Monday, October 28, 2013

Please, be humble and do it right ...

There is an almost unique capability that the United States has that no one even comes close to having. Beyond the rise of the drones and above the COIN vs. conventional arguments - the long-range manned bomber.

Flexible, accountable with multiple redundancies - the long life of the B-52 should tell you all you need to know about their value.

So far, the trends have been favorable for the yet to be named B-3; we should all hope that continues;
Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the two largest defense companies in the world, are teaming up on the next-generation bomber.

The companies announced a teaming effort for the Air Force’s Long Range Strike Bomber program on Oct. 25. Boeing will be the prime contractor, while Lockheed will act as primary teammate.

“Boeing and Lockheed Martin are bringing together the best of the two enterprises, and the rest of industry, in support of the Long-Range Strike Bomber program, and we are honored to support our US Air Force customer and this important national priority,” Dennis Muilenburg, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a joint statement. “Stable planning, along with efficient and affordable development and production approaches, enables our team to reduce development risk by leveraging mature technologies and integrating existing systems.”
Steady, firm, and well grounded --- and hopefully very short of the expensive, program destroying transformationalist cultisms.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Oh goody goody......the two biggest defense contractors are teaming up to prevent competition so that they can stick it to the tax payer. Awesome. Whose fucking idea was this?! I bet somewhere, some jackass is celebrating this as a victory (fewer legal issues ala KC-135)