Come on, you know the end…  Well, if U.S. Aerospace didn’t know the end before, they certainly do now.

Late is unacceptable.

After their late delivery (by five minutes) of an already last minute bid for the KC-X tanker contract, U.S. Aerospace has filed a complaint with the GAO.  Since the tanker competition clearly needed an extra dose of juvenile behavior, the California-based firm has claimed that U.S. Air Force officials:

… may have intentionally delayed the messenger from delivering our proposal, in order to create a pretext for refusing to consider it because they have political issues with our Eastern European supplier, thus violating the requirement that the program be a fair and equal competition, open to all qualified bidders.

Or… they could have just rejected the hastily thrown together proposal on its merits, but I suppose that’s an unfair assumption…

The company includes a very detailed explanation for their tardiness:

Our proposal was hand delivered on July 9, 2010. The messenger arrived at the government installation, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, well before 1:30 pm, more than half an hour before the 2:00 pm deadline. Air Force personnel initially denied the messenger entry to the base, then gave incorrect directions to 1755 Eleventh Street Building 570, and finally instructed the messenger to wait where he was for Air Force personnel to come and get him. He at all times complied with the instructions of Air Force personnel, from the time he arrived at the installation until the proposal was taken by Air Force personnel at the program building. Although the proposal was arbitrarily marked received at 2:05 pm, it was under Air Force control before the bid deadline.

I wonder… did the dog eat the first copy too?

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, KC-X (all tags)

Reuters today explains how New START negotiations have devolved into (dis)armed robbery. Money grubbing for nuclear modernization funds is fair, if unbecoming, as part and parcel of congressional sausage production. But not this s*** again:

Corker who along with Kyl and other senators recently visited three national laboratories, called the state of the facilities and weapons, “pretty alarming.” Kyl was struck by the way that Sandia National Lab showed him a plastic container with 1950s-era vacuum tubes that are being replaced with new circuit boards. “They’ve got to get on with this,” Kyl said.

Kingston is going to pop a blood vessel in his eyeball (read his previous diatribes on vacuum tubes).

While horse trading is part of the game, potential treaty skeptics’ funding demands at this point have become rather trifling. Increased nuke money is in the FY 2011 request. It’s in the 10-year plan. It’s in the 20-year plan. Senior administration officials have publicly reiterated their commitment to it. But some senators are unhappy because the planned investment will come from “savings the government hopes to get from interest rates”? Put the nation on a more sound fiscal footing and you won’t have to worry about it, for chrissakes!

Future year budget plans are not set in stone. (Remember when the Bush administration used to project decreased defense spending? Ha! How’d that turn out?) Senators of course understand this variability. They know the administration can’t guarantee future funding streams, as doing so would infringe on Congress’s power of the purse and neuter the U.S. government’s ability to adjust future funding to meet shifting priorities. Congress fights tooth and nail to preserve such flexibility, which is why appropriators are always hesitant to approve multiyear procurement of major weapon systems.

But senators are still objecting on this basis when it comes to nuke modernization. In other words, senators are asking President Obama to guarantee something (modernization funding) that only they themselves can constitutionally guarantee.

The administration has done its part to integrate the modernization program into its future planning, but all it can do is ask for the money. It is up to Congress, including New START skeptics, to provide the funds. Senators: this is ultimately your responsibility, not that of the executive branch. Stop trying to pass the buck.

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Nukes on a Blog, New START, Senate, Congress, Defense Spending, FY 2011 Budget Request, Modernization (all tags)

A small article from The Hill caught my attention Friday evening, because it illustrates how complex the federal appropriations puzzle really is.  The Congressional Black Caucus is upset after White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel promised Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) $1.5 billion in farm disaster relief in exchange for her support of the (soon-to-be filibustered) small-business bill.  The CBC is miffed because the administration is stonewalling them on the settlement of Pigford v. Glickman:

Six members of the Congressional Black Caucus wrote to President Obama on Thursday calling on him to find a way to compensate black farmers who suffered discrimination in government loan programs during the 1980s and 1990s.
[snip]
…the administration has told black farmers it lacks the funds to pay a $1.2 billion agreement they reached with the Department of Agriculture in 1999 to settle the Pigford class-action lawsuit.
[snip]
The lawmakers say that Obama should also take administrative action to pay $3.4 billion the federal government promised to settle claims that it mismanaged Native American trust funds. Elouise Cobell is the lead plaintiff in the case against the Interior Department.

Lincoln’s $1.5 billion was originally part of the small-business bill and was later removed in a vain effort to curry Republican support.

What does this have to do with defense spending?

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Iraq & Afghanistan, Congress, Defense Spending, Congressional Black Caucus (all tags)

Two months after the Senate first passed their version of the war supplemental, the House passed the final version of the bill yesterday, 308-114.  Now all that stands between the military and a delicious $37.1 billion is the stroke of President Obama’s pen, coming in the next few days.

We’ve reported on this bill twice already, tracking its progress through Congress.  

A quick recap:

The Senate version of the bill, passed May 27, contained $58.8 billion in spending, including $37.1 billion for the war, over $13 billion for Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange, $5.1 billion for FEMA, and $2.9 billion for Haiti disaster relief, as well as a host of smaller expenditures.

The House then passed its version of the bill on July 1, which accepted the Senate version while adding $22.8 billion in spending fully offset by $23.5 billion in cuts and law modifications.  This included a $10 billion education jobs fund, $1 billion for youth summer jobs, $5 billion in Pell grants, $4.6 billion to settle two class-action lawsuits, and $701 million for border security.

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Security Matters, Iraq & Afghanistan, Defense Spending, War supplemental, Congress (all tags)

Update 7/28/10: The House approved the war supplemental later on Tuesday by a vote of 308-114. Obey was among the nays.

As the House nears a vote on the war supplemental, House Appropriations Chairman David Obey says he will not vote for the bill.

“I would be willing to support additional war funding – provided that Congress would vote – up or down – explicitly on whether or not to continue this policy after a new National Intelligence Estimate is produced. But absent that discipline, I cannot look my constituents in the eye and say that this operation will hurt our enemies more than us.”

Since President Obama first requested $33 billion in supplemental fiscal 2010 funds for the Pentagon in February, Congress’ concerns about the war in Afghanistan have increased.  Not helping, of course, is the recent leak of over 90,000 internal military documents detailing the war… the night before the vote.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer stated that despite concerns about the war in Afghanistan, members should vote for the funding bill.

“We may want to reconsider [the mission of the U.S. forces serving in Iraq and Afghanistan], but the fact is those troops are there now.”

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, Iraq & Afghanistan, Congress (all tags)

As the tension builds, with a few even speculating that neither the C-17 nor the F-35 extra engine will make it in to final fiscal 2011 defense appropriations, things have heated up at the Farnborough International Airshow, taking place from July 19-25 in the UK.

Dave Hess, president of Pratt & Whitney, the manufacturer of the current F-35 engine, acknowledged at the show that his company was actively lobbying lawmakers on the issue.  He insisted, though, that the rival team of General Electric and Rolls Royce are spending “orders of magnitude” more.

While he acknowledged that the issue is an “enormous priority” for both GE and Rolls, Jean Lydon-Rodgers, president of GE Aviation's military business and former head of the GE-Rolls engine team, rejected Pratt’s criticism as “unfair”.

Boeing and EADS also took their show on the road, each touting the size of their orders.  Bids for the $35 billion KC-X tanker contract have closed and a decision is due in November.

As the Pentagon’s belt gets tighter and tighter, the fierce competition for contracts is reaching a fever pitch.  PACs associated with both Lockheed and Boeing are on track to make record-level campaign contributions this election cycle, with each already well over the $2 million mark.  Both have already maxed out contributions to several lawmakers, as well as to party committees.

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, C-17, F-35 (all tags)

While promoting his efforts to cut defense spending (and our report) Rep. Barney Frank stopped off at Countdown with Keith Olbermann.  

While the whole interview is great, Olbermann's introduction is particularly good - and not just because it includes a shout out to the Center.

For other news on the report just do a quick search - even Oliver North had something to say... he wasn't impressed (but then, he may have read the wrong report - I'm unaware of any calls for unilateral disarmament).

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Security Matters, Defense Spending, Sustainable Defense Task Force, Shameless Self-Promotion (all tags)

All too often, defense programs consume resources like a fountain consumes water in a public park—always flowing regardless of cost or necessity.  Programs with no clear use running billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule remain fiendishly difficult to kill.  It is this unfortunate reality that made the July 13 hearing of the Senate Homeland Security Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management so refreshing.

Department of Defense officials emphatically pressed lawmakers to cease production of any more C-17 cargo planes, saying they were neither requested nor required.  Indeed, they said, the current capabilities of our strategic airlift fleet exceed the military's present-day needs as well as worst-case scenario projections.  Purchasing additional C-17 aircraft would run contrary to Defense Secretary Robert Gates' goal of saving $100 billion over the next five years and would necessitate cutbacks in other DoD programs.

(More after the jump)

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Security Matters, defense spending, pentagon, homeland security, strategic airlift (all tags)

Albert Wohlstetter, the father of the “fail-safe” concept which dictated that bombers flying to deliver a nuclear attack should return to base after reaching a predesignated point en route unless they received an explicit order to continue, would not be amused to learn that the new communications terminals designed to connect bomber crews to the U.S. president in the event of a nuclear war are years behind their development schedule and millions of dollars over budget.

Get it sorted, people.

(GAO has more; check pages 67-68)

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Nukes on a Blog, Air Force, Defense Spending (all tags)

After weeks of intense debate, the House passed an approximately $80 billion emergency supplemental appropriations bill last night that will lend an additional $33 billion to the wars in Afghanistan in Iraq.

In the end, the vote to advance the nearly $60 billion Senate-passed measure came under a vote on the rule, an obscure process used to allow the House to vote to set the terms for debate on the bill, but not on the underlying bill.  Inside the rule, the bill was deemed passed after the rule passed.  The vote was close, but eeked by at 215-210.  The budget resolution (that isn't really a budget resolution) was included within the self-executing rule.

The House then took up five separate amendments.

(after the jump)

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Iraq & Afghanistan, Security Matters, Defense Spending, Congress (all tags)