structure change with it, according to Wesley, and that is going to have to happen sooner rather than later, he stressed. The Army has to “dive in” and start putting plans in place in the next five-year budgeting cycle “because if you want to achieve what the secretary and the chief has said, to be an MDO capable force by 2028, you have to start doing some of these organizational changes early,” Wesley told a group of reporters following the event at CNAS. And organizational changes need to align with the service's plans to field first units with newly modernized equipment and in some cases, units are slated to receive this equipment in very short order, according to Wesley. “You need some place for that stuff to land,” he said. “When you talk about long-range precision fires, for example, having an appropriate theater fires command. When you talk about air-and-missile defense and first unit equipped, what kind of force structure do we have to enable that? And it can't just be at the brigade level ... It has to transcend echelons.” Wesley said while he couldn't discuss specifics yet, he believed evidence of major organizational changes will likely be seen toward the end of the next five-year budget period. The three-star also said he believed the Army would need to increase the level of units stationed abroad. “The National Defense Strategy talks about the contact and blunt forces,” Wesley said. “Contact are those that are in theater all the time — either rotational or permanent — and blunt [forces] are those that can rapidly move into theater as necessary.” Getting the right mix between contact and blunt forces will be necessary, Wesley said. "You have to have contact forces. What we are working on is how to optimize what that balance is. You have to have headquarters and fires commands and that can be a deterrent effect immediately.” Over the next few years, the Army plans to war-game the right mix, but “regardless, I think you are going to find that at some point there will have to be a debate on the degree to which we have forward presence, potentially increased, in the future,” Wesley said. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2019/03/06/major-army-force-structure-changes-afoot/

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  14 mai 2020 | International, Aérospatial, Naval, Terrestre, C4ISR, Sécurité

  A delicate balancing act: The US government must juggle a pandemic and the FY21 budget

  By: Robert DuPree For the past few months, the U.S. federal government has been, quite understandably, totally focused on addressing the enormous health care and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. These efforts will necessarily continue to be front and center in the weeks and even months ahead, no matter how rapidly the curve flattens or declines, as different sectors and regions reopen. But to move the country forward, Congress must prepare to do its regular business for the year, which largely means tackling appropriations bills. Congressional staff have reportedly been doing the prep work to get spending bills ready for whenever the House and Senate can safely convene to work on them (or to do much of this work remotely). The American people — including federal contractors large and small, and our employees — are relying on Congress to check its partisan impulses and figure out how to do two things at once in the coming months: Continue to combat the COVID-19 crisis, and develop fiscal 2021 funding bills for all federal departments and agencies to meet our nation's needs. Unfortunately, there are some who are already taking a simplistic view, saying Congress will be so busy dealing with the pandemic that it will have to just give up and pass a continuing resolution to fund the government beyond the election into next year or even for a full year. On the contrary, the pandemic is exactly why Congress should be doing its work and completing updated appropriations bills on time. First of all, in these extraordinary times, the country doesn't need appropriations bills which merely extend the decisions made on spending last December, when Congress finally completed action (over two months late) on FY20 appropriations bills. The COVID-19 pandemic was just a blip on the horizon at that time. For FY21, the country needs updated spending legislation that more accurately reflects the greatly changed world we now face. Moreover, departments and agencies also need the flexibility to enter into new contracts to meet new needs, which is generally prohibited unless expressly provided under a continuing resolution. Further, Congress and the administration must come to grips with the elephant in the room — the strict annual spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011, as amended. To mix metaphors, this law is no longer just an elephant, it's an emperor who has no clothes. Congress has modified the BCA's statutory spending caps a number of times over the past decade (thus, the above caveat “as amended”). Now we're about to face the final year of the law's spending caps, and what do we find? The caps are a joke. The caps were meant to limit discretionary spending each year, but Congress has repeatedly found ways around them. This has usually been done in one of two ways. The first is by including some amount of normal baseline defense spending under the category of overseas contingency operations, or OCO, which is “wartime” funding; this occurs even when unrelated to America's overseas/wartime military efforts. OCO spending is exempt from the BCA caps, so funding part of the base Defense Department budget this way enables the law's defense-spending cap to be technically met while also understating the Pentagon's non-wartime expenditures. The second way is by designating certain spending as “emergency” expenditures. Yes, these are almost always for valid, unforeseen emergencies, but it is still spending that would otherwise exceed the discretionary caps. Only Congress can wave a wand and say: “No, it doesn't exceed the cap — it's for an emergency.” To be honest, the caps painted an unrealistic picture of efforts to control federal spending anyway. By only being applied to discretionary spending, exempting massive entitlement expenditures and interest on the debt, the caps presented a partial picture of true federal-spending restraint to begin with. And now the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in multiple legislative packages being enacted, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates could add over $2.7 trillion to the current year's deficit. But because they are loans or designated as “emergency” spending, they don't violate the caps. They just add to the deficit. In reality, true federal spending has soared far past the stable level of spending that the caps were purported to achieve when the BCA was first enacted. Yet, the caps are still in place for next year, which will impact the congressional appropriations process by either preventing the spending needed to address current needs, or leading to further contortionist efforts by legislators to circumvent the caps. So let's quit pretending. Congress and the administration should agree to repeal the final year of the caps as part of the next COVID-19 legislative package so appropriators can be upfront about the spending needed without having to hide so much of that spending behind the “emergency spending” loophole. Be transparent, and admit the country is, like during World War II, spending a whole lot more than anticipated to meet the crisis. And most of all, get the job done by acting in a bipartisan fashion to pass appropriations bills by Oct. 1, 2020, that accurately reflect our real needs and expenditures. Admittedly, that may not be easy to do in an election year, but the nation and the federal contracting community are depending on Congress to be able to manage the COVID-19 crisis response, while simultaneously conducting its regular business. Robert DuPree is manager of government affairs at Telos Corporation. He focuses on political developments in Congress and the executive branch, including the federal budget, appropriations process, national defense and cybersecurity. He previously served as legislative director for a senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives. https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2020/05/13/a-delicate-balancing-act-the-us-government-must-juggle-a-pandemic-and-the-fy21-budget/

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  25 novembre 2020 | International, Aérospatial

  Boeing Stirs Pentagon’s Ire With More Dings, Damage to Aircraft

  By Anthony Capaccio Boeing Co. has been cited by the Pentagon's contracts management agency for an increase in incidents of damage to military aircraft or components at three of its facilities. The citation from Army Lieutenant General David Bassett, director of the Defense Contract Management Agency, cited “recent negative trends” in mishaps at Boeing's facilities in Seattle, San Antonio and Mesa, Arizona, “that far exceeds historical rates” and are “not consistent with expected performance.” The results could include damage from parts falling off a cart during transportation or too little overhead “clearance when maneuvering the aircraft or ground support equipment resulting in repairs needing to be made,” Matthew Montgomery, a spokesman for the contracts agency, said in an email. “Our analysis of mishaps indicates a disproportionate number of events occurring at Boeing facilities” since 2018 involving aircraft or parts damaged before delivery to the military, Bassett told Leanne Caret, chief executive officer of Boeing's defense unit, in a previously undisclosed June letter obtained by Bloomberg News. The mishaps add to other indications of challenged performance at units of Chicago-based Boeing, the No. 2 defense contractor after Lockheed Martin Corp. They include problems with parts quality for Apache AH-64 helicopters that led to a recent halt in delivery that's still in effect and a wide-ranging Army-led inspection of the Mesa facility. In addition, Boeing is still struggling to deliver a KC-46 refueling tanker that meets refueling system specifications nine years after the company won the contract. Earlier: Boeing's Arizona Chopper Plant Under Scrutiny by Army Mishaps at Boeing facilities increased from 18% of those tracked by the defense contracts agency for large aviation contractors in fiscal years 2017 and 2018 to 38% in 2019. As of June, they stood at 50%, far exceeding “levels observed in other large DoD aircraft contractors of similar scope over the same time period,” Bassett wrote. The issues included a lack of procedures, a failure to follow those in place and “inattention or supervisory factors” that “contributed to the majority of these mishaps,” Bassett wrote. Of particular concern was Boeing's Seattle facility, where 66% of the company's fiscal 2020 mishaps occurred, he wrote. Since the letter, “Boeing leadership and their employees have responded well” and “have initiated changes that should lead to better quality and mishap outcomes,” Bassett said in a statement. “We look forward to those changes demonstrating enduring improvements in quality and mishap reduction that will improve the products we receive.” Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher said the company didn't have a comment on the Bassett letter. Montgomery, the contracts agency spokesman, said that Boeing ranks in the top three of the 13 major aviation contractors tracked for reported mishaps over fiscal 2019 and 2020. “Each mishap is unique and some mishaps are still under investigation,” Montgomery said. “Some mishaps represent a failure to follow a procedure or take necessary preventative action.” During the time period reviewed, Boeing had five reportable mishaps in fiscal 2017 and four in fiscal 2018, he said. “They are currently sitting at 11 mishaps for fiscal 2020.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-24/boeing-dinged-and-damaged-military-aircraft-pentagon-complains