Blog – Valkyrie Strategic Solutions LLC

29 Nov

Defense reformation is coming

November 29, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
0 comments

And you may not like it. Elon Musk wants to cancel the F-35, and get rid of manned combat aircraft generally, and rely more on drones. Let’s unpack that, because this is now about much more than one opinionated squillionaire, but about an opinionated...

15 Jun

Blog

NGAD, we hardly knew ye

June 16, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
0 comments

US Air Force chief of staff Gen. David Allvin set the cat among the pigeons on Thursday by suggesting that the service might not proceed as expected with its planned next major combat aircraft, the Next Generation Air Dominance program. This came as a shock,...

28 May

Blog

Ask A Silly Question

May 28, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
0 comments

DARPA needs to think more about mission engineering if it wants projects to succeed The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is full of very smart people united by a good intention: to find and enable technological breakthroughs that provide the U.S. and its allies...

20 May

Blog

And This Mess Is So Big

May 20, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
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Yes, this is a Dr. Seuss reference. And this is where you can buy my book, which you should, if you want to understand what the bleep is going on in defense acquisition. "Oh, another negative GAO report on F-35", yawn the usual suspects....

13 May

Blog

Trillion Dollar Trainwreck

May 19, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
1 comment

Trillion Dollar Trainwreck is published worldwide by Valkyrie Strategic Solutions LLC via Kindle Direct Publishing. This project snuck up on me. It emerged from some notes I had put together a few years ago, plus some research I started last fall. In part, the...

17 Apr

Blog

Counting The Legs

April 17, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
0 comments

The last few days of F-35 news took me back in time. To a point two years after a well-remunerated pundit had declared that "if you don't follow the defense business closely, then you can be excused for believing that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is in trouble", followed a matter...

11 Feb

Blog

Just Don’t Call It A Flying Killer Robot

February 11, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
0 comments

Uncrewed, reusable, weapon-carrying fast-jet aircraft have had many names since the WW2 and Vietnam-era idea was revived in the mid-1990s. Maybe 37, which is 37 more than the number of such aircraft that have been delivered to operational units. Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) is the latest. It's survived...

05 Feb

Blog

For Whom The Whistle Blows

February 5, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
0 comments

A mid-cabin door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 on January 5 because it was removed at Boeing, to rectify faulty work by fuselage supplier Spirit, and improperly reinstalled. The bolts that hold the plug in position against its stops - as the latch mechanism...

28 Jan

Blog

The Cartman Gambit

January 29, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
0 comments

"Screw you guys, I'm going home". I have been working on a root-cause analysis of the F-35 project. As I got deeper into the subject, I realized that the impact of decisions taken in the early 1990s was not only colossal but largely unintentional.

22 Jan

Blog

Dreamland Life

January 22, 2024
By Bill Sweetman
2 comments

The last big book on Area 51 was written in 2011 by Annie Jacobsen, previously best known for throwing a case of the screaming abdabs over some Syrian musicians on a 2004 Northwest Airlines flight. It would never have gotten past an agent but for the sensational ending,...