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January 2011
The World Trade Organization today released a final ruling on commercial transport subsidies received by Boeing. The ruling will remain confidential until translated into variety of languages, so only the parties to the case brought by European governments have seen it. However, the ruling probably
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Date:
1/31/2011
I was flattered to see myself quoted by Nathan Hodge today in a Wall Street Journal survey of defense industry financial results. One of my comments in particular may have reminded some readers of an old debate about the nexus between geography and national strategy. I said, "If China comes
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Date:
1/28/2011
The United States has finally decided to treat India, the world’s largest democracy, as an equal when it comes to defense trade. In a continuation of its efforts to forge closer ties with the subcontinent, the Obama Administration has ended the misguided efforts of both Democratic and Republican
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Date:
1/28/2011
A recent report by the prestigious RAND Corporation appears to put a spike through the Obama Administration’s plans for biofuels. The report focuses specifically on U.S. Navy programs to develop a range of biofuels but has clear implications for the overall policy. A secondary issue raised by the
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1/26/2011
On the day that President Barack Obama made U.S. economic competitiveness the lead theme in his State of the Union speech, European aircraft maker Airbus issued a series of misleading assertions about top U.S. exporter Boeing that illustrated a key reason why it is so hard for America to compete.
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1/26/2011
Pretty soon the Army’s only hope of salvaging anything from its ill-fated Future Combat System (FCS) program will rest with the new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). Just last week the Army announced its decision not to equip its combat brigades with the Network Integration Kits which had been intended
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1/25/2011
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has proposed canceling production of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, an amphibious system the Marine Corps has been developing to move troops from ship to shore in forcible entry operations. The main complaint Gates has with the program is that it costs too
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Date:
1/25/2011
The Department of Defense is on a crusade to reduce its costs and shift resources from overhead to procurement. Two weeks ago, Secretary of Defense Gates announced some $158 billion in savings of which some $78 billion was being reinvested. Much of this savings came from closing unnecessary, duplicative
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Date:
1/24/2011
If you're wondering why the Air Force was a big winner in recent budget shifts proposed by defense secretary Robert Gates, it might have something to do with the Pentagon's growing concern about Chinese military breakthroughs. Over the last few years, Beijing has tested its first anti-satellite
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Date:
1/24/2011
President Obama's decision to appoint General Electric chairman Jeffrey Immelt as head of a revitalized Council on Jobs and Competitiveness is the latest installment in an encouraging pattern of moves likely to benefit America's beleaguered manufacturers. Some right-wing critics will undoubtedly see
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Date:
1/21/2011
The Army’s acquisition system has been captivated of late by the ongoing effort to procure a new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). In some sense the GCV along with its linear antecedent the Future Combat System has preoccupied the Army for more than a decade. The Army now wants to make the GCV contracting
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Date:
1/21/2011
The advent of heavier-than-air flight has been one of the great technological revolutions of all times. It changed many aspects of modern life, most notably transportation, surveillance and warfare. The numbers alone make it clear how much flying has become an integral part of our commercial, military
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Date:
1/20/2011
The Air Force is likely to announce the winner of its tanker competition in March -- the same timeframe in which the World Trade Organization (WTO) will release two different reports casting Airbus business practices in a negative light. The first WTO report, which has already been completed, will
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Date:
1/20/2011
The history of status quo powers managing the rise of new competitors is not one marked by lots of success. Whether it was Byzantium with the Ottoman Turks, Austria and Prussia with revolutionary France, France with Prussia or Great Britain and Wilhelmine Germany/post-Meiji Japan, the effort of
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Date:
1/19/2011
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently recommended cancellation of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), a program the Marine Corps was funding to replace its decrepit fleet of Cold War amphibious vehicles. Gates cited the high cost of EFV as the main motivation for his decision, but EFV
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Date:
1/18/2011
Only two years after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decision to end production of the F-22 Raptor at 187 aircraft, the program may be poised to rise like a phoenix from the ashes. When Gates made his decision, it was on the assumption that other countries -- notably Russia and China -- would
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Date:
1/18/2011
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ recent trip to Asia was intended to restart military-to-military relations between our two countries, reaffirm the U.S.-Japan relationship and send a message to the regime in Pyongyang regarding conditions for resumption of six-party talks. The most important objective
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Date:
1/17/2011
This just in: Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright is making his move to succeed Adm. Mike Mullen as Chairman. Or he's already decided to retire, and the competition to become the nation's next top military officer is wide open. Take your pick -- reporter John T. Bennett
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Date:
1/17/2011
When New York-based ITT announced on January 12 that it would split into three publicly traded companies, reporters rushed to hail the trend toward "de-conglomeration." Despite the impressive success of multi-industry behemoths like General Electric and United Technologies, the prevailing view
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Date:
1/14/2011
Last week, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, announced that he had placed the short take-off/vertical landing (STOVL) version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter on “double secret probation.” The prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, has two years to fix problems with the air frame and engine. It
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1/13/2011
Much has been written over the past few days about how the Chinese military's decision to flight-test its new J-20 fighter during a visit by U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates was an embarrassment for China's civilian leaders. Apparently, nobody in the Peoples Liberation Army had bothered to mention
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Date:
1/13/2011
One of the defining features of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ tenure has been the focus he placed on fighting and winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Almost single-handedly he dragged the military away from its traditional focus on high-end conventional conflict and towards counterinsurgency
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1/12/2011
BAE Systems began the year by making a smart move: it took its U.S. commercial avionics unit off the auction block. That decision undoubtedly came as a big surprise to the three bidders who submitted final offers last week, and many observers concluded that the offers must have been lower than
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Date:
1/12/2011
With all the attention being given to reducing the cost of national defense, it is important to acknowledge the value of upgrading current platforms to provide them with additional capability and, hopefully, longer service lives. The Army has a program to upgrade its fleets of Abrams tanks, Bradley
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Date:
1/11/2011
Last Autumn, General Electric was widely praised by New York politicians for deciding to create 500 new jobs at its power-generation unit in Schenectady. The mayor said it was a great day for his city. What the mayor didn't mention was that even with the new jobs, GE will be employing less than
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Date:
1/11/2011
Initial impressions of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ defense budget were that the Marine Corps was particularly hard hit. Not only did the Secretary cancel the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) but he also put the Marine Corps’ variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter on two-year probation.
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Date:
1/10/2011
The big story for the defense industry in the January 6 budget cuts proposed by defense secretary Robert Gates was what didn't happen: after reducing future weapons outlays by $330 billion in previous rounds of budget cutting, this time Gates cut almost nothing. The headline story was termination
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Date:
1/7/2011
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced his long-awaited defense budgets yesterday. Despite the efforts of the media to turn his decisions into a major news story there was not much noteworthy in his announcement. The actual reductions in defense spending were $78 billion over five years or
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Date:
1/7/2011
Defense secretary Robert Gates apparently has decided to kill the Marine Corps Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) in the 2012 budget. As chance would have it, 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the date when the current amphibious assault vehicle joined the force. Think about how much technology
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Date:
1/5/2011
Amidst the welter of calls for reducing defense spending, cancelling weapons programs and bringing the troops home, it is useful to consider the role that American global power has served over the past decades. U.S. military power provides a degree of global stability unparalleled since the heyday
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Date:
1/5/2011
Two months ago the co-chairmen of the president's bipartisan deficit commission issued a series of proposals for narrowing the gap between federal income and expenses. One section of their proposals concerned how annual defense spending could be trimmed $100 billion by fiscal year 2015. That was
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Date:
1/4/2011
The conventional wisdom in the national security community is that the United States must and will reduce its expenditure on defense and hence the size and capability of its military forces. Defense analysts are trying to put a good face on this situation in speaking of frugal superpowers and leaner
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Date:
1/4/2011
The way the Pentagon buys weapons isn't just broke, it's baroque -- way too complicated to function efficiently. If you doubt that, check out this chart used by the Defense
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Date:
1/4/2011
Lt. Col. Mark B. Elfendahl, Chief of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command's Joint and Army Concepts Division, sent us the following response to Dan Goure's December 8 critique of the Ground Combat Vehicle program. We thought our readers would benefit from hearing how the Army views future
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Date:
1/4/2011
In the general rush to cut the budget deficit, much ink has been spilled over various schemes to reduce the size and sophistication of the U.S. military. The most well-publicized of these proposals, that of the deficit commission, called for cutting a trillion dollars from defense over the next
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Date:
1/3/2011
The decade just ended was a disaster for defense procurement. Most of the Army's major development programs were canceled. The Air Force saw its top-of-the-line fighter and future bomber killed while failing to get a new tanker into production for ten straight years. The Navy walked away from
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Date:
1/3/2011
The impulse to political extremism is not new, even if the tools available to today's terrorists often are. Barbara Tuchman devoted the second chapter in her history of the fin-de-siecle West, The Proud Tower, to the havoc wrought by anarchists on both sides of the Atlantic between 1890 and
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Date:
1/3/2011