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January 2010
One of the oddities of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review is its treatment of the private sector. The document has an entire chapter devoted to changing the way the Department of Defense (DoD) does business. This chapter contains some important initiatives particularly with respect to the idea
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1/29/2010
The Washington Post reported on January 26 that a long decline in pregnancy rates among American teenagers ended at mid-decade, and the pregnancy rate has begun rising again. The story, based on a study from the respected Guttmacher Institute, suggested that Bush Administration emphasis
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1/29/2010
In general, Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDRs) are like State of the Union addresses: long on vision and short on practical steps to be taken. Having reviewed a draft of the 2010 QDR I can say that it is the best of the lot. It makes a serious effort to connect strategy to missions and concepts
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1/28/2010
Details of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review have begun to circulate, and it looks pretty much like my colleague Dan Goure predicted: a warmed-over version of the Bush defense posture. That isn't all bad, because by the end of its tenure the Bush Administration had come to grasp the emerging
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1/28/2010
The Department of Defense is about to release the unclassified version of its 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) which will provide high-level guidance to the department for the remainder of the Obama Administration’s first term. As such, one might have expected the QDR to radically redirect
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1/27/2010
A draft overview of the defense department's fiscal 2011 budget request highlights a handful of weapons programs as key to current and future military operations. The document was leaked last week, but media reports have only mentioned a small portion of its content. The chapter of the overview
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1/27/2010
The Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) is the biggest intranet in the world. With 800,000 users, some people say the only network that's bigger is the Internet itself. But NMCI has spawned more than its share of controversy, because the Navy awarded a huge contract to Electronic Data Systems to
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1/26/2010
It has become commonplace for analysts to suggest that China offers an alternative economic model to the democratic capitalism espoused by the United States. The Western model is based on the idea that political freedom and economic liberalization go hand-in-hand. The so-called Chinese model is
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1/26/2010
Two weeks ago the Airborne Laser (ABL) conducted a successful full-up, non-destructive test against a boosting target. This test was in preparation for the first-ever shoot-down test planned for later this year. Lasers are one of a new class of directed energy weapons that could revolutionize most
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1/25/2010
The federal budget is trapped in a structural deficit that the White House says will average 6% of gross domestic product over the next ten years. Since federal spending only claims about 20% of GDP in a normal year, that means the Obama Administration expects to borrow over a quarter of all government
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1/25/2010
Although the most recent version of the Quadrennial Defense Review is classified "secret," an unclassified overview of the fiscal 2011 defense budget circulating in Washington reveals the basic outlines of the QDR. It lists the major themes of the QDR thusly:
-- U.S. security in a complex
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1/22/2010
Tuesday’s level 10 earthquake on the political Richter scale may not bode well for defense, specifically future defense spending. One interpretation of Scott Brown’s surprise victory in Massachusetts was extreme unhappiness with decisions being made in Washington on a host of issues from TARP, to
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1/22/2010
Yesterday I had the honor of testifying before the Seapower & Expeditionary Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee concerning Navy shipbuilding plans. My prepared remarks are below. In general, I agreed with Navy plans for submarines, carriers and surface combatants while
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1/21/2010
The convincing win of Republican candidate Scott Brown in yesterday's special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy is being attributed to many factors -- a weak economy, anti-incumbent populism, Obamacare, etc. But Brown's campaign manager has his own explanation.
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1/20/2010
Yesterday, Iran’s minister of defense fired a verbal shot across the bow of the United States, warning that his country could attack our warships in the Persian Gulf in the event of any attack upon Teheran’s nuclear facilities. The chance of such a confrontation rose rather sharply recently with
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1/20/2010
How dysfunctional does the intelligence process in Afghanistan have to be for three senior intelligence officials, including Major General Michael T. Flynn who is currently Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, to write
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1/19/2010
The story of how Oshkosh Corporation beat out incumbent BAE Systems to win an Army contract for 23,000 trucks and trailers just keeps getting worse and worse. First the Government Accountability Office found that the Army overrated the production capabilities that Oshkosh brought to the table,
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1/19/2010
In April 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cancelled the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program. At the time, he said that the FCS had been designed for a different environment than the one that the U.S. military now confronted. Secretary Gates tasked that service to come back to him with
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1/18/2010
Ten years ago, renowned author James Gleick published a book called Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. The book documented how new information technologies were speeding up the pace of innovation, investing and just about every other facet of life, with huge consequences for
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1/18/2010
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Obama Administration are committed to getting our soldiers in combat the critical equipment and support they need to do their jobs. Secretary Gates has made enhancing survivability his particular cause. He forced the military to rapidly develop and deploy thousands
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1/15/2010
At the beginning of the decade, the U.S. Navy radically restructured its plans for modernizing surface combatants. The surface-combatant force structure traditionally had consisted of large cruisers, medium-sized destroyers, and frigates small enough to operate in shallow water. In 2001 the service
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1/15/2010
Inside the Navy reports this week that the Marine Corps has launched a congressional lobbying campaign to undercut the Navy's shipbuilding goals, citing a chart entitled "Marine Corps Shipbuilding Requirements" that was briefed on December 18. Among other things, the chart calls for building
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1/14/2010
Public Policy 101 says that whenever the United States faces an economic crisis there must be a guns versus butter debate. The argument always goes the same way. We are told that we can either have guns or butter, meaning national security or domestic security by way of entitlements and non-defense
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1/14/2010
In the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing plot, attention has focused almost exclusively on the well-known terrorist havens such as Waziristan, Yemen and Somalia. What has been all but completely ignored is the nationality of the would-be bomber. He is from Nigeria, the most populous nation
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1/13/2010
Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute has written a long rebuttal to my Monday issue brief, which argued that the Quadrennial Defense Review can never be what conservatives want it to be -- a 20 year strategic plan insulated from political and budgetary pressures. I suppose I had this
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1/13/2010
It will take the Department of Defense about a year to deploy the additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan authorized by President Obama. Part of the reason for this seeming delay is the difficulty in moving anything in Afghanistan during the winter months and the scarcity of airfields and military
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1/12/2010
If the 2010 mid-term election were held today the Democrats would lose five Senate seats but pick up one, for a net loss of four seats, based on published polls.
Democrats would lose Senate seats in Arkansas, North Dakota, Nevada, Colorado and Delaware.
But they would capture the GOP seat
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1/12/2010
As the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review approaches its release date in early February, rumors have been flying about a possible cut in the number of aircraft carriers that the U.S. Navy operates. The Fleet currently contains eleven carriers, but according to the rumors that could be reduced by the
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1/12/2010
The U.S. Navy is not waiting for the Obama Administration or the international community to solve the problem of climate change. It is moving ahead to identify the potential impacts of climate change on its operations and to develop the means by which to monitor, assess and respond to those changes.
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1/11/2010
The federal government released December employment results for the economy last week. The manufacturing sector lost another 27,000 jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal. That may sound bad, but compared with the rest of the decade, it actually was pretty good: total employment in the domestic
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1/11/2010
Yesterday’s release by the White House of the unclassified portion of the review of security failures that led to the nearly successful Christmas Day airline bombing, show an Intelligence Community (IC) that is little better today than it was on 9/11 at understanding and dealing with the terrorist
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1/8/2010
Here's a paradox from the world of naval shipbuilding. The Navy's need to begin development of a new ballistic-missile submarine in 2012 virtually guarantees that the Virginia-class attack sub will stay in production through 2025 -- even though Virginia has been disqualified as a candidate for
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1/8/2010
Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Business News scooped the competition yesterday by revealing Pentagon plans to make major budget adjustments to its biggest weapons program, the F-35 fighter. Capaccio reported
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1/7/2010
During the presidential campaign, President Obama made much of the notion that he would pursue a dramatically different counterterrorism policy than his predecessor. This was one of the motivating factors behind the now nearly-forgotten Cairo speech. However, that speech and the President’s efforts
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1/7/2010
It is now clear that the U.S. Government, not just the Intelligence Community but other relevant agencies, had sufficient information about the Nigerian would-be aircraft bomber to take action. It was not just that his own father had “outed” him to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. There were communications
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1/6/2010
If the Intelligence Community (IC) and the Department of Homeland Security cannot adequately defend against a lone Nigerian college student with exploding underwear, what chance will they possibly have against the emerging nexus of South American drug cartels and Islamic extremists? According to
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1/5/2010
In his first day on the job Monday, incoming Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush announced the company would move its corporate headquarters to the Washington area. The move is long overdue, given how tight the competition has become among the look-alike companies that dominate the defense sector. When
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1/5/2010
A well-wired Democrat health care lobbyist says there is about a 25% chance Obamacare could collapse. There are razor thin margins in both Houses, so many moving parts, and more and more Democrats are getting dug into their positions as the election gets closer. There are several Democrats in
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1/4/2010
New Year’s Day has come and gone, and the government of Iran has failed to meet the Obama Administration’s deadline for entering into serious negotiations regarding its nuclear weapons program. In fact, the Iranian Foreign Minister escalated the confrontation, warning that if the West did not accept
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Date:
1/4/2010