YOUNG RETIRING: Rep. Bill Young (R-Fla.), a powerhouse on military spending issues in Congress, will not seek re-election in 2014, he told the Tampa Bay Times. Young, 82, now the chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, led the full committee from 1999 to 2005. As a leader on defense spending in the post-9/11 era, he helped pay to equip troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan while trying to modernize the military. But the environment changed dramatically in 2010, when Congress passed bans on earmarks. Budgets have only tightened since then.
As the U.S. Navy gets ready to christen the DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer on Oct. 19, the service and contractors are scrutinizing the program for lessons they can use to help shape other vessel programs. The futuristic Zumwalt has been a complex shipbuilding effort, requiring the choreography of the Navy and three different major contractors: Raytheon for many of the ship systems and integration; General Dynamics Bath Iron Works for the hull; and Huntington Ingalls Industries for the composite deckhouse.
As the U.S. Navy prepares to christen its newly designed DDG-1000 Zumwalt destroyer, questions continue to haunt the service’s long-term destroyer strategy. As a recent Congressional Research Service report highlights, the most immediate threat to the Navy destroyer appears to be sequestration.
TEL AVIV — With advanced avionics and mission systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) claims its 1970s-era delta-winged fighter, the Kfir, could rank in the same class of contemporary “fourth generation” fighter jets. The company can deliver up to 50 of the Mach 2+ Kfirs, configured to the newest “Block 60” standard, using airframes retired from IAF service in the 1990s, according to IAI officials. These aircraft were mothballed in the southern Negev desert and are in good condition for refurbishment.
MARS SIM: The Mars Society is looking for six volunteers to participate as members of the crew of the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) during a year-long simulation of a human Mars expedition set to take place in northern Canada starting in August 2014. The crew will conduct a sustained program of field exploration on Devon Island, 900 mi. from the North Pole, while operating under many of the same constraints that will be faced by explorers on an actual human Mars mission, according to the Mars Society.
LONDON — With ScanEagle chosen for its anti-piracy mission, the U.K. is now examining unmanned rotary-wing options. The U.K. Royal Navy is widening its focus on the potential of shipborne UAVs. While much of its attention has been on the development of a carrier strike capability with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and two new aircraft carriers, commanders are eager to broaden the intelligence-gathering capability of their surface fleet.
PARIS — Moscow is reviewing a proposal to centralize its space industry in an effort to curb government waste and restore confidence in Russia’s space program following a spate of launch vehicle failures in recent years. The proposal was unveiled by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin in a meeting with President Vladimir Putin, during which Rogozin said a new state entity will be formed to centralize oversight of Russian production plants, leaving Russian space agency Roscosmos to serve as system integrator and procurement authority.
Swiss Space Systems (S3), a new commercial space company based in Payerne, Switzerland, will use the planned Colorado spaceport near Denver as the North American base for its air-launched Soar suborbital spaceplane. Under a preliminary agreement announced Oct. 8, Spaceport Colorado will be the U.S. home to S3’s converted A300, which will conduct dorsal launches of the Soar to deliver small satellites to orbit.
Just as the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence community and their panoply of contractors were beginning to figure out how to live under long-term budget cuts known as sequestration, now come growing fears that sequestration spending levels will be the ceiling, and not floor, for future spending.
STAYING COURSE: Many House Republicans who have supported allowing the government to shut down are continuing to hold fast, saying shutdowns and not raising the debt ceiling are not insurmountable. “No question, a government shutdown hampers the economy,” said Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama’s defense and aerospace-heavy northern congressional district. But there were 17 shutdowns between 1976 and 1995, yet the economy boomed in the 1980s and 1990s, he added. “No question, not raising the debt ceiling poses economic risk,” he said Oct. 7.
Canada has begun “gathering data” on options to replace its Sikorsky CH-124 Sea King maritime helicopters as protracted negotiations continue with Sikorsky on its troubled CH-148 Cyclone program. On Oct. 3, officials from the Department of National Defense (DND) and Public Works & Government Services Canada (PWGSC) procurement agency “met with AgustaWestland, Eurocopter and Sikorsky to obtain their views on the elements that should be included in the data-gathering process,” PWGSC says.
Officials at NASA’s Ames Research Center triggered a scientists’ boycott of a conference on the search for exoplanets with an inaccurate characterization of federal law governing access by Chinese nationals to NASA facilities, according to the lawmaker who wrote the law.
Cluster munitions still play a significant role in U.S. military doctrine, and the costs of either keeping or getting rid of them, combined with the lack of a big-player endorsement for dispensing with the controversial munitions, may continue to sideline de-armament efforts for now.
The stage is set for a planned increase in U.S. Marine Corps deployments to Darwin, Australia, next spring as part of the U.S. shift of greater military resources to the Asia-Pacific. The second successful rotation of about 250 Marines left the region in September, about the same that Tony Abbott, who was sworn in last week as Australia’s new prime minister, confirmed the commitment of the two countries to a rotational 2,500-member Marine Corps force starting in 2016-2017.
