Emphasizing venture capital, modular open architecture, and software development will help turn neat ideas into battle-ready weapons, acquisition gurus told Congress. But having separate bureaucracies for Research & Engineering and Acquisition & Sustainment may be a problem.
CAPITOL HILL: Nunn-McCurdy notifications to Congress of gross cost growth in a weapons system’s costs strike fear in the hearts of top Pentagon acquisition officials, and something like them may become law for a new set of costs — operations and support. “They should be the next frontier for acquisition reform,” former DoD Comptroller Bob […]
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
WASHINGTON: National Guard attack helicopter units just can’t be as battle-ready as full-time regular Army ones, Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox has been telling the Hill. That’s why the Guard should give all its AH-64 Apache gunships to the active-duty force to replace older aircraft lost to budget cuts. “Combat elements must be in […]
NEWSEUM: At first it looks like pure wishful thinking: The administration’s 2015 budget plan assumes the automatic budget cuts known as sequestration don’t go back into effect in 2016, when the stay of execution known as the Balanced Budget Act runs out. In fact, the Pentagon’s No. 2 official argued today, the administration is taking […]
It’s a delicate time for the Navy’s controversial Littoral Combat Ship, largely because of acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox. It was Fox who wrote the memo directing the Navy to slash its long-term LCS buy from 52 vessels to 32. So we’d love to know how strained the smiles were yesterday when Fox stepped aboard […]
WASHINGTON: The fact that the Obama administration selected Christine Fox, the former CAPE director, as Deputy Defense Secretary illustrates two truths: First, several people turned down the job or withdrew from consideration because of the hideous confirmation process; second, the political impulse to place a female in the position was intense and, ultimately, successful. Those […]
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
WASHINGTON: Acquisition experts agree that accurate cost estimates can be devilishly difficult to get right. The Pentagon’s top cost estimator, Christine Fox, says current cost estimates are often accurate within several percentage points. That’s impressive, but on programs measured in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, a few percentage points can mean a […]
WASHINGTON: Every senior civilian leader and the Navy agree that America needs replacements for the Ohio-class nuclear missile submarines if our nuclear deterrent is to remain credible. But the SSBN-X, as the program is known, is at risk from the mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration, the influential head of CAPE, the Pentagon’s budget and […]