Lockheed Martin and the Air Force believe they have put in place the best possible acquisition strategy for recapitalizing the service's AC-130 gunships by modifying MC-130Js after they leave the assembly line, Air Force and company representatives said in interviews last week.

The Defense Department wants to shift $750 million to pay for urgent war costs with funds originally set aside to prepare reserve forces from across the services for operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, according to a reprogramming request sent to Congress last week.

Members of the Reserve Forces Policy Board have urged Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to include National Guard and Reserve priorities in the ongoing Strategic Choices and Management Review, seeking more directly than before a comparison with the active-duty military in the face of shrinking budgets, according to a May 6 memo from the group.

As the military prepares for whatever follows a decade of large-scale ground wars, reserve forces are likely to undergo changes to how they are employed and for what purposes, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said this week.

The Air National Guard expects to see a $39 million loss resulting from more than $80 million in sequestration budget cuts to fiscal year 2013 funding Congress specifically set aside for the service component's modernization needs, even though the Guard has seen its dependency on that funding triple over the past four fiscal years.

Air Force reserve component leaders are concerned that ongoing congressional budget issues may negatively impact modernization plans for Air Force Reserve and Air National Guard aircraft efforts, in particular F-16 targeting pods and the C-130's fuel control system.

The Defense Department has agreed to institute a new consultative process that will smooth the path toward incorporating the priorities of state governors into DOD's budget process.

The National Governors Association is making a push for additional say in how the Air Force trims its force-structure strategy, a topic the association's co-chairs discussed during what they called a "state-of-the-states" address today.

A senior Air Force official on Thursday gave House Armed Services Committee staffers and Pennsylvania lawmakers a bare-bones idea of how the service plans to move forward with reintroducing 32 cargo aircraft into its force-structure strategy.