The Senate Armed Services Committee leadership has launched a probe to determine what went wrong with the Air Force’s Expeditionary Combat Support System that led the service to cancel the project after having invested more than $1 billion in it since 2005. “I remain deeply troubled by the failure” of the ECSS program,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), SASC chairman, reported IT World on Jan. 25. “I have directed the committee’s investigative staff to conduct a comprehensive investigation of the program in the next Congress to determine the causes for the failure and assess steps that can be taken to avoid similar failures in the future,” he added. Air Force officials saw ECSS as the next-generation supply chain management tool that would transform the service’s logistics enterprise. However, the Air Force leadership announced in November that it was canceling ECSS, acknowledging that the project was deemed not worth pumping more money into after several unsuccessful attempts to revive it. “There are important lessons learned from ECSS, and we’re trying to capture that and apply it going forward,” Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told reporters at the Pentagon on Jan. 11. (Donley-Welsh transcript)
Boeing Claims Progress on T-7 and Other Challenged Programs
April 25, 2025
Boeing appears to have become to overcome the problems that led to billions in losses on fixed-price defense contracts in recent years, point the company back toward profitabily, says Boeing president and CEO Kelly Ortberg.