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the rest of the above article:
"One’s success in any position," McFarlane told Military Times, "ultimately depends upon the ability to build working relationships based upon knowledge, performance and respect for one’s peers." Asked whether there were moments, as national security adviser, when he felt conflicted between his sense of loyalty to the administration and to the military institution, McFarlane said no. "All officers — whether serving as lieutenants or generals — take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not an institution of parochial preference."

It will be the same for McMaster, he added, saying "He has been dealing candidly with the highest levels of our government for years and won't face any issues on that score."

Of course, that's yet to be determined. Being a Washington outsider may serve McMaster well in this role. The president has exhibited an affinity for military bearing, and seems willing to heed advice from those who tell it like it is. Alternatively, McMaster's uniform may come to symbolize how he stands apart.
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now I read (sounds like Politics but it just talks budgets)
Durbin: Dems would back Trump defense hike with domestic match
President Trump’s first 2018 budget blueprint was panned on both sides of the aisle on Tuesday, but a key Senate Democrat said his party could support Trump’s defense proposal if the domestic side is raised to match.

If a $603 billion top line for the base defense budget and a $462 billion top line for the domestic side of the budget is Trump’s opening position, the opening position for Senate Democrats is familiar one: Parity between the defense and non-defense budgets.

Sen. Richard Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, told reporters Tuesday if that were the case, Democrats “would have a more open mind.”

Restoring military readiness — which has “suffered through sequestration and the other budget cuts” — is the number one priority, with weapons systems and modernization up for conversation, Durbin said.

“But unless there is some sort of parallel investment on the non-defense side, many of us are going to resist it,” said Durbin, of Illinois.

On the flip side, an increase for the non-defense side is likely to run afoul of fiscally conservative Republicans.

The Trump White House was dealt a a blow Tuesday as senior Senate Republicans joined Democrats to push back on the budget blueprint.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters that deep State Department cuts Trump is expected to propose “probably” can’t pass the upper chamber.

“When we get to funding the government, obviously it will be done on a bipartisan basis,” McConnell said, adding he believes the “diplomatic portion of the federal budget is very important.”

The Wall Street Journal reported the Trump administration will cut the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development by 37 percent.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee that oversees foreign aid, told NBC News the proposal was “dead on arrival.”

"It’s not going to happen," said Graham , R-S.C. "It would be a disaster.”

On Monday, more than 120 retired three and four-star generals organized by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition sent a letter to the House and Senate leadership to urge them to protect the State Department and USAID budgets.

The House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and his Senate counterpart Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have criticized the Trump blueprint as insufficient on defense spending.

The two hawkish lawmakers have proposed $640 billion for the 2018 base defense budget, and McCain has noted that Trump top-line is a "mere" 3 percent over President Obama's 2017 request for $583 billion.

Echoing comments from key Democrats and Republicans, defense budget analyst Todd Harrison, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called the budget blueprint a "starting point" for the Trump administration's negotiations. Harrison's read was it means less for defense in a final deal.

"In all likelihood we’re not going to get as much money for defense as the Trump administration is proposing right now,” Harrison said.

To spend more on defense than the budget caps allow requires 60 votes in the Senate, which requires a deal with Democrats. Harrison noted that every deal for the last five years has modified budget caps with parity between defense and non-defense as a prerequisite for a deal.

One key development is Senate Democrats are “close to an agreement” for leftover 2017 appropriations for the Defense Department that would exceed President Obama’s budget request, Durbin said, to “come up with bipartisan answers, that are reasonable.”

Other lawmakers confirmed the bill will match the 2017 defense policy bill that passed Congress in December at $618.7 billion.

A Senate Appropriations Committee spokesman affirmed that Chairman Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., “is pleased with progress between the House and Senate to complete the 2017 defense bill, and would like to see similar progress on the remaining bills.”

Congress punted on most 2017 spending bills last year in favor of a stopgap spending bill that expires at the end of April. Without a 2017 spending bill, Congress would either shut down the government or pass another stopgap continuing resolution.

Durbin said he did not know whether McConnell is on board with the 2017 appropriations in the works, but he was optimistic that the defense bill would be able to navigate Capitol Hill’s partisan crosscurrents:

“I hope so, but it started with a lot of hard work between House and Senate Democrats and Republicans,” he said. “A CR is a terrible way to run the Department of Defense or any branch of government.”

Asked about the White House’s soon-to-come $30 billion defense supplemental spending bill, Durbin would not say whether Democrats would insist on parity. President Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly promised the supplemental would come within the first 100 days of the administration.

“We want to know where it’s coming from … if they’re paying for it, and if the next budget will take it out of non-defense spending,” Durbin said. “If he is going to give more money to the Department of Defense at the expense of the National Institutes of Health, medical research, we’re going to have a fight on our hands.”

Nor could Durbin say whether the supplemental would ultimately be wrapped into the 2017 spending bill itself or be part of 2018 appropriations.

“We don’t know why it’s been held up. They’ve been teasing us with it for weeks. It seems pretty straight forward, but maybe paying for it isn’t,” Durbin said.
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Tuesday at 8:21 AM
Yesterday at 5:52 PM
while McCain, Thornberry rip White House budget plan on defense

source:
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related (and more specific, with interesting charts inside) is USNI News
Thornberry: Trump Budget Too Small; Pentagon Needs $91B More Than Defense Spending Caps Allow
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The House Armed Services Committee chairman wants a defense spending increase nearly 70 percent larger than what the White House has called for –$91 billion, compared to President Donald Trump’s $54 billion – above what spending caps allow for Fiscal Year 2018.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) told reporters today that the FY 2018 base budget – not including spending for overseas operations – ought to be $640 billion to fund the right-sized force, operations and maintenance and capability upgrades requested by the Pentagon. In comparison, Budget Control Act spending caps allow for only $549 billion, the Obama Administration had planned for $584 billion, and Trump this week stated he wanted $603 billion. The last Future Year Defense Program (FYDP) written before the BCA was passed, before sequestration and spending caps hit, had the Defense Department spending a now-unthinkable $661 billion in FY 2018.

The delta of $91 billion in spending could come in a massive Overseas Contingency Operations budget if lawmakers cannot agree on a way to eliminate the BCA spending caps, Thornberry said, adding that, “as cumbersome as OCO funding is, it’s better than not getting any money.”

Thornberry said a “wide spectrum of the Republican conference” on the House side supports repealing spending caps on the defense budget, but it’s unclear if a majority would support it, and even less clear if the Senate could find a path that leads to even a partial repeal of sequestration. The chairman called using the OCO budget to support base spending needs an inefficient way of doing business but said he’d consider it as a last resort.

“There are lots of less-than-desirable options, I’ll try to figure out the best thing to do, but we just have to take those things as they come,” he said.
“But there’s no question that having base requirements met in an OCO budget makes it much harder for the Pentagon to plan and makes it harder to get industry to invest, and there are definite consequences to that approach. I still would say it’s better to get the money than not, but I hope we can all move towards a more predictable line of funding that will make the dollars we do spend more efficient.”

However the money comes, Thornberry was insistent that $640 billion is the number needed to create a whole force – one that stops a budget-driven Army drawdown, begins to grow the Navy fleet, invests in new airplanes to replace aging and maintenance-intensive ones, and funds sufficient training and operations time.

Thornberry gave reporters a chart showing unfunded requirements from Obama’s FY 2018 plan, and noted that relatively little of those requirements could be paid for under the Trump plan, despite Trump saying in his Feb. 28 joint address to Congress that his budget would be “one of the largest increases in national defense spending in American history.” In fact, Trump’s defense spending plan is only 3 percent larger than Obama’s and would have a modest impact on a military that is both trying to regain readiness and modernize – and in the case of the Navy, increase the quantity of – its planes, ships and ground vehicles, all while being stretched to provide sufficient presence around the globe.

As an example, Thornberry’s chart shows that the $19-bilion gap between Obama’s plan and Trump’s could buy an additional $10.9 billion in ground forces, $3.8 billion in increased training pipelines, $1.5 billion in munitions, $1.5 billion in increased prepositioned war reserves, $800 million in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities and $500 million in global counterterrorism operations. The remaining $37-billion sum of unfunded requirements includes requirements like air dominance, naval presence and dominance, naval readiness recovery, facilities maintenance, nuclear arsenal and deterrent, ballistic missile defense and more.

Thornberry made clear this chart didn’t represent his priorities but rather was intended to show that Trump’s budget increase was not nearly sufficient to create a trained military with ready and modernized platforms.

“Obviously the priorities would have to be evaluated, I’m just trying to give you a little more feel for the kinds of things we believe need to be done and some relative dollar amounts for what it takes,” he said.

Much is in flux right now in terms of the Pentagon’s near-term spending abilities. The government is currently being funded under a continuing resolution that extends last year’s funding levels. The House and Senate appropriators are expected to resume their work on the FY 2017 defense spending bills next week, with the hopes of passing a final bill before the CR expires in April. The FY 2017 bill would put the services’ money in the right buckets to meet this year’s needs – for example, operating under last year’s budget has
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and the Navy not being allowed to move it under a CR.

Additionally, the White House is expected to release a supplemental funding bill this week to add about $30 billion in FY 2017 defense spending, which service officials have made clear would be used to boost readiness.

Finally, the White House should release its FY 2018 request in the spring, likely early May, at which point lawmakers could decide whether to stick to Trump’s suggested spending levels or boost the spending plan to something closer to Thornberry’s $640-billion idea.
 
“The main point of the [November] test was to build confidence,”
did it?
Army Working to Double Range of 155mm Howitzer
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weapons engineers are trying to extend the range of the
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to 70 kilometers, a change that would double the effectiveness of the indirect-fire weapon.

By adding six feet to the cannon, engineers at Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, increased the chamber volume as well as the rifling length of the artillery piece.

“We were able to push the round harder for longer, so it goes faster and further,” David Bound, M777ER team lead, said in a recent Army press release.

“Think of it like a guy with a really long arm. He can hold a ball longer and throw it faster than a guy with a really short arm. So we just integrated that longer ‘arm’ onto the howitzer so that the same bullet could get acted on longer and quicker. That in turn means more range.”

The latest configuration of the M777ER weapon integrates a special, .55 caliber cannon tube manufactured at the Army’s Watervliet Arsenal. Engineers tested the weapon at
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in November.

“Several
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and soldiers were at Yuma in November to witness the firings,” Bound said. “I think they are all very happy and impressed with the fact that the M777ER did what it did so quickly, and they are definitely excited to see the next step.”

Testing to date has been done with legacy ammunition, which is what soldiers and Marines currently use every day. A new rocket-assisted projectile is being designed, as well as a new super-charge, Bound added.

The next step is to see if the M777ER platform can take the force from the new ammunition since it would be going from a 7-kilometer increase in range to a 40-kilometer increase in range, Bound said.

If all goes well, a user evaluation will be conducted and feedback on any other modifications will be solicited, he said, adding that this step could happen in July 2018.

“The latest test is certainly an intermediate step,” Bound said. “We saw a few different outcomes than we expected to see.”

For example, the gun is very light, so it moves when it shoots — especially at low angles. But engineers did not expect to see it move as much as it did, he said.

What engineers expected to see and didn’t was an increase in tube whip, the bouncing of the cannon tube after firing, but it appears the elevation system can lift all the additional weight and still hold the tube steady, Bound said.

Another concern engineers are wrestling with is blast overpressure, Army officials maintain.

When the weapon is fired, there is a blast wave that comes out of the muzzle. The muzzle brake, located at the end of the cannon tube, takes the energy of the extra propellant gases and redirects it backward so that it helps slow down the tube during recoil, Bound said.

“Unfortunately, this redirects all that energy back at the crew and, if we redirect it too much, we hit the crew with a large blast wave that can hurt them,” he said. “To reduce the impact on the crew, the engineers at Benet Laboratories are designing a muzzle brake that gets us the efficiency we require while keeping the crew safe and out of the way of all the redirected energy.”

Army officials did not say when the M777ER will be ready to fire 155mm rounds. The engineers have planned additional incremental improvements with several demonstrations over the next few years, according to the release.

“The main point of the [November] test was to build confidence,” said Bound, adding that the team expects to see increasing range during future tests.
 
this is interesting:
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still has plenty of fans, but
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apparently isn’t one of them, which makes Forbes a long shot for Secretary of the Navy. Yes, the withdrawal of
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for SecNav reopens Forbes’ path to the position, even triggering
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. But it’s still a treacherous road, slick with the unpredictabilities and managerial eccentricities of a nascent Trump Administration.

“I’ve known Randy Forbes a long time. I think he would be a terrific candidate for the Secretary of the Navy,” House Armed Services chairman
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told reporters this afternoon.

More broadly, Thornberry said, the Administration and the Senate need to get moving on nominations. “Secretary Mattis is still the only Senate-confirmed person in the whole Department right now,” he said. “I am concerned that basically you’ve got the Secretary and then a lot of other folks who don’t necessarily share this administration’s viewpoint.”

Thornberry declined to comment on the abortive candidacies of Bilden and
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, who also withdrew, other than to say our political system may makes it excessively difficult for successful businessmen to serve. Both men cited their extensive business interests as a complicating factor. Senate Armed Services chairman
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, whose committee holds the actual nomination hearings, said with characteristic snark that maybe Trump should not nominate another billionaire, “maybe just a multimillionaire.”

Forbes was a career politician who’d served at the state and federal level since
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, the kind of person the Trump administration seems uncomfortable with. As the
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, Forbes was the
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for Secretary of the Navy under Donald Trump, and our sources were certainly blindsided by Bilden’s appointment. Bilden’s withdrawal Sunday — after vehement denials from the White House that such a thing would happen — put the SecNav position up for grabs again. Combined with Viola’s withdrawal earlier, Bilden’s quitting suggests some dysfunction in how the Trump team chooses candidates.

We hear and read that Mattis naturally wants to populate the Pentagon’s E-Ring with his own people. We also hear that Mattis is very reluctant to take former members of Congress aboard, though we don’t know why. Perhaps they’re too political or too independent — either of which is a potential problem with Forbes, who was
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and
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until he lost a primary against a former Navy SEAL turned Tea Party insurgent. As Navy Secretary, Forbes would probably not sit quietly in his office and wait for Mattis’s orders.

But if Mattis is really ruling out Capitol Hill, and the Trump team is ruling out Washington insiders, they’ve narrowed down the places they can look for talent. Perhaps it’s time to open the aperture back up.
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Tuesday at 8:21 AM

related (and more specific, with interesting charts inside) is USNI News
Thornberry: Trump Budget Too Small; Pentagon Needs $91B More Than Defense Spending Caps Allow
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now Thornberry joins key Republicans against Trump plan to slash State budget
As President Trump considers deep cuts to foreign aid and the State Department, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee joined a chorus of prominent Republicans critics.

HASC Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, at a press briefing Wednesday, emphasized the value of soft power for U.S. national security.

“I very much believe we have to have a wide range of tools to advance our national interests, and that includes tools of the State Department, the intelligence community and the Department of Defense, and others," he said. “Can we spend more foreign aid, more effectively? Absolutely. But we can’t look to the military to do everything that needs to be done.”

Other Republican critics of deep State Department cuts include Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.; Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.; Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., are all on the record in opposition.

"President Trump, do not destroy soft power because we cannot win with military force alone," Graham said during a CNN town hall on Wednesday.

Asked if he would oppose a reported 37 percent budget cut to the State Department, Thornberry said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea. I also think we need to have reforms at the State Department and foreign assistance,” Thornberry said of the planned cuts.

More than 120 retired three- and four-star generals have also sent a letter to lawmakers with a similar view.

On Monday, Trump proposed a 2018 federal budget blueprint that includes a $54 billion increase for the military, which would be offset by cuts on the non-defense side of the budget — his opening offer in a longer negotiation between the White House and Capitol Hill.

Foreign aid cuts would dovetail with Trump's ally-jolting "America first" rhetoric, and his budget director repeatedly touted them when the budget blueprint was announced. While Americans tend to overestimate the size of the foreign aid budget, it actually makes up less than 1 percent of overall federal spending.

Democrats continued to balked at the domestic cuts, while Thornberry and McCain say the $603 billion proposed for defense falls well short on the $640 billion they say the military needs to repair President Obama's cutbacks.

At Thornberry’s briefing Wednesday, he largely emphasized the need to better fund military readiness, but asked about the State Department, he said, “Part of the reason we have asked the Department of Defense to do more and more over the years is that other departments of governments have not been able to do things.”

Thornberry served early in his career as a deputy secretary of state for legislative affairs under Ronald Reagan. As a member of Congress in 2007, he served on both the Center for Strategic and International Studies “smart power” commission, which produced a report that emphasized the value of alliances, global development and public diplomacy, and on the bipartisan commission that drew up recommendations for winning the Iraq war with lethal approaches, diplomacy and foreign aid.

The HASC plans in the next few weeks to hold a hearing on countering hybrid warfare, a military strategy that blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare and cyber warfare — widely understood to be Russia’s practice in the Ukraine.

“We’re going to abide by the law and be true to our values, but it would be foolish for us to unduly limit the tools we have,” Thornberry said.

Past joint testimony from the secretaries of state and defense about the value of foreign aid, diplomatic and military funding has been, Thornberry said, “very persuasive."
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interestingly Air Force downplays requirements changes to Air Force One replacement
The White House and U.S. Air Force are closing in on the final requirements needed to build the next fleet of Air Force One aircraft, the service’s top acquisition official said Thursday.

But as questions swirl about whether specifications will drastically change under President Donald Trump’s direction, Air Force officials maintain that revisions will be relatively minor in scope.

The service in 2015 selected Boeing to build a heavily modified version of its 747-8 design for the next presidential transport aircraft, which is in the nascent stages of development. However, Trump has placed the Air Force One replacement program under harsh scrutiny since the election, at one point threatening to cancel it altogether over the total cost of the program, which has not been cemented by the service.

One of the options on the table is to alter the plane’s requirements, first discussed by Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg after a January meeting with Trump. But acting Air Force acquisition head Darlene Costello said the service, which procures Air Force One on behalf of the White House, had already been hard at work ensuring that no undue expense had been baked into the program.

“The Air Force has been looking at this over the last two years to make sure that we have traded away any requirements for cost, so that we're not doing more than we have to with the aircraft,” she said during a briefing with reporters at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium. “But with the president's interest, obviously we work with the White House military office over the past few weeks on the [concept of operations] and the requirements that come from those conops, which will then inform our acquisition strategy on the program.

“So over the last few weeks, we've been working over those again to make sure that we all agree that we have the right set of requirements,” she said. “I expect that we'll get that finalized from the White House military office relatively soon. Once that is done, then we'll go off and we'll adjust if need be our acquisition strategy."

The White House is not likely to downsize its requirement for two presidential transport aircraft, Costello said. But a wide array of other changes have been considered, from the number of passengers the aircraft can carry to small engineering adjustments.

Because “we've been scrubbing these [requirements] for a little while,” changes “tend to be basic,” she said.

'What's good is good enough'

In a latter session with reporters, Air Mobility Command head Gen. Carlton Everhart and Brig. Gen. Ty Thomas, director of Air Mobility Command’s strategic plans, requirements and programs, stated that they did not predict major changes to the aircraft.

“There may be a little bit of movement, but probably not a whole lot,” Thomas said.

One area the service is focusing on is optimizing the aircraft’s power requirements. For example, the final requirement will likely move away from developmental power generation solutions and toward proven, off-the-shelf products.

"Do you really need this power requirement, and if you do, is there capability out there right now that we can put on that aircraft to support the particular power requirement, for example?” Everhart said. In some cases, "what's good is good enough."

Everhart was present at a December meeting that Trump held with several generals at the president's Mar-a-Lago resort. During that meeting, Everhart said the president asked "a lot of in-depth questions" about the aircraft and acquisition strategy.

Comments from Air Force officials appear to be at odds with the president’s own claims. In February, Trump asserted that his administration’s work to decrease requirements had reduced the total cost by a billion — almost a quarter of the $4 billion program cost that Trump has cited. Such a huge decrease likely could only arise from a massive shift in requirements.

The Air Force, for its part, has not disclosed its estimated program costs. Budget materials show that the service intends to spend $2.9 billion for research, development, test and evaluation through fiscal 2021.

"We’ve not gotten to the phase where we're going to work the cost yet,” Costello said. “As soon as the requirements are set and stable, then we'll go off and we'll work our process and then we'll start negotiating with industry on what the price will be. Then we'll know how much we'll be able to actually acquire this for."
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FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
Wow !

Installation of Abrams Reactive Armor Tiles (ARAT) on M1A2 SEP V2 tank
Installation of Abrams Reactive Armor Tiles (ARAT) on M1A2 SEP V2 tank - 2.jpg Installation of Abrams Reactive Armor Tiles (ARAT) on M1A2 SEP V2 tank - 3.jpg Installation of Abrams Reactive Armor Tiles (ARAT) on M1A2 SEP V2 tank.jpg

Tank Urban Survival Kits TUSK
Tank Urban Survival Kits TUSK.jpg Tank Urban Survival Kits TUSK - 2.jpg
 
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