The Missile Defense Agency is struggling with lousy quality control among its contractors, its executive director said today. David Altwegg told reporters that he and his colleagues stood watching a recent THAAD test. A drogue parachute pulled the target out of a C-17. “We all stood there and watched it fall into the water,” said an obviously disgusted Altweg. A failure review board was convened and found the test failed due to “a quality control problem.”

Today, the Army requested $143 billion for 2011 in the base budget, a modest increase over the $140 billion the service received last year from congress, and an additional $102 billion in the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account, formerly known as the supplemental war requests. While the design of the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), the replacement for the cancelled FCS ground vehicles, has yet to be finalized, the Army is still spending nearly $1 billion on the program.

The Humvee, which replaced the Jeep, will no longer be bought by the Army. While the service won’t buy any more Humvees, the Army is not getting rid of them. “The Army is not buying more Humvees but other people buy Humvees so the line is not terminated. We envision the Humvee to be an enduring part of the Army fleet for a long time,” Army Lt. Gen. Edgar Stanton, the military deputy in the Army comptroller’s office, told reporters during a Q and A session after the Army budget briefing.

UPDATED: Vice Adm. David Venlet, NAVAIR commander, Likely New JSF Program Manager; LM Issues Statement

The bombshell of budget day: Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the prpgram manager of the Joint Strike Fighter program was being canned and would be replaced by a three– star general. “One cannot absorb the additional costs in this program and the delays without people being held accountable,” Gates said during the question and answer period of his budget briefing today.

UPDATED: With Obama Calling C-17 Adds “Waste, Pure and Simple“

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee has signaled that Democrats will search high and low for ways to “cut wasteful spending” in the Defense Department. Rep. Ike Skelton, known for his temperance on most matters military, put out a short statement saying that the HASC “will be watching closely as the administration implements last year’s reforms and will continue to look for ways to cut wasteful spending as we review this year’s budget.”

As DoD rolls out its 2011 budget request today, along with the Quadrennial Defense Review, one area we’ll be closely scrutinizing is the Navy’s shipbuilding plan. Last month, CBO naval analyst Eric Labs told Congress that if the Navy funds ship construction at the historical norm of around $14 billion a year, the fleet will fall to around 270 ships by 2025, a far cry from the service’s aspirational 313 ship battle fleet.

UPDATED: With Gates Comments on How Old Strategy Was “Too Confining“

Clearly continuing his Augean task of reshaping the U.S. military to win the wars it is fighting, Defense Secretary Robert Gates commits the Defense Department to institutionalizing his focus in the final, official version of the Quadrennial Defense Review. “This is truly a wartime QDR. For the first time, it places the current conflicts at the top of our budgeting, policy, and program priorities, thus ensuring that those fighting America’s wars and their families — on the battlefield, in the hospital, or on the home front — receive the support they need and deserve,” Gates says in his opening note to the QDR.