Skip to main content

US Army Considers Multi-Year, $3 Billion Contract for Apache Helicopters

The US military is reportedly in talks with Boeing Defense, Space & Security over the terms of a $3.3 billion contract to purchase 275 AH-64E Apache helicopters. This comes a month after US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter approved the Army’s proposed multiyear procurement plan.






Col. Jeffrey Hager, the Apache program manager, told Inside Defense that a signed agreement can be expected by early 2017. The Senate and House versions of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act have both been approved, but concerns over the cost efficiency of production and procurement programs has kept any bill from being passed.


Loading...


The director of defense pricing for the Pentagon's acquisition directorate, Shay Assad, approved the Apache proposal. Assad told Politico in April that his years spent as an executive at Raytheon showed him how companies often overpay for multi-year defense contracts. As a result, Assad claims that he requires contractors to justify their prices, in an attempt to garner the most savings. 
According to a fact sheet released by the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), if the Apache deal is approved it could potentially yield some $1 billion in savings over five years. The HASC recently voted for an additional $583 billion defense budget, which includes 25,000 reservists, 27,000 additional active-duty troops, an increase in the Navy’s shipbuilding budget, and the acquisition of new aircraft for the Navy. Defense News quotes US House Representative Adam Smith as saying, "This bill is based on a lot of hope in what will happen next April or May…While this is a good bill, it spends more than we have, and this is a problem we will have to wrestle with in this markup, on the floor and once we get to conference."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Best Available Evidence: Hillary Clinton Has Parkinson's

Clinton has been using her "dehydration" story for years. This time it won't work. The media is already working around the clock to hush up questions about Hillary's rapidly deteriorating health. She overheated has allergies pneumonia! She'll be back on her feet soon, citizen. End of discussion. Anyone who says otherwise is a Looney Tune. (Remember that just a week ago the media shamed anyone who even suggested that Hillary Clinton might be sick.)  We don't buy it . Commenting on Clinton's latest "medical episode", Dr. Zuhdi Jasser M.D. observed : “What she had was a syncopal episode. She passed out. That’s either cardiovascular or neurologic. Now, her team wants us to believe it is dehydration. She didn’t appear to be dehydrated and that doesn’t get fixed in 90 minutes.” There's a very good reason why Bill has already replaced his wife on the campaign trail : Hillary Clinton is suffering from advanced stages of Parkinson's. And it...

Russia: Let's Improve Baltic Air Safety! NATO: No Thanks, We'll Pass

NATO has rejected air-safety proposals made by Russia which would have ensured all military planes flying in the Baltic region would operate with their transponders switched on. This makes no sense. According to the Wall Street Journal, NATO officials said the proposals “would do little to improve” air safety — a strange response, given that NATO has repeatedly scolded Russia for allegedly flying its military jets over the Baltic with transponders switched off. Headlines about ‘dangerous’ and ‘unsafe’ Russian military flights have been ten-a-penny over the last couple of years. Such stories have become so ubiquitous — and the media so obsessed with blowing them out of proportion — that at one point a woman in Cornwall became convinced that she saw Russian bombers overhead one day when she was out for a driving lesson. One would imagine then, given NATO’s repeated criticisms and concerns over safety in the Baltic region, that they would have welcomed any kind of common-sense prop...

The Lingering Costs of Clinton’s Libyan War

Clinton Ehrlich notes that the Russian government views Clinton with the utmost contempt: The Russian foreign-policy experts I consulted did not harbor even grudging respect for Clinton. The most damaging chapter of her tenure was the NATO intervention in Libya [bold mine-DL], which Russia could have prevented with its veto in the U.N. Security Council. Moscow allowed the mission to go forward only because Clinton had promised that a no-fly zone would not be used as cover for regime change. Russia’s leaders were understandably furious when, not only was former Libyan President Muammar al-Qaddafi ousted, but a cellphone recording of his last moments showed U.S.-backed rebels sodomizing him with a bayonet. They were even more enraged by Clinton’s videotaped response to the same news: “We came, we saw, he died,” the secretary of state quipped before bursting into laughter, cementing her reputation in Moscow as a duplicitous warmonger. The Libyan war was an important factor in the...