Raytheon and United Technologies Corporation recently announced plans to merge into a new company, Raytheon Technologies, in 2020. While the past few years have seen significant industrial consolidation with the defense sector, the proposed Raytheon-UTC merger would be the largest defense merger in recent history.
In our last paper, we discussed the current state of the U.S. vertical lift fleet and how past investment decisions helped shape this fleet. This brief will focus on future investments. Vertical lift aircraft are a substantial part of the U.S. military, both in terms of fleet size and investment levels. Helicopters and tiltrotors make…
This analysis provides critical insights into understanding the current trends in the defense industrial base and the implications of those trends on acquisition policy.
Recent reports of unsafe conditions and unresponsive repair services require immediate action by the Defense Department to fix the problems—but not kill the program.
With Deputy Secretary Patrick Shanahan now the acting Secretary of Defense, there has been some hyperventilating about whether Boeing has the inside track in the Pentagon. Industry can relax.
The Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) can and should be improved. But tossing out the FAR completely and starting over will slow, not accelerate, acquisition in the near term. Worse, it will ultimately undermine the usefulness of the alternative pathways that we are currently developing.
A group of reformers in both Congress and the executive branch have a common diagnosis of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) weapon system acquisition process: it is too slow and rigid. The DoD News coverage of Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin’s comments this past April succinctly summarize this concern: Download full report “The…
Acquisition Trends 2018: Defense Contract Spending Bounces Back analyzes the current state of affairs in defense contracting at a time when the defense acquisition system sits at an inflection point. Defense contracting has rebounded these past two years, but there are unanswered questions about continued defense budget growth and the long-term effects of the last few years’ acquisition reform efforts.
This report examines how such incentives are used in PBL contracting and looks further towards how incentives can best be utilized in a PBL contracting environment. This report is structured in three parts: a review of the available literature on the use of incentives in PBL contracting, a data analysis of where and how PBL contracts are used in the DoD, and a summary of initial findings from the experts CSIS has interviewed on the subject.
This study examines the literature on how contracts are fulfilled for both civilian and defense crisis funds, primarily focusing on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), disaster funds, and Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) funds. Utilizing publicly available data, the study provides a methodology for classifying the contracts and analyzes the data based on noncompetitive awards, undefinitized contract actions, and reachback contracts.