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.

Arms control elicits strong emotions and sparks great debates. In that tradition, Kingston Reif and Travis Sharp offer a rebuttal to the recent commentary we ran from the folks at the Heritage Foundation. Here’s the take of two dedicated arms control advocates. In their recent commentary on DoD Buzz (“Will START Talks Go MAD,”), the Heritage Foundation’s Baker Spring and Helle Dale recycle a snake oil sales pitch that first emerged at the dawn of the Atomic Age. The illusion is that the awesome destructiveness of nuclear weapons can somehow be neutralized by a panacea—in this case impenetrable missile defenses.

CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus shot down reports that he had recommended to the Obama administration that the Palestinian territories be included in his command’s area of operations. Although, he did say that the Arab-Israeli conflict sets the “strategic context” in which American soldiers operate in the larger Arab world and he has done what he can to move the peace process forward.

The tanker competition has grown so baroque that it’s easy to sometimes wonder what’s real and what’s delusion. The latest twist is that EADS and some of Europe’s governments are reportedly lobbying for a deadline extension on when tanker bids can be submitted. Boeing’s brethren on Capitol Hill, sensing a possible threat to $35 billion for the company that means so much to their states, swung into action with little delay. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said any, “Delay is unacceptable.”

When SecDef Gates cancelled the Army’s FCS program last year, the service’s flagship modernization effort didn’t really stop, it just got a name change and a bit of reorganization. This week, GAO highlighted reliability problems that continue to plague a number of the FCS remnants, saying the Army and OSD prematurely approved low rate production of new technologies.

The Obama Pentagon proclaims it’s commitment to reformed acquisition and greater competition. Robbin Laird, international defense consultant who advised the Air Force on the last tanker competition, argues in this commentary that Northrop’s decision to pull out of the KC-X competition will pose a basic test of the administration’s commitment and it’s ability to oversee a major program.

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.

UPDATED: Sarkozy To Press Obama On Tanker
Today’s headline in The Hill tells the story: “McCain Endorses Pentagon Process On Tanker Bid As Legitimate.” My colleague Roxana Tiron asked McCain for his views and the story says he told her that he “was not worried about Boeing, the only competitor left for the contract.” Meanwhile, EU officials warned against American protectionism in the wake of Northrop’s decision to pull out of the $35 billion deal.

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.

UPDATED: DepSecDef Lynn Says U.S. ‘Disappointed’ By NG Decision
More than eight years since Boeing first tried to supply new airborne tankers to the Defense Department, the company appears to have finally won the tanker competition. Northrop Grumman announced today that it will not bid on the KC-X tanker and it will not file a protest that might delay the program any further The announcement came from the top. “We reached this conclusion based on the structure of the source selection methodology defined in the RFP, which clearly favors Boeing’s smaller refueling tanker and does not provide adequate value recognition of the added capability of a larger tanker, precluding us from any competitive opportunity,” said CEO Wes Bush.

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.

After a two-year effort, an international ban on the use of cluster bombs will go into effect on Aug. 1. And, just as it did with the landmark landmine ban, the United States refused to sign the treaty and has no plans to scrap its inventory of cluster bombs. But the world’s sole superpower may find it more difficult to use them thanks to European allies who agreed to the ban last month.

Army officials say they want to open up the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) competition to any company that builds combat vehicles, not just BAE and General Dynamics. They are hoping other builders can gain entry into the niche armored fighting vehicle market, said GCV PM Col. Bryan McVeigh. He also laid out the requirements for the new vehicle.

Sen. John McCain is worried about the F-35 and thinks the Defense Department has done a pretty lousy job of telling Congress about the program’s woes. “As a strong supporter of the F-35, as a person who supported cancellation of the F-22, I’m very disturbed” about how the Pentagon kept the Congress informed. He said at today’s Air Force posture hearing that the SASC has not “been adequately informed of the extent of what the difficulties are.”

No one at the Pentagon has been willing to say the Joint Strike Fighter buy might get smaller until now. But Robert Hale, the comptroller and thus the main money man, made it explicit today. “If there is cost growth, I think we will just have to reduce the buy,” he said at the annual Precision Strike Association conference.

Air Force Secretary Mike Donley confirmed the Joint Strike Fighter program will breach the Nunn-McCurdy cost growth limits but Congress should expect few changes after the mandated review occurs. Donley told defense reporters that the Pentagon has already made many of the changes that are needed.“We’ve been taking all the mitigating and corrective actions we would take as if there were a Nunn-McCurdy breach,” he said. How big the breach will be and when it will be reported to Congress, he isn’t sure.

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.

Russia has tried to use these treaty talks to lock in its nuclear advantages and take away any potential American defenses, and our side seems ready to agree it will neither improve nor expand its existing system for countering long-range ballistic missiles. Meanwhile, true to Obama’s dream, the U.S. government doesn’t seem to think that having the ability to inflict widespread damage on Russia would be essential to an improved bilateral relationship.