President Obama used his weekly address to lay the whole responsibility of the sequester on Republicans in Congress. There is a good dose of scare tactics thrown in, including at the Department of Transportation where they apparently can’t execute a 2% budget reduction except by disrupting flights across the US.
* Suddenly the White House has very granular data on the sequester scourge, down to the state level (here’s Virginia [PDF] for instance). The Washington Post has a round up.
* But some Republicans in Congress would rather see sequestration happen than yield further on the tax/spend mix, and defense industry support in Congress is no longer what it used to be. NYT | Politico.
* Xi Jinping, General Secretary of Chinese Communist party, Chairman of the party’s Central Military Commission, and soon President (maybe we can agree to just call him Xi for short, though that may come out wrong when you read it out loud) instructed last month officials to reign in extravagant banquets and other ostentatious displays of waste. Xi’s made a point to have simple meals during his trips around the country. In the same vein he just approved regulations for tighter control of military spending.
* Such thrift should leave room to research nuclear propulsion for polar ships and likely for aircraft carriers as well, a possibility first discussed a few years ago. China Daily | South China Morning Post.
* India’s IDSA: what is the role of the services in capital acquisition decisions?
* The US Navy’s Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division is making progress on UAV interoperability.
* DID covered last week sensor networks that monitor corrosion in aircraft. There is also work done on using fiber optic sensors to track [PDF] the structural integrity of UAVs. Would it make sense to converge such efforts into one aircraft health monitoring system? After all, corrosion and structural integrity are closely related.
* US NAVSEA updated its org chart to reflect William J. Deligne’s recent move to Executive Director from PEO Carriers and Rear Adm. Hendrickson leading AEGIS BMD (a joint Navy/MDA program).
