US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

FORBIN said:

Def budget 2017 definitive ?

Army +1000 pers from 475000 to 476000 pers
USMC : + 3000, 182000 to 185000
USAF + 4000, 317000 to 321000
USN +1000, 32300 to 324000

Army ANG + 8000, 342000 to 350000
Army reserve+ 4000, 198000 to 202000

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For new equipment as planned minor differences

Total 619 billions i see also 610 out, planned last year for 2017 : 595 billions + 0.9 %

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so an increase of about 4 %.
2016 : 587 bill : base 529 the true budget + OCO 58 bill
2017 about 540 or + and about 70 or +

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Air Force Brat said:

... "GO NAVY", they will get it fixed!

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The Navy is digging in its heels and rejecting billions in cuts from its 2018 budget as infighting has hit a boiling point at the Pentagon.

The Navy has refused to submit a budget that incorporates $17 billion in cuts over the next five years that Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered. It's a standoff that has been brewing for months since Carter told the Navy to begin cutting major shipbuilding programs and invest in weapons systems and aircraft, according to half a dozen defense officials who spoke to Navy Times.

At issue is Navy Secretary Ray Mabus's insistence that budget cuts not be directed at the shipbuilding program, which he has long fought to shield from cuts as he attempts to rebuild the fleet to his goal of 308 ships.

Mabus argues that cutting ships is the "least reversible" thing to cut from the budget because of the long timeline for shipbuilding programs and the damage to the industrial base. The Navy had been developing budgets with the $17 billion in cuts that preserved shipbuilding, but the savings came overwhelmingly from operations and maintenance money needed to deploy ships and fix them when they get back — Navy leaders deemed those cuts intolerable.

What's unclear is what impact the outgoing administration's fiscal year 2018 budget would have on the incoming Trump administration, which will be expected to roll out a defense budget this spring. Carter's office insists its going to hand over the best budget it can while keeping the Navy and all the other services within the caps mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

"At Secretary Carter's direction, the Department of Defense is hard at work developing a FY18 budget proposal that will help guide the next administration and ensure a seamless transition," said top Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook.

"All of the services were asked to develop specific budget plans that focus on improving readiness and developing capabilities that will allow the United States to defeat high-end adversaries while adhering to current budget limits. The Department is reviewing those plans to ensure they are balanced and maintain America's military edge."

But the Navy, led by Mabus, insists it would be foolish to send over a budget that cuts ships when Trump has said he wants to grow the Navy.

"Whatever budget the Navy submits will have the half-life of a mayfly at noon on January 20th," said a senior defense official supportive of the Navy's plan, referring to the date of Donald Trump's inauguration. "So to some degree Secretary Mabus has tried to make that point over the past several weeks."

The defense official said that Trump is "on the record" saying he wants 350 ships, so he is "unlikely to support a document that cuts ships. ... This is a nonsensical discussion that amounts to people on the third deck [OSD], substituting their judgement for the Navy's on what the Navy needs."

The budget battle is the latest in a string of brawls between Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Mabus which have spilled out into the public. Carter and Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work have pushed the Navy to cut its shipbuilding program in favor of investments in missiles and systems that will boost the current fleet's capabilities.

"The games between Carter's team and Mabus's team have gone on for months," said another defense official familiar with the infighting. "This is just a small example."

Carter's office is also preparing a letter to send to the Navy that will outline his priorities that will be sent to the Navy shortly, three sources confirmed. It would be the second such letter in the past 12 months.

In December 2015, Navy Times sister publication Defense News reported that Carter had directed the Navy to cut the overall buy of the littoral combat ship from 52 to 40 and to pick just one ship variant — the current program produces both a trimaran version manufactured in Alabama and a mono-hull version built in Wisconsin.

The deadline for submitting budgets to OSD is Thursday, the senior defense official said, adding that the Navy's will not incorporate the cuts. Ultimately that means that Carter's budget wonks will have to do the cutting themselves and the Navy may not like what they decide to cut, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

But the standoff between Mabus and Carter is emblematic of the Defense Departments struggle to come to terms with the budget constraints imposed by the 2011 cuts.

"The SECNAV's decision is emblematic of the challenge the Navy faced since the BCA was enacted in 2011," Clark said. "Operational demands continue to grow while the fleet remains the same size or shrinks. Ships and their crews don't have time to train and maintain their ships, and they are increasingly reliant on supplemental funding which cannot be planned for in advance.

"SECNAV is essentially drawing a line in the sand that the navy will need to reduce its OPTEMPO and put resources toward capacity, instead of just working the fleet harder to support overseas operations."

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Jura said:

... Lockheed Scores $1.3B Advance Payment for Tenth Batch of F-35s

source:

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3rd Armored Brigade Leaves Fort Carson for Eastern Europe

In a post on 4 November (to read here), I announced the departure of an ABCT (armored birgade combat team) from the 4th Infantry Division of Fort Carson. A start for a 9-month projection in Eastern Europe.

The 3rd ABCT will inaugurate a deployment cycle of US units in Eastern Europe. These rotations are part of the European Reinsurance Initiative (ERI), for which the Obama administration has asked for an envelope of $ 3.4 billion for 2017.

The 3rd ABCT is currently completing the dispatch of its equipment from the garrison town of Fort Carson, Colorado, to Beaumont Harbor, Texas (I photographed this post on Monday afternoon at Fort Carson Where I attended the final preparations).

The vehicles and support and logistical support equipment will embark on Sealift Command rokers to the German port of Bremen. There they will be waiting for US personnel to receive them and transport them by rail and road to 5 points of convergence in Poland (Szczecin, Poznan, Zagan, Swietoszow, Boleslawiec and Wroclaw).

Around fifteen flights will transport the bulk of the ABCT to the respective Polish parking areas between the beginning and the middle of January.

The brigade can then begin to fulfill its mission: to participate in ERI and conduct bi-national exercises to increase interoperability between US forces and NATO forces.

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Jura said:

...
Pentagon reportedly buried study exposing $125 billion in waste

source is FoxNews

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Want to save $125 billion by slashing Pentagon “waste”? Not so fast. If you take a closer look at the much-touted

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proposing those cuts– which was published in 2015 but went viral after

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saying the Pentagon had “burie[d]” it — and talk to experts, officials, and

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on defense policy, the savings turn out to be less of a slam-dunk than advertised.

“I don’t necessarily think the report is overstating the ease with which that savings can be achieved,” said

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, the cerebral and snarky ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. “But I certainly think the reporting on the report is overstating the ease with which we can save that $125 billion.”

First, divide by five: A crucial detail the headlines always omitted is that the DBB forecast $125 billion in savings over five years. That makes the annual savings from their proposed efficiencies a still respectable but hardly game-changing $25 billion a year. “That’s [about] 4% of total DoD outlays,” calculates Capital Alpha analyst

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, “which is well within the types of savings corporations would strive to achieve.”

Why does that figure happen to be well within the norm for private sector cost-cutting practices? It’s because the whole premise of the study, in essence, is to ask how much DoD could save if it followed — all together now — private sector cost-cutting practices.

In fact, the analytical underpinnings of the study seem to have been done by

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, a world-famous private-sector management consultancy. McKinsey has a reputation for hiring

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, a former director

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, and a client roster that includes

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, AOL before its disastrous merger with Times-Warner, and many more

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. But, whether following McKinsey & Co.’s advice is wise or otherwise, the study’s 77 pages of publicly released briefing slides don’t say how to apply these private-sector practices to the Pentagon — which rather begs the point.

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by

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on Scribd

For example, it says that a “4-8% annual productivity gain for DoD is a realistic goal,” but its only argument for why that’s realistic seems to be that corporations routinely achieve it (slide 9), without saying how well that would translate into the public sector. The study projects “15-40% gains in IT productivity and effectiveness” (slide 19), but it doesn’t say how to realize them, or how hard it might be. To the contrary, the IT goal glosses over the disastrous record of past government information technology mega-projects, even though some of them are cited as case studies in backup slides (49-54). “Even in the private sector, only 17% of fundamental change projects deliver their full potential,” the report admits at one point (slide 26).

Another major area of savings is large-scale early retirements (17-18, 41). While it makes some provision for retention bonuses to keep the most skilled employees (3), the study ignores the looming demographic crisis of too many retirement-age employees leaving the civil service at once, with too few experienced mid-career personnel to replace their institutional knowledge.

“The report lacked specific, actionable recommendations,” Pentagon spokesman Gordon Trowbridge told me. “Where the study did offer concrete recommendations, the department has taken action. For example, we have implemented service contract review boards that are projected to achieve billions of dollars in savings.” Overall, the department is aiming to save $30 billion over four years from efficiencies, an average of $7.5 billion a year.

That’s hardy $25 billion a year, though. “I think it is probably not a reasonable goal, and the work the DBB did doesn’t provide any basis to set it as a goal,” said Andrew Hunter. As the

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of the Pentagon’s celebrated Joint Rapid Acquisition Cell, and now director of defense industrial initiatives at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, Hunter knows a thing or two about making defense procurement faster and more efficient.

Where the DBB does provide specific courses of action, they’re not necessarily feasible, either. “Their proposal to renegotiate contracts across the board is impractical,” Hunter told me, “and they don’t appear to have been aware of the significant efforts (already) underway across the services to reduce service contract costs.”

That said, Hunter emphasizes, “they did a nice job of collecting business operations costs across the Department. The value in what the DBB did is if you collect this information consistently over time, you can detect and act on positive and negative trends in business operations.”

Data is vital to accurate analysis, and the Washington Post‘s most damning accusation the Pentagon “imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings.” When I asked Pentagon sources about this, though, they weren’t quite sure what the Post meant.

The substantive section of the report — the 77 slides of recommendations and analysis — “has been available continuously online since January 2015,” said Trowbridge. “We understand some members of Congress might be interested in seeing the underlying data, and, as always, we’ll respond to those requests.”

“Data wasn’t classified, but some was marked proprietary,” said another defense official. “If someone wants the info, they just need to ask and DBB will give it out, minus proprietary stuff.” Proprietary in Pentagon parlance specifically refers to the intellectual property of contractors, and one of the major thrusts of the report was negotiating lower contract costs.

“The report was valuable and continues to shape the way the Department is pursuing efficiencies in cross-enterprise business functions,” the official emphasized. But it’s not an executable plan of action on its own, the official continued, and the Pentagon now “has DBB looking at ways to actually achieve the $125B in savings.”

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The Washington Post story has certainly turned up the pressure to save. The chairman of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees,

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crusaders Rep. Mac Thornberry and Sen. John McCain, called for all the underlying data to be made public. Their scathing joint statement read (in part), “We have known for many years that the Department’s business practices are archaic and wasteful, and its inability to pass a clean audit is a longstanding travesty. The reason these problems persist is simple: a failure of leadership and a lack of accountability.”

But maybe the reason is not so simple. Maybe it’s a complex interaction of a

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-a-year organization — that’s more than

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, the world’s largest company — building

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and operating it in life-or-death circumstances, all under unrelenting scrutiny from 535 members of Congress.

“It’s an enormously important report, and I think it’s something we should look at closely,” said Rep. Smith, speaking to the US Naval Institute’s

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at the Newseum. “(But) I wouldn’t get overexcited about it — like, ‘wow, $125 million just laid on the table that we can go spend!'”

“I have not yet encountered the human endeavor that does not contain waste, fraud, and abuse,” Smith said. “There’s waste fraud and abuse at IBM, at Microsoft, at Amazon.” (We just don’t know as much about it because Congress can’t routinely see their books or haul their executives up to testimony). “I think it’s our job in Congress and the job of whoever ends up running DoD to do their level best to get

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, and I’d be interested in looking at the details of where they think they’re going to get that $125 billion.”

“But,” Smith concluded, “understand it’s not as easy as it might appear.”

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• "During the hearing, Stackley
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  , noting that two were crew errors, two were deficiencies in ship construction and repair, and one was due to ship design."
  
• “We worked with the fleet, we worked across the design community, we worked with the Joint Staff, we worked with the CNO (chief of naval operations’) staff and we reviewed existing designs – U.S. and foreign – frigate designs, as well as considered a clean sheet,” he said. but you ended up with adding a RAM launcher, guns here or there
• "... Stackley said, insisting that the current LCS contract structure is the fairest setup for a ship class in serial production."

Jura said:

but you ended up with adding a RAM launcher, guns here or there

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Jura said:

news from Admiral Greenert: "In FY 2019, the Navy will then procure new Small Surface Combatants (FRIGATES), an upgraded design based on the LCS. They will offer improvements in capability, lethality, and survivability."

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(part of
CNO Releases Annual Navigation Plan
available at

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)

anybody who cares is reminded those "improvements in capability, lethality, and survivability" here:

and the statement "This increased capability is achieved at less than 20% more cost than the current LCS." from
Dec. 11, 2014 fact sheet on the results of the Navy’s recent Small Surface Combatant study
available at

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Equation said:

My gosh I hope they find the poor Marine whom had ejected from his plane and presumably somewhere on the coast of Japan before hypothermia sets in.

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