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For the better part of a dozen years, a group of employees and managers at the Navy’s largest public shipyard operated what amounted to an unsanctioned, off-the-books police force, equipping it with illegally or improperly obtained weapons, vehicles and fuel, wasting an estimated $21 million in public funds in the process. Those are the findings of an internal command-directed investigation performed by the Naval Sea Systems Command’s inspector general, which undertook an in-depth review of the case after military criminal investigators and federal prosecutors declined to do so. The investigation, which was conducted in 2014, has not been previously disclosed....

Middletown, Iowa — Starting next year, the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant will begin producing new high velocity training rounds. U.S. Army Contracting Command in Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey, awarded a $63.9 million contract for multi-year production of the M918E1 40mm high velocity training rounds. The contract was awarded to American Ordinance, which produces ammunition through the IAAP. American Ordinance is a subsidiary of Day & Zimmerman, which provides construction, engineering, staffing and defense for corporations and governments around the world. American Ordinance faced competition from several domestic and international companies that were also engineering the round. The round, known as...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday initiating a government-wide review of the U.S. defense industry and suggest changes to strengthen it. The review is intended to identify and address potential weak points in the defense manufacturing base including companies that could go out of business and leave gaps in the supply chain for U.S. weapons systems, said Peter Navarro, the White House National Trade Council director. The executive order asked for recommendations on possible legislative, regulatory and policy changes that would improve and support the defense industry, calling it a "significant national priority." "America's defense industrial base...

© Greg Nash The House voted Thursday against banning the Pentagon from providing transition-related medical care to transgender troops. The body rejected the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on a 209-214 largely party line vote. The amendment outraged Democrats, who called it ignorant, mean-spirited and denigrating, while Republicans argued the Pentagon should not be spending its money on such medical care. Transgender troops currently in the military have been able to serve openly since last year. The policy also allows them to receive any treatment deemed medically necessary, including surgery and hormone therapy. Rep. Vicky Hartzler’s...

Pres. Donald Trump used the Navy’s next-generation aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, as a backdrop to unveil his vision for the next defense budget in March 2017. The moment was meant to symbolize his commitment to rebuilding the military, but it also positioned the president in front of a monument to the Navy’s and defense industry’s ability to justify spending billions in taxypayer dollars on unproven technologies that often deliver worse performance at a higher cost. The Ford program also provides yet another example of the dangers of the Navy’s and industry’s end-running the rigorous combat testing that is...

The White House insisted Tuesday that the $1 trillion spending bill includes money for 40 miles of border fencing, as President Trump sought to shore up Republican voters by saying the deal also lays the groundwork for rebuilding the military. The president said there is “enough money to make a down payment on the border wall,” and said a $15 billion boost in defense spending — without having a dollar-for-dollar match in domestic spending — has set a new standard that will benefit Republicans and the Pentagon. “This is what winning looks like,” Mr. Trump said. Republicans bristled after Democrats...

President Trump's push for a big military buildup in legislation funding the government is likely to go unfulfilled next week, when Congress returns and quickly tries to agree on how to keep the government open after April 28. A $578 billion bill that funds the Pentagon through September and provides some modest increases has already been hammered out by lawmakers in both chambers and passed by the House. While there is talk of a week-long extension before the big bill is passed, the main bill is likely to be the basis of all defense spending for the rest of the...

The United States could reduce Pentagon spending by over a trillion dollars in the next decade-spending $5.2 trillion rather than the currently planned $6.3 trillion- by adopting strategy of military restraint. That’s the bottom line of a study I produced along with several colleagues as part of “Developing Alternative Defense Strategies 2016,” an exercise organized by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, where groups from five think tanks used CSBA’s “Strategic Choices” software to reimagine the U.S. military budget.The others all increased military spending. The teams from the Center for New American Security and the Center for Strategic and...

The giant bomb U.S. forces dropped Thursday on an ISIS training camp in Afghanistan did not cost $314 million to develop, or $16 million per unit as reported by multiple news outlets.Every news report about cost of the “Mother of All Bombs” relied on a misreading of a 2011 article or a dubious internet website that InfoWars once linked to with a “healthy bit of skepticism.”The actual cost of the bomb is unknown. The actual cost of the program isn’t publicly available because the Mother of All Bombs, officially known as GBU-43 or the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), is manufactured by...

The US's Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb does not cost $314 million, or $16 million, but $170,000 a unit, the US Air Force told Business Insider on Friday. The weapon, whose acronym inspired the nickname "Mother of All Bombs," was produced by the Air Force, not by a third party like Lockheed or Boeing, "so we don't have a standard procurement cost associated with them," an Air Force official said. The $170,000 figure makes sense considering a general-purpose 1,000-pound MK-83 costs about $12,000. The MOAB simply features more high explosives and larger fins to direct the GPS-guided munition. Many outlets,...

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Wednesday blasted the Navy’s Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier program, saying its $4.7 billion cost overrun threatens to undermine the Navy’s aircraft carrier legacy. “We simply cannot afford to pay $12.9 billion for a single ship,” McCain wrote in an 18-page report. “The combined $4.7 billion in cost growth on these first two ships has already not only eroded the buying power for remaining ships in the Ford-class, as it leaves less available for well as other critical military capabilities.” The criticism comes in the form of McCain’s latest “America’s Most Wasted” report, a series...

Raytheon, the company that makes the Tomahawk missiles used in the air strikes on Syria by the United States, is rising in early stock trading Friday. Investors seem to be betting President Trump's decision to retaliate against Syria after the chemical attack on Syrian citizens earlier this week may mean the Pentagon will need more Tomahawks. The Department of Defense asked for $2 billion over five years to buy 4,000 Tomahawks for the U.S. Navy in its fiscal 2017 budget last February. Nearly five dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched at military bases in Syria from U.S. warships in the...

Only three of 58 Army Brigade Combat Teams (BCT) would be available to respond to an enemy attack if one hypothetically happened tonight, according to the vice chief of staff of the Army. “Of the BCTs that are ready, only three could be called upon to fight tonight in the event of a crisis,” Gen. Daniel Allyn told the House Committee on Armed Services during a hearing Wednesday. A BCT usually numbers anywhere between 4,400 to 4,700 soldiers, meaning only approximately 13,500 troops would be ready to fight an enemy in the event of an emergency. To make matters worse,...

Merkel said Germany is committed to spending more, but will do so at its own pace. Berlin is set to increase expenditures by 8 percent this year and aims to reach the NATO benchmark of 2 percent of gross domestic product in about eight years. “We will do everything we can in order to fulfill this commitment,” Merkel said, adding that a strong Europe is also in America’s interest.

Years of budget cuts have taken a toll on the Navy's fleet of strike fighters. Nearly two-thirds of the Navy's strike fighters are sitting unused because there is not enough money to repair them, according to DefenseNews.com. The Navy has had to deal with declining budgets in recent years even though the demand for military aircrafts carriers remains the same. Congress was unable to produce a budget before the October 1 start of the 2017 fiscal year. Political leaders say Congress' inability to pass the military budget on time is hurting the fleet. In addition to the grounded planes, there...

After weeks of pressure from President Trump, Lockheed Martin agreed on Friday to a somewhat larger price cut on its F-35 fighters than it had on the last few orders, and finally brought the cost of the main version below $100 million for each jet. The Pentagon will buy 90 of the radar-evading planes under the new contract for $8.2 billion. The F-35 is by far the Pentagon’s largest program; it has plans to eventually build more than 2,400 of them for the Air Force, Navy and Marines, and hundreds more for allies. Mr. Trump began to criticize the much-delayed...

Franklin D. Roosevelt's "arsenal of democracy" that helped win World War II has been gradually withering away for two generations. This isn't just a story about other countries stealing U.S. jobs, it also reflects a failure of federal leadership in protecting the industrial foundations of America's military might. Washington is the main customer for U.S. weapons output, so if it doesn't manage the defense industrial base wisely, the base decays. Consider tank production. Tanks have been the premier expression of land warfare since the first primitive armored vehicles appeared on the Western Front a hundred years ago. But even though...

Barack Obama was the first president of the United States to spend more on “means-tested entitlements”—AKA welfare—than on national defense, according to data published by his own Office of Management and Budget. Historical tables that the OMB posted on the Obama White House website, include annual totals for both “national defense” spending and “means-tested entitlement” spending going back to fiscal 1962—which is three years before President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating the Medicaid program, a means-tested entitlement that together with the Children’s Health Insurance Program enrolled 74,407,191 beneficiaries as of November 2016. In every year from fiscal 1962 through fiscal...

If nothing else, we may be seeing what can happen when a little more competition gets introduced into government contracting. A few weeks ago, Donald Trump publicly complained about the price of the F-35, being produced by Lockheed Martin, calling it “out of control,” and suggested that he’d check in with Boeing on whether they could do any better. This wasn’t too long after Trump slammed Boeing for the cost of the new Air Force One fleet, and suggested that he’d cancel the program and look for someone else to build it.How did all that work out? Boeing and...

If anyone has any GOOD recommendations for stock purchase of defense contractors, preferably small to mid cap, that would be awesome.