Word: pentagons
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...security led to secret requirements for onboard jammers to thwart radars and missiles. Then there was the required shielding to help protect the choppers' electronic guts from being fried by electromagnetic pulses generated by nuclear blasts (as well as separate systems to protect against biological and chemical weapons). Pentagon officials say the VH-71 isn't so much a modified EH-101 as it is a "whole new helicopter." Then, of course, there was the kitchen and bathroom for the 14 passengers (the new choppers can fly 300 miles, triple the range of the current Marines Ones, making such facilities...
...familiar Pentagon-procurement pattern, the Navy and its contractors began blaming one another for the spiraling costs once the program came under a critical spotlight. John Young, the Pentagon's outgoing acquisition czar, recently blamed both. He cited the program as emblematic of a Pentagon culture wedded to rosy cost projections. "Higher costs, whether based on low estimates or poor enterprise management, is unacceptable and harmful to the defense enterprise," he wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates last month. "The acquisition team bears significant responsibility for moving forward with these programs built on inadequate foundations." (Read "Can Robert Gates Tame...
...President currently uses. But they're not the equivalent of the "flying Oval Office" with all the communication and security gear slated for the final 23, due to be delivered by 2019. With the first batch currently beginning flight tests, the Connecticut congressional delegation has been urging the Pentagon to shift some of the work to Sikorsky Aircraft. That Connecticut firm built every presidential helicopter since President Eisenhower was the first to regularly fly in one, until the tradition was broken by the 2005 award to Lockheed Martin and its European partners, Italy's Augusta and Britain's Westland...
...Obama told McCain that he and Gates share the Senator's view that sometimes pushing for too much in a new piece of equipment makes little sense. Gates "recognizes that simply adding more and more does not necessarily mean better and better," Obama said. But for a Pentagon accustomed to having its way with the White House - and it nervously awaits Obama's imprint on its 2010 budget - those are fighting words...
...Late in the summer of 2006, the top Marine intelligence officer in Iraq cabled his superiors at the Pentagon that the war was essentially lost in Anbar; his dire assessment soon surfaced on the front page of the Washington Post. "The prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim," the newspaper said, summarizing the report. "There is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there." One anonymous official who read the report flatly told the paper "the United States has lost in Anbar." (See pictures of the Anbar Awakening movement...