Boeing unveiled the plane it will offer for the KC-X airborne tanker competition today, including a little movie and a press release. There was no mention of a 777 tanker, just the long-expected 767. One of the more intriguing adds to the new bid was the news that the new tanker will boast “a digital flight deck featuring electronic displays” taken from the 787, Boeing’s most advanced civilian plane. It will “show all flight attitude, navigation, engine indication and crew-alerting information on screens 75 percent larger than on a commercial Airbus A330.” One can almost hear the Boeing folks crying: Take that EADS!

It’s a bit mushy, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates said today that he is “very hopeful” that we will have two competitors” responding to the final tanker RFP. When I asked Gates during today’s press conference when the final RFP would be out, he wouldn’t go beyond saying, “very soon.” Rumors are that it may come out any time this week.

News that the F-35’s IOC date will probably shift substantially to the right led a congressional aide to note Congress now has few ways to help the Pentagon or taxpayers other than by supporting the F136 second engine program for the Joint Strike Fighter. Gates’ successful kill of the F-22 means “there are now very few options for Gates or Congress… All staff can do is recommend to members that whatever screwed up program that they have that the risk to operational readiness is unacceptable without a competitive engine program. Everyone acknowledges this off the record, except Gates.”

UPDATED: Vice Adm. David Venlet, NAVAIR commander, Likely New JSF Program Manager; LM Issues Statement

The bombshell of budget day: Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that the prpgram manager of the Joint Strike Fighter program was being canned and would be replaced by a three– star general. “One cannot absorb the additional costs in this program and the delays without people being held accountable,” Gates said during the question and answer period of his budget briefing today.

UPDATED: With Gates Comments on How Old Strategy Was “Too Confining“

Clearly continuing his Augean task of reshaping the U.S. military to win the wars it is fighting, Defense Secretary Robert Gates commits the Defense Department to institutionalizing his focus in the final, official version of the Quadrennial Defense Review. “This is truly a wartime QDR. For the first time, it places the current conflicts at the top of our budgeting, policy, and program priorities, thus ensuring that those fighting America’s wars and their families — on the battlefield, in the hospital, or on the home front — receive the support they need and deserve,” Gates says in his opening note to the QDR.

Capitol Republicans have been banging heads over the last few weeks, trying to figure out how to counter the expected results of the soon-to-be-released Quadrennial Defense Review. The greatest challenge for the Republicans is simple: Robert Gates, who has drawn the mantle of this QDR tight about his shoulders, stands behind the decisions arrived at during the QDR and he was appointed by a Republican. His national security credentials are impeccable and no one can accuse him of being weak on national defense or a misguided Democrat.

UPDATED: Veteran Pentagon Watcher Predicts Budget Gridlock if Gates Leaves And GOP Wins House and Heritage Analyst Comments

We humbly offer a few events and trends to watch over the next two years, since one year is far too short in the defense world, as any budget weenie can tell you. What to watch: Gates on his way out the door; the November elections; the struggle in Af-Pak; the intelligence wars. First, Defense Secretary Robert Gates may leave. The rumors have been that he would go just before the next budget is announced.

Predicting the end of a regime, especially one led by ruthless and wily survivors, always poses great risks to the prophet of doom. But the Iranian regime meets almost all of my indicators for the end of a government. First, there are persistent reports that some of the security forces are refusing to use lethal force against their compatriots. On top of that, several news accounts have said that members of the security forces have been forced to surrender to crowds. One particularly noteworthy example had security forces “cowering” as angry crowds confronted them in the capital.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants former Defense Secretary Bill Perry as co-chairman of the congressionally mandated QDR oversight panel. Perry, now a professor at Stanford University and fellow at the Hoover Institution, is one of the most respected defense wise men and boasts a wide network of former colleagues and admirers. A source familiar with the panel said Perry would be the Democratic co-chair, leaving Gates still to find a GOP member after former Sen. John Warner withdrew from consideration.

UPDATED: JSF Cut About 100 Planes, One Year Added to Schedule

Word on Capitol Hill is that the Quadrennial Defense Review should result in the demise of two Navy carrier groups and the Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. On top of that, the Joint Strike Fighter program is likely to lose a so-far uncertain number of planes and the Air Force looks to lose two air wings. Folks on the Hill are watching the carrier cuts particularly closely. They were willing to accept the temporary loss of one carrier but two groups may just be too much for lawmakers to swallow, though it would conveniently answer the hot debate about whether the Navy faces a fighter gap.

The Pentagon, after years and years of deliberation and heavy pressure from Britain, has finally decided it will not share the all-important computer source code for the Joint Strike Fighter. Sharing source code would, in the words of one close observer of the program, “turn the British JSF into a Trojan Horse.”

John Warner, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, looms as one of the canniest and most rational defense experts on Capitol Hill for the last two decades. His inclusion as co-chair of the independent panel charged with overseeing the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review would have provided the nation with a keen eye to ensure that Defense Secretary Robert Gates and company did not get away with too many fudged or badly reasoned decisions. Sadly, that is not to be. That may leave the panel behind the power curve, as the Heritage Foundation’s Mackenzie Eaglen told us.

The second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter needs a fancy lug nut redesigned and should be back up on the test stand by the end of the year, a GE spokesman says. The program has been dogged by rumors that it faced a potentially significant redesign of its combustor but the real problem lies with a lug that attaches the diffuser to the cumbustor, GE spokesman Rick Kennedy said Tuesday morning.“The actual combustor will not have to be redesigned,” he said.

Rumors flew last week that GE faced the prospect of having to redesign its cumbustor and that the engine is in such deep doo doo that it would be off the test stand for at least six months. Then Loren Thompson, uber-source for many defense reporters, put out an item this morning summarizing the rumors and now Congress wants answers — right away.

The veil will be partially lifted next week but almost nobody outside a small group in the Army knows what the service’s new Ground Combat Vehicle will look like or what it will be expected to do. So we surveyed industry leaders at AUSA to get their best guesses.

In a largely supportive and generous speech, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the annual gathering of the Association of the US Army that he continued to support the Army’s modernization plans but reminded the service that it must find uses for the MRAPs bought for Iraq and Afghanistan.

House Republicans mounted a spirited critique of the Obama administration’s new European missile defense plan, saying the intelligence does not support the administration’s claims of a change in the threat. GOP members also claimed the new plan would not sufficiently contain the threat from Iran.

Northrop Grumman is really, really worried that Boeing will get the march on them in the tanker competition because its KC-X pricing data was revealed during the last go-round. But last week’s congressional briefing appears to indicate the Pentagon gives short shrift to Northrop’s concerns.

Expect fireworks from a pair of meetings yesterday and Wednesday about the future of what was one of Americas most closely guarded secret weapons, the National Reconnaissance Office. A tiger team is meeting to discuss what could be an enormous expansion of the NRO’s power, from its current focus on building and operating highly classified imaging and radar satellites to building and operating all US military and intelligence space and ISR assets

UPDATED: GE/RR Will Offer Detailed Fixed Price Proposal Friday or Monday
The war for the Joint Strike Fighter’s engine money has developed a new front: when is a fixed price offer actually a fixed price offer. We spoke with a source over the weekend who read us some emails which were apparently from Pentagon officials claiming that General Electric and Rolls Royce, makers of the F136, had not actually made the government a fixed price offer.