UPDATED: HIll Aide Says LockMar Has “long way to go to demonstrate max load bring back vertical landing.“

In a move that couldn’t be much better timed, the F-35B successfully executed a short take off and a landing, as well as a hover. Lockheed Martin said the tests “confirmed predictions of the jet’s vertical thrust, stability and control in hovering flight.”

Congressional pressure on the Pentagon to buy more F/A-18 E/Fs and use multi-year authority continues to build, with Sen. Kit Bond being the latest to leap on the bandwagon at today’s Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee hearing.

Bond sent a St. Patrick’s Day letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates urging use of the multi-year authority. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the Navy believes Boeing’s February proposal for a multi-year deal meets the “threshold” for a minimum 10 percent savings. A decision should be forthcoming in a few weeks, “sometime in April,” he said.

The Navy’s first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS 1) has been quick out of the slips to score some major public relations points by seizing a few tons of cocaine on its first operational deployment in the Caribbean. The fast, maneuverable LCS will excel at such “naval constabulary” operations, writes the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment’s Martin Murphy, in a new white paper; the new ship will act as the “light cavalry” for the surface Navy.

The Pentagon will tell Congress that the Joint Strike Fighter is roughly 50 percent more expensive than it was in 2002 and will breach the Nunn-McCurdy cost limits “in a few days,” Pentagon acquisition czar Ash Carter told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Carter told the committee the cost increases were “unacceptable.” The Pentagon has “to wrestle this back into some realistic box.” Unit costs will climb from $50.2 million to as much as $95 million a copy, Christine Fox, director for Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, said in her testimony.

The Pentagon’s head of operational testing and evaluation is “concerned” that a recent decision to remove fuses and fire extinguishers from the Joint Strike Fighter program means more planes may be lost to enemy fire and may increase the risk from fires resulting from fuel leaks and related risks. Michael Gilmore said in written testimony prepared for the Senate Armed Services Committee that the program recent removal of “shutoff fuses for engine fueldraulics lines, coupled with the prior removal of dry bay fire extinguishers, has increased the likelihood of aircraft combat losses from ballistic threat induced fires.

The 2010 QDR directed the Air Force and Navy to jointly develop the concept to “guide the development of future capabilities needed for effective power projection operations.” Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has been thinking through just such a concept for the last two decades and has a new paper out titled “Why AirSea Battle?” that lays out the case for why its needed.

Veteran Senate defense budget expert and analyst at the Center for Defense Information, Winslow Wheeler, penned the following commentary about the Senate Armed Service Committee’s Thursday hearing on the F-35. He wants to know why the Joint Estimating Team has not been invited to testify and how Pentagon acquisition czar Ash Carter can believe the JSF faces no fundamental problems, among other things.

The incoming Coast Guard commandant has penned a remarkably honest and sometimes disturbing memo saying the service was “forced to make asset reduction decisions” in the 2011 budget without “full appreciation” of the operational impact they would have. Vice Adm. R. J. Papp’s memo has stirred considerable concern on Capitol Hill that the Coast Guard is making a major long-term mistake by cutting 1,100 uniformed personnel in 2011 and planning to reduce some of its missions.

It could be a long range strike platform. It could use SAR and electro-optical sensors to spy on an enemy. About the only thing it won’t do is serve as an attack fighter. It is Boeing’s Phantom Ray, an unmanned aerial system being developed by the company’s Phantom Works. The company will roll out the new plane in May. It should taxi in July. Then it will move to NASA’s Dryden site for flight and other tests, which should begin in December.

UPDATED: Congressional AIde Says F-35 Still A “Pig;” Lockheed Defends Program

In his most significant action since the Senate confirmed him, Ash Carter has issued an acquisition decision memorandum moving full rate production to November 2015, to withhold $614 million from Lockheed Martin and only pay it “to reward measurable progress…” Carter’s revised plan drew a stinging critique and call for a production freeze from Winslow Wheeler, a former congressional budget expert now with the Center for Defense Information.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead has signed off on the Navy’s “Vision for Confronting Irregular Challenges.” The Navy will buy ships and aircraft that provide “broadened” and “balanced” capabilities to deal with a range of irregular opponents, including pirates, terrorists, criminal organizations, insurgents and other state and non-state actors, the document says. By “balancing shifts in our investments” the service will better address and incorporate “urgent and emerging requirements” to confront the “hybrid nature” of future challenges. It emphasizes buying “multi-mission ships and aircraft,” oriented to “lower end operations.”

Coast Guard commandant Adm. Thad Allen said that his National Security Cutter is a better ship for partnering with foreign navies than the Littoral Combat Ship. Problem is, he doesn’t have enough cutters to meet the current demand from the various combatant commanders.

A key supporter of the F/A-18 E/F isn’t sitting still for Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ latest explanation of the ever-shrinking fighter gap. Rep. Todd Akin wrote Gates an early Valentine’s Day card pressing him to buy more planes and to use multi-year authority to buy them.

White House officials pressured the Coast Guard commandant to tone down comments that his service faces serious threats to its ability to respond to emergencies such as the Haitian earthquake disaster, DoD Buzz has learned. A source with close ties to the Coast Guard told us this morning that the “White House hammered Allen” once they saw a draft of his final State of the Coast Guard speech. Basically, he was told, you’ve got your budget now get out there and defend it.

Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway says the Marines have gotten too heavy buying heavily armored vehicles tuned to fighting the current wars. He wants the Marines to return to their expeditionary roots and so is out buying lots of small jeeps and other weapons that fit the Corps’ new “distributed operations” war fighting concept.

The long and often halting development of the Advanced Precision-Kill Weapon System (APKWS), a laser guided version of the Hydra 2.75-inch rocket, appears to finally be reaching an end and production could, possibly, begin this year. In early January, Marine AH-1W Cobra helicopters fired the precision rocket at a variety of targets and scored direct hits on all eight shots, said APKWS builder BAE Systems.

Reviews of the 2010 QDR have been pretty harsh. Last week, we asked Kathleen Hicks, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense and lead QDR author, to responsd to critics who say the report focuses too much on the current wars and neglects the rise of high-end challengers such as China. In a defiant tone, Hicks challenged critics to show where the report failed to address emerging threats.

Reviews of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review are pouring in from Washington’s defense cognoscenti and so far they come with a strong tilt towards disappointed. The lack of any real news or major program or policy shifts has led a number of defense wonks to question the value of the whole QDR process.

The much-debated carrier fighter gap stretches about 100 planes wide in 2018. That is what Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the House Armed Services Committee today. That is less than half of the Navy’s estimate, given to Congress last year. The Navy has pretty much stuck with a figure of 243 aircraft or, as some lawmakers have it, 48 planes a year.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates sent a clear signal to Democrats who might be eager to make cuts to the Defense Department’s budget: if you cut us below current levels you will “have to sacrifice force structure. We cannot do it any other way.” Making such cuts will mean that the United States will suffer from “a reduction in military capability and a reduction in our flexibility.” Gates was replying to a question from Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who cited the Obama administration’s domestic spending freeze, adding that the U.S. “may need to trim defense budgets as well.”