With the bold cuts announced today by one of America’s two closest allies, myriad questions arise. Is the West losing a prime element of its expeditionary forces? How will this affect US-UK national security relations? What will this mean for British-European relations? The folks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have produced an excellent Q and A providing some early and detailed answers. And it’s got a catchy title too: “Doing Less with Less? Assessing the Impact of the UK Strategic Defense and Security Review.

Defense analyst and consultant Rebecca Grant said today that she believes there will not be any follow-on contracts for the KC-Y or KC-Z tankers, leaving the KC-X as the final plum for Boeing and EADS to pluck for at least 20 years. Those successors would triple the size of the 179 KC-X tanker buy should they occur. The next tanker buy would then be the replacement for the KC-10, in roughly 20 years.

In the most dramatic defense realignment of a major power since the end of the Cold War, the British government appears poised to scrap its commitment to buying a replacement for the Harrier jump jet and to push money from conventional forces to special operations troops. The biggest weapons decisions affect the Royal Navy. The nuclear Trident submarine will be delayed for a year. Britain will buy its two aircraft carriers but the country will supposedly scrap one of the ships after only three years.

Satellites are very expensive. The sensors on them are very expensive. Launching satellites is very expensive. One way the government has considered saving some of those costs is by piggybacking its sensors on commercial satellites. Known as hosted payloads, such packages have attracted considerable interest from the government. Josh Hartman, who was one of the Pentagon’s top space acquisition officials and is now with the Center for Strategic Space Studies, offers a step-by-step approach to get both sides closer to their goal.

The failure of the F136 engine in late September resulted from a “seal clearance” in the fan that was set too tight causing friction. “The issue with engine 008 was unique to that engine,” GE spokesman Rick Kennedy said in an email. “No modification [will be] required to other engines.” Engines 05 and 07 continue to run well in tests.

It is one of the hottest weapons system contests around. The Raytheon/Boeing team has hit the target in the government-funded tests of the $5 billion Joint Air To Ground Missile three out of three times. Lockheed has missed two out of three times in the government tests, though they plan to pay for more tests. But DoD Buzz has learned that Raytheon and Boeing are not using the same missile they are likely to use for production should they beat Lockheed Martin out for the program.

With one wary eye on the Tea Party movement and its potentially isolationist policies, representatives of GOP thinktanks sent a simple message today: don’t cut Pentagon weapons systems in the belief that the American homeland can be protected without a military that can fight and project power around the globe. “It is a false choice to believe that you can defend the homeland without projecting power,” said Mackenzie Eaglen, defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

As the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan and Iraq and land forces encounter more and more obstacles to operating — fenced in by rising insistence on sovereignty — the U.S. Navy’s role will only grow in importance, says the chief of naval operations, Adm. Gary Roughead. Climate change will only highlight the rising importance of the Navy as fishing patterns shift south and north. The Navy, he said, is better positioned for such an environment because it can operate offshore free of the constraints of inserting forces where they may not be wanted.

The chief of staff of the Air Force, Gen. Norton Schwartz, called out General Electric and Rolls Royce today, saying that they should consider paying more out of their own pockets if they wanted to keep alive the second engine program for the Joint Strike Fighter. “The question is, can we afford it in the short term,” he said.

Complete UPDATE: Includes Analysis of Lawmakers Arguments Four senators have joined 48 members of the House calling for cuts of as much as $1 trillion to the Pentagon budget. The four senators — Ben Cardin, Leahy, Bernie Sanders, Ron Wyden — are all staunch liberals. The absence of any conservative or defense Democrats would appear to raise serious questions about just how much support such deep cuts would attract in the august body.

A group of more than 50 senators and representatives, led by Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Ron Paul (R-Texas), are calling on the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform to endorse major cuts to the defense budget. Joined by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, they say the commission should look at what a press release calls “excessive defense spending” when they want to find ways to reduce the federal deficit and national debt.

Lockheed Martin, dogged by a whistleblower lawsuit charging the company built lousy and possibly dangerous software for the F-35, is breathing a little easier this afternoon as a judge dismissed the suit. According to my colleague Bob Fox at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (the F-35’s home town paper), U.S. District Court Judge Terry Means recently threw out the 2006 suit filed by Sylvester Davis, a former software engineer on the program.

The man touted as President Obama’s next national security advisor would be a “disaster” in the job, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Bob Woodward, according to the new book “Obama’s Wars.” Retired Gen. Jim Jones is leaving his job as National Security Advisor and is likely to be replaced by Tom Donilon, Jones’ deputy. It is likely to be an unpopular choice for the Pentagon. Woodward writes that, “Gates felt that Donilon did not understand the military or treat its senior leadership with sufficient respect.”

When the Air Force announced an $11.9 billion sustainment contract for the venerable and enduring B-52 eyebrows shot up along the Potomac, especially on Capitol Hill. It appeared to provide roughly $127 million per airplane spread out over eight years, one hell of a lot of money for a plane that originally cost $9.3 million in 1955 (somewhere around $76 million per in current dollars). So we checked with the Air Force to get some details on just what was happening and why.

The Marines, who have voiced concerns for some time about the program, appear ready to abandon or seriously curtail their purchase of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV).

“We’ve got thousands of up-armored Humvees out there sitting around [and we’re] wondering what we’re going to do with them,” Gen. James Conway said at the Expeditionary Warfare Conference in Panama City, Fla. In addition to the JLTV woes, support for the General Dynamics platform known as the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle seems to be growing shakier.

The battle of the budget has been fully joined by the ideologues of the Democrats and Republicans this week. On the right, we have Monday’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Arthur Brooks, Edwin Feulner and the redoubtable William Kristol in which they argue that the defense budget must not pay for the deficit. Now, on the left, we bring you the views of William Hartung of the New America Foundation. He has aimed high, for almost $1 trillion in cuts. We’ll see if this debate spreads beyond the Beltway and into the conversations of decent people over the dinner table and in bars.

The Government Accountability Office has denied all aspects of the KC-X protest by tiny upstart U.S. Aerospace. This is the company that was working with Antonov and claimed the Air Force misdirected their messenger when he tried to deliver the company’s bid less than an hour before the Pentagon’s deadline. Its erstwhile competitors, Boeing and EADS NA, delivered their bids long before US Aerospace’s messenger got tied up at the Wright-Patterson base gate and then got lost. Check out the “sniper spotter” reference in the protest.

The Pentagon hasn’t decided what will get Lockheed Martin to improve its management of the Joint Strike fighter program, but it has decided the largest defense company in the world is doing an inadequate job of managing cost controls in the biggest defense program in history.