Coronavirus hits defense contractor jobs. Boeing’s Puget Sound shutdown affects 70,000 workers and the P-8 and KC-46 programs. GE cut 2,600 employees (10%). Textron furloughed 7,000 workers. Honeywell cutting hours. GD Bath Iron Works shut for 2 weeks, giving PTO to 8,000 workers. UTC is on a hiring freeze.
Another swing of the pendulum: KC-46 Tanker Problems Call For A Rethink Of Fixed-Price Development Programs. Boeings losses now exceed $3 billion.
The U.S. Navy Eyes A Shock Trial-Free Future. Why? “Shock trials are expensive… Weather conditions and environmental concerns make scheduling difficult… shipyards make it challenging to bring a ship in for timely repairs after the shock trial occurs.” Hopefully sensible heads prevail.
JTRS: A Cautionary Tale For Today. A slice: “JTRS set out to be the Joint Strike Fighter of the radio world, an omni-purpose communications network device that was supposed to do everything but wash your windows. What it actually delivered – after 15 years and $6B – was little more than a large invoice.”
SpaceX Loses Another Starship Prototype During Failed Test. That’s the 3rd prototype lost. May have been due to a “test configuration mistake.” For great advances, failure should be expected.
Put your money where your strategy is: using machine learning to analyze the Pentagon budget.
JAIC readies ‘AI champions’ as commission recommends doubling R&D spending.
Low Speed Precision Control gets a fast contracting success story. “We were able to contract the LSPC effort in four months using an other transaction authority (OTA)”
Secret footage from WWII spy center Bletchley Park discovered. We might not think of it that way like Manhattan Project, but Bletchley Park was of the great acquisition stories of all time.
3M pushes back after Trump orders company to stop exporting N95 masks. 3M would “it would not comply with a White House order to stop exporting masks to Canada and Latin America.” Note, 3M received a $172 million contract for N95 masks from HHS.
DoD, AF Punt On New Space Acquisition Exec. “Roper has argued strenuously against a bifurcation of the lines of authority for space and air acquisition as inefficient, costly and counter to DoD efforts to better integrate space across warfighting domains.”
Equitable Adjustments for Volunteered Contractor Performance: Confusion about the Burden of Proof. Via Michelle Currier.
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