WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s hardest-nosed accountants have endorsed the Army’s Aviation Restructure Initiative. ARI is a controversial cost-cutting plan which would retire the Vietnam-vintage OH-58 Kiowa scout helicopters and replace them with AH-64 Apache gunships taken from the National Guard. The Army said ARI, once fully implemented, would save $1.09 billion a year. In a document…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.BAE Systems’ LR-PGK: The Superior Anti-Jam Solution
Going the distance to defeat emerging jam threats.
CAPITOL HILL: It’s not every day you hear a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asking Congress to undo part of the administration’s budget proposal. But National Guard Bureau director Gen. Frank Grass is in a unique position, the only chief caught between the Pentagon and the states. So this morning, Gen. Grass explicitly…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
[UPDATED with Army & Senate responses] WASHINGTON: After convening in Washington for briefings on the Army budget and how to implement it, the state-level commanders of the National Guard have instead launched a new offensive against the Army plan to cut their forces, flooding Capitol Hill with letters and PowerPoint slides (embedded below). Their immediate goal:…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
UPDATE: Clarified Summary Of Maj. Gen. Rossi’s Remarks WASHINGTON: Poor General Ray Odierno. While the Army Chief of Staff took pains this morning to have only kind words for the National Guard (watch the video clip), one of his subordinates’ statements about the Guard’s post-9/11 performance keeps causing angry ripples across the Internet. Those ripples started…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The battle between the regular Army and the National Guard, which we all knew would blow up one of these days, has blown up. At 3:30 this afternoon, the spokesman of the 54 state and territorial Guard commanders, Kentucky Adjutant General Ed Tonini, raised the standard of revolt against the active-duty leadership who had, he said, “slammed their…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
CAPITOL HILL: When the armed services come here to make their case to Congress, the Army tends to be the elephant: huge, grey, and kind of clumsy. But this year, as the regular Army heads into what will likely be a bitter battle over fiscal 2015 funding with the Army National Guard, the service’s leadership…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Chinese and Russian hackers have everybody running scared. So whatever else happens with the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2015, we know it will include more money for things cyber, from purely defensive network security to black-budget “offensive cyber weapons” such as the Stuxnet worm. But one big thing remains in doubt: the role…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
A major overhaul is coming in software for missile warning
Space Systems Command’s FORGE program is the first, major missile-warning software modernization effort in 20 years.
The war hasn’t started, yet. But unless the regular Army and the National Guard can resolve their differences behind closed doors before the president’s budget request is publicly submitted sometime in February — and prospects are dim — there will be open, brutal conflict on Capitol Hill on a scale not seen since the 1990s.…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
As budgets tighten, will the National Guard and the regular Army go to war? Not if Gen. Frank Grass, chief of the National Guard Bureau, can help it. Peppered with questions about the conflict today at the National Press Club, Grass carefully redirected almost every one. In fact, he said, December’s last-ditch budget deal to delay…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: Gen. Frank Grass, the chief of the National Guard Bureau, seemed pretty chipper this morning over breakfast. That’s something you would not have seen from the Guard’s leadership the last time America faced a major drawdown to its armed forces, when the Guard and the regular Army engaged in fratricidal budget battles. This time round,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: Last year, the US Air Force fell face-first onto a buzzsaw when it proposed dramatic cuts to the Air National Guard, whose supporters raised a storm of protest in the Congress. Now there are signs that the next big budget battle will be between the regular active-duty Army and the Army National Guard. Or,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
