Rapid Fire: 2010-08-20 | US Shipbuilding

* CRS (Congressional Research Service) analyst Ronald O’Rourke, who has often been right about shipbuilding programs when the US Navy was wrong, releases his August 2010 report on Navy shipbuilding plans [PDF]. * Meanwhile, Maritime Professional delivers an equally hard-hitting analysis of the fast-dwindling US Merchant Marine, and MARAD: “The Emperor Has No Clothes.” Taken together, these analyses are not encouraging. * PricewaterhouseCoopers: The value of mergers and acquisitions in the aerospace and defense sector dropped to $2.2 billion in the second quarter of 2010 from $5 billion in the same quarter last year, despite significant M&A activity in the middle-market segment. * Show Me the Money: A slew of private equity firms line up to buy McKechnie Aerospace, an Irvine, CA-based supplier of aerospace components for commercial and military customers, for around $1.2 billion. This is part of a broader PE trend. * Turkey plans to keep on spending on major equipment buys. Its 2010 budget is 1.8% of GDP rather than the 2% commitment for NATO members – but that’s almost double the level for many European NATO countries. * Rent-a-Cop: Private contractors will take up much of the security work in Iraq as US troops pull out, […]