Acquisition Headlines
Defense stock rebound: “Lockheed Martin saw first-quarter earnings of $5.99 a share, an increase of 49% from a year earlier.” That led to an overnight […]
Search Results for program budget
Acquisition Headlines
“The U.S. Army is looking for information on a 360-degree counter-drone system capable to detect unmanned aircraft systems weighing less than 20 pounds.” I assume […]
Rise of centralization post-WWII
To one extent or another, each of the technical services carried out research and development (including test and evaluation), procurement, production, supply, and even maintenance […]
Costs are the negative aspect of a valuation process
I start, then, with fundamentals. The conception of costs in modern economic theory is a conception of displaced alternatives: the cost of obtaining anything is […]
What do we mean by big “A” and little “a” in Acquisition?
Every weapon system in the U.S. arsenal is intended to satisfy a specific military need (often referred to as a requirement), must be paid for […]
Why does US defense industry fail in “normal” times?
Here is Fredric Scherer discussing why the US defense industry seemed to perform so well in urgent programs of the 1940s and 50s, and so […]
Rumbles on the Columbia-class submarine
Current Navy plans call for construction on the first of 12 Columbia-class nuclear-armed submarines to begin in 2021, with an overall price tag of $128 billion. But […]
David Packard’s impact on defense acquisition
This paper contends that the study of David Packard, the co-founder of electronics firm giant Hewlett-Packard and one of the founding fathers of Silicon Valley, […]
Acquisition Headlines
Andy Marshall, the Pentagon’s ‘Yoda,’ dies at age 97. A controversial character for sure. Here’s a good article on Marshall from 2014. A slice: “It […]
The need to demonstrate technical feasibility
Finally, it is clear that in the German case, as in the British, an early demonstration of the technical feasibility of the turbojet engine made […]
William Hartung on Lockheed Martin and the military-industrial complex
William Hartung joins me on the Acquisition Talk podcast to discuss his book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. […]
Implications of the Space Development Agency
Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan on Tuesday [March 12, 2019] officially established the Space Development Agency as a separate organization within the Department of Defense […]
Acquisition Headlines
“I can guarantee that no Air Force maintainer will ever name their daughter ‘Alice.’ ” That was from an article about the F-35 logistics system, […]
Where should DARPA focus its innovation?
DARPA has no doubt stimulated many important innovations over the past 60 plus years, from the internet and GPS to drones and autonomous vehicles. But […]
What are they not telling us about Navy experimental exercises?
The Navy and Marine Corps are continuing a series of exercises to understand what technologies and tactics the services need to rapidly develop to fight […]