Raytheon and Boeing took a step closer last week to qualifying their prototype Joint Air to Ground Missile for the next acquisition milestone in the $5 billion program with what company officials say was a visually spectacular test. The missile, which had no explosive warhead, struck a working T-72 tank after a 4-kilometer flight and destroyed the tank, driving it half a foot across the ground, sending a several hundred pound road wheel flying through the air and leaving White Sands Missile Range with nothing much left to shoot at, said Mike Riley, Raytheon business development manager for JAGM.

The United States has spent $2 trillion since 1998 on wars and regular defense spending and has been left “with a smaller Navy and Air Force and a tiny increase in the size of the Army,” argues Winslow Wheeler, defense analyst at the Center for Defense Information. If Defense Secretary Robert Gates is serious about restructuring the military and what it buys, then he better get going or he’ll be a “wasted asset,” Wheeler says.

Sources tell DoD Buzz that the Army has canceled the Ground Combat Vehicle competition because the current Requests for Proposal (RFPs) do not accurately reflect Army requirements and a changing acquisition strategy. A contract for the new vehicle was close to being awarded, we’re told. A restart of the GCV competition is expected fairly soon, a new RFP may be out within 60 days, and the Army intends to stay within the original seven year timeline to field the vehicle.

Even if the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle made by General Dynamics is killed, departing Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway says the country will need the same sort of capability and will end up buying it. “It’s my believe if that program was canceled outright we would still go with another weapon systemn like EFV,” he said this morning at what may well be his final Pentagon press conference.

UPDATED: Congressional Aide Says JLTV Fate Looks Uncertain; Less Biz for Industry
The Army has come out with its tactical vehicle strategy and it commits the force to field 244,000 trucks with scalable armor that can support network connections, including MRAPs. That will leave the service with smaller total fleet, down to 244,000 by 2025 from the current level of 260,000. But there appears to be one big hole in the Army plan. It does not project how many Joint Light Tactical Wheeled Vehicles it will be. The strategy’s answer: TBD.

The United Kingdom began its hunt for military savings the weekend after the Farnborough Air Show and the search has ranged throughout the defense establishment. One of Britain’s most precious capabilities, the one that gave rise to the famed Special Air Services regiment, is its Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols. Most of this capability resides within the 21 Special Air Services regiment known as the Artists. There are rumors that the British may consolidate one of its three squadrons, which happened once before.

UPDATED: Lockheed Details Test Results; Raytheon Faring Better So Far

Put $5 billion on the table, factor in shrinking budgets, add the fact that you are competing for what is likely to be the last tactical missile competition for the next quarter of a century and you’ve got one hell of a fight for the Joint Air to Ground Missile (JAGM). On one side of the missile corral stands mighty Lockheed Martin. Facing the largest defense company in America is a team of Raytheon and Boeing. JAGM is a test for the companies, as well as the Pentagon, being the first of two programs set up by former head of acquisition John Young as a test of his prototyping approach.

Requirements creep. Bloated requirements. Overly ambitious requirements. Few things get blamed as often for rising costs and schedule delays to major weapons as requirements. So imagine an effort by the Big Army that went from idea to fruition in less than three months. That was the payoff of the Apps for the Army competition, which also overcame historic military reluctance to run a contest and actually rewarded people for doing innovative and effective work. This whole approach may spread, with the Air Force and Marines keeping a close eye on the Army’s effort.

The post-Afghanistan future of the Marines is a bright one, Navy Undersecretary Bob Work said today at CSIS. The same probably cannot be said for the Marine’s armored amphibian, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), which received a very tepid endorsement from Work who said it was a very costly machine. The Navy is pressuring shipbuilders to lower the price tags on new amphibious assault ships, he said.

The talk on Capitol Hill is that major interagency reform — a new look at the interagency legislation and executive orders undergirding US national security — may be the hottest and hardest to address of the recommendations of the independent QDR panel led by Bill Perry and Stephen Hadley. The panel called for a substantial revamp of the national security structure, saying it was created during the Cold War and was best suited to that era, not to today.They also called on Congress to fix its own house and reduce the overlapping jurisdictions that slow and complicate everyone’s ability to act.

Just as smartphones have become an icon of the civilian world, they may soon find their way into every soldier’s kit. Take a look at General Dynamics’ version of the battlefield smartphone. The GD300 features a highly-sensitive GPS, 3.5 inch touch screen and the ability to connect door-kickers to the tactical network.

“The aging of the inventories and equipment used by the services, the decline in the size of the Navy, escalating personnel entitlements, overhead and procurement costs, and the growing stress on the force means that a train wreck is coming in the areas of personnel, acquisition and force structure.” Those are the words of the independent panel mandated with reviewing the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review.

The chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee said this morning he will lean on the wary Democratic leadership to bring the defense spending bill to a full committee and then floor vote by the end of September. The chairman was speaking at an awards event held by the Association of the US Army. Dicks, chairman for a few months since the death of Rep. Jack Murtha, is likely to run head on into Rep. David Obey, outgoing chairman of the full committee and a resolute opponent of war and — sometimes — defense spending.

UPDATED: EXCLUSIVE First Picture of BAE’s GCV
It’s wide. It’s not light. It’s learned lessons from MRAPs and is survivable. It manages bandwidth so big fat transmission pipes like the doomed T-Sat satellites aren’t needed It’s BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman’s offering for the Ground Combat Vehicle. The base version is 53 tons. Bolt on modular armor and storage pods and you hit 75 tons.

Saudi Arabia plans to buy 84 new F-15s along with some 72 UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, defense officials tell Bloomberg. Navy Vice Admiral Jeffrey Wieringa, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), said Congress will be notified of the sale in the next couple of months.

If Congress fails to pass a wartime supplemental spending bill by next week, before the congressional August recess, the Pentagon will begin to run out of money in its operations and maintenance accounts and to pay military and civilian personnel beginning next month, the service under-secretaries told lawmakers today. Military manpower accounts would begin to take the biggest hits beginning in September with the possibility that active-duty personnel would stop getting paid.

A new RAND paper examines heavy armor performance from the past decade’s irregular and hybrid wars. The bottom line: from Iraq’s city streets to Gaza’s narrow alleyways to the mountains of Afghanistan, ground troops love the intimidating presence of the 60 to 70 ton main battle tanks, their thick armor, their precise firepower, mobility and their unmatched utility as mobile pillboxes.

The Air Force’s approach to the new combat search and rescue helicopter program — call it CSAR-2 — marks what appears to be an increasingly solid Pentagon trend — restrained requirements and a sharp focus on improving weapons we’ve already got.

That became clear when Sikorsky and Lockheed Martin announced today that they are going to bid a modified Blackhawk helicopter for the role of searching for and rescuing downed airmen and troopers. The program, laboring under the distinctly unglamorous name of HH-60 Recap, will replace the current fleet of 112 HH-60G Pave Hawks.

The new Marine Corps Operating Concepts calls for the service to emphasize its small wars legacy and return to its naval infantry roots to serve as the bridging force between ships afloat and operations ashore. Before it can do that, however, the Corps must shed some serious weight. The document says the imperative to significantly lighten all of the component parts of the Marine’s combined arms air ground task force (MAGTF) “will have a significant impact on research and development, programmatic budgeting, acquisitions, doctrine development, and employment of future systems.”

UPDATED: With SASC Rebuttal of Gates’ F136 Competition Claim

“I don’t see any problems with his nomination at all.” That’s the money line from Sen. Carl Levin about tomorrow’s hearing of his Senate Armed Services Committee to confirm the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus to lead allied force in Afghanistan. Levin, speaking at a Defense Writers Group breakfast this morning, also said he “can’t imagine” President Obama would veto the defense policy bill over the F136 engine.