A top Pentagon official now says that the Quadrennial Defense Review probably won’t push the armed services too far away from new weapons systems they have planned. This, of course, is a very different tune from the one the Pentagon has sung most of this year. Ryan Henry, the deputy undersecretary of defense for policy and a senior QDR honcho, said the study is likely to suggest adapting current systems to new kinds of threats. Speaking at a conference of the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association on Oct. 26, Henry said no major decisions have been made in the QDR yet but that competition is emerging between systems that were designed to meet “state-type” threats and systems that were designed for non-state threats. Henry pointed out that conventional systems still are being used with success in unconventional combat. He noted specifically the role of the B-52 dropping precision munitions in Afghanistan.
Lockheed Martin projects more than a billion dollars of losses on a classified program, but company officials said April 23 they are confident it will turn profitable by 2028 and become a "franchise" system in the U.S. military.