Britain’s Conservative government, faced with enormous deficits, may launch its Queen Elizabeth class carriers without airplanes to put on them as it considers early retirement for its Harrier jump jets. The two 65,000 ton carriers are built into the UK’s defense budget, but new airplanes are not. Scrapping the Harriers early, combined with delays to the Joint Strike Fighter short takeoff version, could leave the UK temporarily dependent on the U.S. for F/A-18s and V-22s. That raises the prospect of one country deploying carriers and then relying on another country to supply the airplanes to fly from them.

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.

Lockheed Martin, with just a five-week headstart, has completed 60 percent of LCS 3, compared to Austal, whose LCS 4 is only 26 percent complete. We hear Lockheed recently attached the bow to the rest of the ship. Given how close the competition is between Lockheed and the Amero-Australian shipbuilder, the bigger company’s ability to produce ships with greater speed and fewer delays might raises questions in the minds of U.S. Navy officials about Austal’s ability to regularly deliver ships.

The People’s Republic of China has joined an elect group of four countries that have taken men as deep as 3,500 meters below the surface of the ocean. And in keeping with Chinese claims to huge amounts of the ocean surface and its depths, the crew planted a flag on the bottom in the South China Sea, much as Russia recently did in Arctic waters. This should mark substantial improvements in China’s gathering of data for submarine warfare.

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.

Those of us who hoped for an LCS contract announcement during the dolrdrums of late August must sigh and twiddle our thumbs for a bit. The two bids are apparently so close that the Navy has come back to the two companies and asked for more information. Although the Navy has repeatedly told the world an award would be made this summer it now looks as if it will be made sometime before the beginning of 2011, according to a service statement,” Cmdr. Victor Chen said in a statement.

The U.S. aid effort to Pakistan, which has been relatively small so far, may well last more than four months and, if indications from the Pentagon are correct, will also grow in scale.

The man managing the Marine’s response, Brig. Gen. David Berger, said he and his team had been operating on the presumption that the operation would last 30 to 60 days. Now, the head of Marine operations told reporters, the planning window looked more likely to be 90 to 120 days. And the Marines may bring the Osprey in to help, he said.

It was the top story in the Wall Street Journal — China looks set to become the world’s second largest economy. But the New York Times put it on the front page of the business section, seeming to indicate this story was less a milestone and more a technical correction. The need for analysis was obvious so we asked a Chinese expert at the Heritage Foundation to give us a better idea of just how important this fact is and why. Dean Cheng’s conclusion: the PLA must still fight for its share of the pot, but a growing pot will probably drive a demand for greater deference from China to those who share its neighborhood.

As they comb the Hill and pitch the benefits of the second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, General Electric is pushing one set of ideas particularly hard in the face of skepticism from the Navy and some other Pentagon sources: the F136 will not substantially increase maintenance costs. The company shared some of its Hill talking points.

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.

UAVs aren’t going to be as useful as they have been in Afghanistan and Iraq because, in the next real war, they are much more likely to face armed opposition from the ground and from the air. The outgoing commander of US air assets in Europe, Gen. Roger Brady, told a recent UAV conference maneuverability and stealth limitations are arguments against UAVs in contested airspace. It turns out the folks at General Atomics have been listening and looking ahead.

The rumor mill is racing with reports that Gen. Hoss Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will soon leave his post and be replaced by Gen. Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff. Schwartz’s ascension has Air Force sources beaming. It has been some time since an Air Force officer has been blessed with promotion to the innermost command circle. “I’m happy [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates is expressing some confidence in my poor, beleaguered Air Force.

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.

“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.

The 74 test flights of the F-35B might look impressive, but it’s actually behind schedule, Lockheed CEO Bob Stevens said. It was supposed to have flown 95 times by now. “Higher than predicted” failure rates of component parts have grounded some F-35B test aircraft. Stevens described the failing parts as sub-components, not major parts such as the engine, which has been performing well.

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.

Farnborough Air Show – After some seven months of flying in Afghanistan the percentage of the Osprey fleet ready for flight each day has stalled out at roughly 70 percent, a figure the head of Marine aviation says must be improved. Lt. Gen. George Trautman told DoD Buzz in an exclusive interview that those rates are “not good enough for me.” While Afghanistan is uniquely challenging, it has also been the source of some good news for the Osprey, Trautman said. The plane has “proved its survivability,” sustaining a number of hits from 12.7 rounds, a more lethal load than the American .50 caliber.