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August 9, 2013 By AMK

The drone that wouldn’t die: How a Defense contractor bested the Pentagon

With large budget cuts looming in the next decade, top Air Force officials knew last year they needed to halt spending on some large and expensive programs. So they looked for a candidate that was underperforming, had busted its budget, and wasn’t vital to immediate combat needs.

They soon settled on the production line for a $223 million aircraft with the wingspan of a tanker but no pilot in the cockpit, built to fly for a little over a day over vast terrain while sending imagery and other data back to military commanders on the ground. Given the ambitious name “Global Hawk,” the aircraft had cost far more than expected, and was plagued by recurrent operating flaws and maintenance troubles.

“The Block 30 [version of Global Hawk] is not operationally effective,” the Pentagon’s top testing official had declared in a blunt May 2011 report about the drones being assembled by Northrop Grumman in Palmdale, Calif.

Canceling the purchase of new Global Hawks and putting recently-built planes in long-term storage would save $2.5 billion over five years, the service projected. And the drone’s military missions could be picked up by an Air Force stalwart, the U-2 spy plane, which had room for more sensors and could fly higher.

But what happened next was an object lesson in the power of a defense contractor to trump the Pentagon’s own attempts to set the nation’s military spending priorities amid a tough fiscal climate.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/the-drone-that-wouldnt-die-how-a-defense-contractor-bested-the-pentagon/277807/ 

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: budget cuts, campaign contributions, concurrent acquisition, DoD, lobbying, political contributions, political influence, politics, product development

May 14, 2012 By AMK

GAO finds MDA’s concurrent acquisition strategy ineffective

The Missile Defense Agency is producing ineffective systems defending against warheads from rogue states as a result of its concurrent acquisition method, according to the Government Accountability Office.

GAO auditors issued a report Friday suggesting the systems MDA purchases are suffering since the agency commits to product development before the technology is fully matured.

Keep reading this article at:

http://www.executivegov.com/2012/04/gao-finds-mdas-concurrent-acquisition-strategy-ineffective/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+execgov+%28Executive+Gov%29.

The Washington Times article is at http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/23/missile-agency-buys-makes-unready-technology/print.

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: acquisition strategy, concurrent acquisition, cost overrun, GAO, MDA, performance, schedule

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