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Budget Cuts Bear Down
As the specter of mandatory budget cuts totaling $500 billion within the Defense Department looms ever larger, the Air Force finds itself facing the possibility of dialing back its aircraft modernization plans and ditching older aircraft.
In the News
Energy Weapons: Zap, Crackle and Pop
The main appeal of using an energy beam to shoot things is that it travels at the speed of light, which means, in practice, that it will hit whatever it is aimed at. Trying to shoot down an incoming missile or warhead with a physical projectile, by contrast, is much more difficult. The guidance challenges of trying to “hit a bullet with a bullet” are enormous and are only gradually being solved using complex radars and missiles equipped with expensive sensors. A second attraction of lasers and other energy weapons is that in most cases they cannot run out of ammunition, and can keep firing for as long as they are plugged into a power source. The initial costs may be quite high, but each shot may then cost only a few dollars, compared with a price-tag of $3m or more for the latest missiles used to shoot down aircraft or other missiles.
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Sequestration Defies Rational Planning, Deputy Secretary Says
With sequestration looming increasingly large on the horizon, defense and civilian agencies have received little or no guidance on cutting spending and key deadlines, such as the one about notifying employees of impending job cuts, reports FCW, a sister publication of Defense Systems.
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Group Takes ‘Evidence-Based’ Approach to Reforming Military Compensation
As the Vietnam War and the draft drew to a close 40 years ago, military leaders were worried about how to create a military that was made up entirely of volunteers, and one that they could also afford to pay.
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Tricare Would Not Be Safe From Budget Cuts
Veterans’ health care funding may be exempt from automatic, across-the-board budget cuts that are due to begin in January, but military health care is not — and a new think-tank report says Congress would have to reprogram $3 billion from other Defense Department budget accounts to fully pay for military health care should the cuts occur.
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Study: DoD Sequestration Cuts Would Slam Federal Workforce, Delay Pain to Contractors
Large defense companies and industry associations have claimed that the threatened sequestration cuts to the federal budget would cause an immediate hit to the bottom lines of contractors, their workforces and consequently the broader economy if the cuts kick in as planned on Jan. 2. A new study finds that's not necessarily so, but that on the other hand, cuts to federal civilian employee payrolls would happen almost overnight.