Acquisition headlines

Pentagon’s Messaging on JEDI: Without it, Our Adversaries Win and Troops Lose. That’s quite a bit overstated, but it turned out to be an effective strategy (see next link).

“A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Department of Defense (DOD) can move forward with its plan to award a $10 billion “war cloud” contract later this summer, which will be likely given to either Amazon or Microsoft, knocking down a legal challenge by cloud-computing competitor Oracle.” Link is here. Is it that Oracle couldn’t “demonstrate prejudice,” or do they just want to get the darn thing done?

Without additional $157 million, US Army aviation readiness projected to suffer. Amazingly, the Army is still looking wise and prudent. They are asking to draw funding from existing accounts rather than threatening some catastrophe if new funds are not provided. My view is that sustainment costs are so high — and crowding out investment — because of poor investment decisions we’ve made over the course of many decades. Eventually, the tide has to turn or we will enter a vicious cycle.

Bulgaria agrees to buy F-16 Block 70s in $1.25 billion deal.

House NDAA puts the US military at risk. That claim was made because the Senate authorized a $746.4 billion bill, while the House provided only $733 billion. That’s just a 1.8 percent decrease. It amazes me how the DOD — by far the biggest spender on defense in the world — can be put at risk because Congress wants to grow the budget by only 2.4 percent from last year rather than 4.2 percent. If the claim is true, and the US military is that fragile, then heads should be rolling…

Bad News: Russia Warns It Can and Will Detect Any F-35 in Its Airspace. Well… it doesn’t appear that Russian S-300 and other air defenses provided to Iran were able to detect Israel’s F-35s which penetrated Iranian airspace. But that doesn’t mean the Russians couldn’t detect the F-35. Question: if the US sent F-35s undetected over Russian airspace, would the US publicize the fact?

To develop hypersonic missile launcher, Pentagon seeks $50 million funding transfer.

DARPA’s LogX program will move DoD logistics and supply chain data to the cloud. Oh DARPA, I don’t think they have any clue what they’re getting into. LogX PM says “… there are literally thousands of different individualized information systems that handle specific business processes.” Perhaps they think they’re the first people to ever try to centralize logistics information. Luckily, they realize that a “just-in-time system… is not terribly resilient to being disrupted.” The DOD logistics challenge is orders of magnitude larger and harder than commercial firms.

Related: Why DARPA wants more operational personnel. Who doesn’t? Seems to be that DARPA is making a case that it needs more operational people to get better user feedback and “bridge the valley of death.” That might solve some problems on the smallest of programs — allows for prototyping and iteration in concert with users — but what about significant programs (MDAPs)? More personnel won’t solve broader structural problems with DOD organization.

“Let’s unleash the space professionals so they can grow and become the equivalent of the Air Force after separating from the Army,” Donovan said July 3 in an interview with SpaceNews. Uh huh, that’d what people are afraid of, being an avenue to increase DOD topline by hundreds of billions. If space were so important, then I’d like to see some tradeoffs within the budget we have available, surely it is big enough at over $700 billion.

Can the DDG-51 Burkes make it to 45 years? Vice Adm. Moore doesn’t seem to think so. But if many classes of ships didn’t have service life extensions of 7 to 13 years, then it would have taken until 2052 (!) to reach a 355-ship Navy. Still, even with the extensions and an additional 47 ships that the CBO estimates will cost an extra $208 billion, the Navy won’t reach 355 ships until 2034. That’s if existing ships somehow (does anyone know how?) will make it to 45 or even 50 year service lives.