While key executives tell Breaking Defense they have adjusted to the new normal, experts worry IT supply chain vulnerabilities could be exploited in the future by adversarial nations.
CAPITOL HILL: Presidents propose; Congress disposes. President Trump’s shipbuilding budget for 2018 is a placeholder that legislators can increase, the chairman of the Senate seapower subcommittee told me this morning. After Sen. Roger Wicker chaired a hearing with shipbuilding executives, following a classified hearing with Navy leaders, I asked him about Trump’s budget. Despite Trump’s […]
UPDATED: Adds GAO rebuttal WASHINGTON: The latest GAO report on the Amphibious Combat Vehicle may reveal more problems with GAO’s approach than with the Marine Corps program. While the Government Accountability Office does its usual solid work on the numbers, when it recommends delaying production by four months to do additional testing, it’s acting from an excess […]
WASHINGTON: As shipbuilder Bath Iron Works laid the keel for the third and final destroyer of the DDG-1000 class, the Navy and industry were struggling to understand embarrassing breakdowns on the first ship, the USS Zumwalt. Congress fears there could be worse to come. “The hard work hasn’t really begun yet in terms of delivering the […]
AUSA: Lasers versus drones: It’s the cool versus awesome, ninjas versus pirates matchup of future warfare. The Army’s already experimented with a 10-kilowatt laser on a heavy truck, Boeing’s High Energy Laser – Mobile Demonstrator (HEL-MD), which could shoot down mortar rounds in flight. Now, while Lockheed scales up the truck-mounted laser to a whopping […]
WASHINGTON: It looks like a tank, drives on tracks like a tank, fires 120 mm shells at several times the speed of sound like a tank — but don’t call it a tank. The General Dynamics “Griffin” is a kind of concept car on steroids, a demonstration of existing technologies that could be quickly fit […]
UPDATED with Carter statement, Electric Boat clarifications, Hill comment ELECTRIC BOAT, GROTON, CT: Shipbuilders are fixing the biggest problem on one of the Pentagon’s top priorities, the Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet. As Defense Secretary Ashton Carter toured the Groton shipyard and talked up the importance of submarines, Electric Boat officials told reporters they’re fixing faulty welds […]
CAPITOL HILL: Despite tight budgets at the Pentagon, the Navy wants to speed-up several shipbuilding programs — amphibious warships, destroyers, and submarines — and Congress seems inclined to give them the money. That’s testimony both to the perennial political popularity of shipbuilding, which employs a lot of voters, and to the rising strategic anxiety over […]
The Navy’s plan for building new nuclear missile submarines — the $80 billion Ohio Replacement Program — tips the balance between the nations’ sub-builders in favor of New England-based Electric Boat. Yes, the “Submarine Unified Build Strategy” carefully allocates work between EB, owned by General Dynamics, and Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding, owned by Huntington-Ingalls. Yes, […]
Yesterday, the Army awarded three companies a $12.7 billion, 10-year contract for over 60,000 manpack radios. But execs at General Dynamics, Harris, and Rockwell Collins shouldn’t pop champagne corks yet. The Army has radically changed how it buys radios in recent years so that what the “winning” companies have actually won, in essence, is the […]
[UPDATED with total hiring figures] WASHINGTON: Navy demand for submarines is so strong that sub-builder Electric Boat is betting on growth, despite the bleak budget outlook for defense in general. Connecticut congressman Joe Courtney, the top Democrat on the House seapower subcommittee, exulted in a statement this morning that his home state yard expects to add […]