This expanded issue of Aviation Week’s Defense Technology International edition is the first of a series planned to coincide with major defense shows worldwide. This week, the Association of the U.S. Army convention and show opens in Washington—an event that grew rapidly during the 2000s as the U.S. committed soldiers and weapons to the longest land conflict in its history.
I n Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, there’s a scene where one of Mendy Melendez’s boys follows Philip Marlowe out of a bar. There might have been trouble, Marlowe says, “if this enormous man hadn’t got out of an enormous car” and thrown the kid one-handed against the wall. “What was that?” Marlowe asks the bruised gangster. “Big Willie Magoon. A policeman. He thinks he’s tough.”
Canada's armed forces, facing a familiar combination of a declining budget and aging fleets, have a third problem: a lack of public and political confidence in the nation's acquisition process after a series of failures and embarrassments, including a 28-year effort to replace naval Sea King helicopters that has already seen one program canceled, and a second one started that is now running at least four years late. The acquisition of four trouble-plagued ex-Royal Navy submarines has been another public problem.
Whatever you think of the outcome of South Korea's F-X Phase 3 fighter selection—now leaning toward the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter—you cannot deny that it is a mess. The government first created a new agency to manage its defense procurements, set clear selection criteria for 60 new fighters and told the Defense Acquisition Program Administration to git 'er done. DAPA picked the F-15SE, a decision that the government speedily set aside.
