Experts told the Senate Armed Services Committee that making cost a requirement could go a long way to helping fix the acquisition system since it would force the services to take cost into account at the beginning of the acquisition process. Of course, the services are likely to resist this at all costs.

Northrop Grumman and Textron’s offerings for the JLTV competition were not ready for prime time and the joint Army-Marine team performed decently in managing the competition. That is the core of the JLTV protest decision that was finally released today.

MDA faces cuts of as much as $2 billion in the coming budget. The GOP is not standing still. One of the Senate’s top missile defense advocates, Sen. Jeff Sessionshas written SecDef Robert Gates saying a 20 percent cut to missile defense spending would just be too much.

Analyst Russell Glenn says the “Hybrid War” concept is not a useful addition to the discussion on future doctrine and should be relegated to a mere subset of irregular warfare. Frank Hoffman, who has written exensively on hybrid war, says Glenn has it all wrong, that hybrid war is a vital concept for understanding future enemies and the military ignores it at their peril.

Sen. Carl Levin begins the hard and probing work about just how to fix the Pentagon’s acquisition efforts Tuesday morning during the first of a series of hearings on the subject. Expect very concrete recommendations from Paul Kaminski about the critical need for extensive and high-quality systems engineering very early in the process, as well as the importance of restoring a step that was abolished during the heyday of “acquisition reform.”

A comprehensive rewrite of OSD’s space acquisition rules is under way, sort of a parallel effort to the recent rewrite of the standard 5000 series that guides major weapons procurement. Several space acquisition experts I spoke with say they welcome the effort but wonder just how much effect it will have in improving actual program implementation.

Tough love remains one of those concepts our society embraces mostly in the negative. It’s just, well, too tough. The following commentary certainly constitutes a fine example of tough love, coming from two of the country’s more distinguished military and airpower analysts. Essentially, Robert Dilger and Pierre Sprey argue that the country should scrap plans for the F-35 and F-22 and build what they call “austerely-designed and affordable aircraft tailored to missions that actually win wars…”