SECNAV and Mowing the Grass
As I was reading the morning news, I saw a piece in The Hill about SECNAV Mabus’ comments regarding the savings associated with “scrubbing” the $ 40 Billion or so the Navy spends on service contracts. Service contracts can be just about anything from feeding Sailors in the chow hall to fixing the leaky toilets at the 4 Star’s headquarters building. SECNAV says “We know we can save significant amounts of money just by setting up things like contract courts, which require … contracting officers to come in every year and justify the contracts.” I don’t...
Read MoreStealth Works in the Budget Too!
First thing: Yesterday’s blog on Shared Services fell flat on the website with only a handful of hits. I take it the world of Shared Services is not so hot on the list of “interesting” topics. But there’s still a lot of money to be saved there. In fact, I would contend that there’s a lot of money floating around in areas that most people don’t find so interesting. It’s the uninteresting that ironically is the most interesting in terms of budget cutting. They escape scrutiny during the year-to-year budget battles, floundering in cash. The big...
Read MoreDavid and Goliath
Over the past few weeks there has been a lot in the press about the larger defense contractors worries about “shrinking” (see DoD Budget Cuts: Less of More) defense budgets and the effects on their profitability. Bloomberg News had a piece today about deals dropping for Pentagon contractors. While it doesn’t appear any of the big guys will be going out of business any time soon, they are indeed under pressure to deliver the goods to their shareholders. I would guess that most everyone who has a 401(k) has some amount of money invested in the large defense-related...
Read MoreToo Big To Fail
If you saw the Sixty Minutes piece on the JSF last night, you probably not a happy camper. The opening salvo was pretty staggering: The program is costing $400B for 2400 airplanes, or about twice as much as the US spent to put men on the moon! So how did we get here? When I was a squadron Commanding Officer in the 1991 timeframe I witnessed a rare occurrence at the Pentagon, The cancellation of the A-12 Avenger program by then Secretary of Defense Cheney. The A-12,intended to be the next generation aircraft for the US military, was scheduled for a buy of about 850 jets. But it was 18...
Read MoreQ•D•arrrrgh!
I saw a nice article in Politico’s Morning Defense this morning about the upcoming DoD Quadrennial Defense Review, commonly referred to as the QDR. I fondly remember my days in the Pentagon wrestling with the QDR gurus, the best and brightest thinkers of all the Services, getting together to figure out how their Service was going to get more money. The knives were out as the behind-the-scenes point papers on the vulnerability of aircraft carriers, the shear madness of fleets of supersonic, stealth airplanes, and the end of the need for “Boots on the Ground” proliferated...
Read MoreStanding in Line at the Grocery Store
There was an article in the news this morning that reminded of the days when I would go to the grocery store with the kids ( and now grandkids). It was a Defense News article on the White house pushing for higher DoD budget numbers- about $36 Billion higher than the sequester cap and just about in line with the Murray-Ryan budget deal. But they are also crafting at least $26 Billion in the “unfunded” wish list (See my previous comments about wish lists). It’s like getting to the checkout aisle at the grocery store with your kids in tow and they start picking up all the...
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