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January 2013
With a month to go it is looking increasingly likely that sequestration will happen. For the two or three of you who haven’t been paying attention, sequestration is the second part of the 2011 Budget Control Act passed by Congress and signed by President Obama. It requires cuts in discretionary
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Date:
1/31/2013
Syria’s civil war has dragged on for almost two years and has resulted in over 60,000 casualties. The uprising has spilled into Turkey since it shares a 600-mile border with Syria. Syria shot down a Turkish warplane in the Mediterranean Sea and killed two crew members last June; five Turkish civilians
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Date:
1/31/2013
U.N. Investigation Of Drone Strikes Could Be The First Step In Halting The White House’s Private War
The U.N.’s special rapporteur for human rights and counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, has announced that he is initiating an investigation of the use of drones by the United States, Great Britain and Israel to conduct deadly strikes that have reportedly caused significant collateral casualties. Emmerson
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Date:
1/30/2013
Defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corporation today reported increased earnings per share in the fourth quarter of 2012 despite softening demand for military goods and services, reflecting the benefits of Chairman Wes Bush's investor-friendly financial strategy. In the three years since Bush
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Date:
1/30/2013
Anyone in the Department of Defense in a position of responsibility for maintenance activities will tell you that rising costs have been “eating their lunch.” One reason for this is that we have a force structure half the size that it was at the end of the Cold War that is five times more active
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1/29/2013
Pentagon leaders have been warning for years that formulaic cuts to the defense budget would damage America's military, and now it's about to happen. The first blow will come not from sequestration as everybody expected, but from a continuing resolution that limits fiscal 2013 spending to prior-year
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Date:
1/29/2013
As the international coalition prepares to exit Afghanistan it is critical that it leaves behind indigenous security forces capable of preventing a Taliban “Reconquesta.” A great deal of attention, training equipment and money has gone into creating an Afghan military, police, and local security
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1/28/2013
If you ever make it down to St. Augustine, Florida, be sure to visit the Alligator Farm. It not only has every single species of alligator and crocodile on site for your viewing pleasure, it also features an obstacle course and zipline
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Date:
1/28/2013
Last Thursday, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal -- a rising star in the Republican Party -- told a national meeting of the G.O.P. faithful, "We've got to stop being the stupid party." He didn't mean Republicans are stupid, but that they manage to look stupid too often for comfort.
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Date:
1/28/2013
How would you absorb a ten percent cut in your annual take home pay -- that is the money you have after paying withholding and taxes? There are two common ways of dealing with this situation. The first is to trim your expenses where you can, cutting back on eating out, going to movies, delaying
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Date:
1/25/2013
There is no question that the United States has the best military in the world. The United States is unique in its ability to project military power to multiple regions of the world simultaneously, conduct multiple major combined and joint operations at a time and both defend the homeland and provide
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Date:
1/24/2013
The nation's biggest military contractor today reported fourth-quarter and full-year results for 2012 indicating that Pentagon budget cuts have not yet begun to have a major impact on revenues and returns. Maryland-based Lockheed Martin said 2012 sales grew to $47.2 billion from $46.5 billion the
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1/24/2013
Every four years the Department of Defense is forced to undergo a painful exercise in self-flagellation and self-deception known as the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). Mandated by Congress in 1997, the QDR is a study by the Department of Defense that purports to define U.S. strategic objectives
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1/23/2013
Incoming General Dynamics Chairman & CEO Phebe N. Novakovic today used her first earnings call to promise investors greater discipline and realism. Although the company's finances are strong -- cash on hand is five times greater than debt -- it has repeatedly disappointed investors in recent years
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Date:
1/23/2013
BAE Systems, Inc. President & CEO Linda Hudson is a true pioneer -- not just the first woman to head a major military contractor, but the first female to do a dozen other things that collectively mirror the progress women have made in America over the past half century. On Inauguration Day, I interviewed
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Date:
1/22/2013
The recent upsurge of Islamist violence in Libya, Mali and Algeria should put to rest any assertion that Al Qaeda is a spent force. Equally important, it underscores the value of agile, mobile and integrated response forces to deal with an unpredictable security environment. As France is learning
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Date:
1/22/2013
Last year my daughter was applying to colleges and received, unsolicited, several scholarship offers based on her high school record. I was happy to discover that these offers included no questions or criteria concerning her skin color, sex or family income.
As we celebrate Martin Luther King's
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Date:
1/21/2013
There have been many questions in the media this week about what recent problems on Boeing's 787 Dreamliner mean for the company's business outlook. The answer is that they basically mean nothing. America's biggest exporter is headed for $100 billion in annual revenues circa 2015, and a lot of
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1/18/2013
The defense sector does not operate like a classic free market. There is a single monopsony buyer -- the government, a relatively small cadre of companies, many barriers to entry, controls over information, limits on profits and unconscionably long product cycle times. If anything, the top down,
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Date:
1/18/2013
Yesterday was the anniversary of the day in 1919 when the 18th Amendment was ratified banning the manufacture, sale or transport of "intoxicating liquors" in the United States. Once the Volstead Act was passed several months later to provide funding for enforcement, it became the official policy
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1/17/2013
Biologists, psychologists and risk analysts tell us that human beings are hard wired to make decisions based on inadequate information and even subjective opinions. At one time this characteristic was a survival trait; it did our ancestors no good to wait until they had incontrovertible evidence
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1/16/2013
The Budget Control Act of 2011 requires cuts to the federal budget that cumulatively would save $2.1 trillion during the period 2012-2021. One facet of those cuts, commencing in the current fiscal year, would be across-the-board reductions known as sequestration. Under sequestration, all non-exempt
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Date:
1/16/2013
Considering how old it is, the Air Force's dwindling fleet of long-range bombers is performing remarkably well. All of the bombers including the venerable B-52 now carry precision weapons that enable them to destroy multiple targets in a single flight. Airframe structures are being reinforced,
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Date:
1/15/2013
An essential part of the U.S. plan to deal with the threat of global terrorism while simultaneously reducing direct U.S. involvement is a buildup of the capacity of partner nations to do more for themselves. The U.S. has spent many tens of billions of dollars training and equipping Iraqi and Afghan
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Date:
1/15/2013
One-hundred and fifty years after America's first Republican president freed the slaves, the party he helped found is faltering. Its ideology of tax cuts, free trade and deregulation seemingly failed to deliver results when Republicans controlled the government during the first eight years of the
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Date:
1/14/2013
For most of the past year, the Department of Defense (DoD) refused to plan for the possibility of sequestration, the processes enshrined in the 2011 Budget Control Act (BCA) that mandated $500 billion in cuts to future defense budgets if a Congressional super commission was unable to find the equivalent
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Date:
1/14/2013
On May 26, 1972 the United States and Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to bar either country from building nationwide ballistic missile defenses. President George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty on June 13, 2002 to counter a feared long-range ballistic missile threat
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Date:
1/11/2013
The 21st Century security environment is marked by an explosion in challenges to nations’ abilities to control their borders. Whether it is drug cartels operating submersibles loaded with tons of cocaine, terrorist groups seeking to employ advanced weapons against civilian targets, smugglers employing
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Date:
1/10/2013
Tomorrow I will join with family members in Plymouth, Massachusetts to bury my mother, 94 years after she was born in the same town during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. People usually prefer to keep such personal moments private, but there is a lesson from my mother's life that I would like
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Date:
1/10/2013
Over the past couple of decades, the U.S. Army has spent tens of billions of dollars in R&D on programs that never made it through development. Two examples of these are the Future Combat System and the Comanche armed scout helicopter. The Army struggled to harvest the advanced technologies begun
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Date:
1/9/2013
With overseas wars winding down and the government increasingly focused on deficit reduction, it is inevitable that many military sites in the U.S. will see their workforces shrink. That's especially true of the public-sector depots and shipyards that provide repair services for weapon systems,
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Date:
1/9/2013
What is the greatest threat to U.S. national security? Some say it is our national debt and a weak economic recovery. Others assert that it is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and long-range delivery means. There are those, including high-level defense officials, who believe it is
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Date:
1/8/2013
Although the budget walls seem to be closing in on some of its competitors, General Dynamics is enjoying robust demand for its submarine development and production work. Shortly before Christmas, the company's shipbuilding unit received three sizable contracts to perform development work on a replacement
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Date:
1/8/2013
Let me review the bidding. So far, the President got $600 billion in new taxes (plus the return to normal payroll tax levels and the new taxes to support ObamaCare). The Budget Control Act (BCA) already imposed $1 trillion in spending cuts. The next fight will be over more spending cuts in the context
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Date:
1/7/2013
President Obama's nominee to succeed Leon Panetta in the Pentagon's top job, former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, should be a shoo-in for confirmation. Hagel volunteered for combat in Vietnam, served as deputy in the Reagan Veterans Administration, started the nation's second-biggest independent
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Date:
1/7/2013
A few years back when counterinsurgency was all the rage and building the security capacity of partner countries was considered an important U.S. strategic goal, the Air Force came up with a plan to acquire a fleet of light attack and transport aircraft. This notional force would consist of low
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Date:
1/4/2013
The Budget Control Act of 2011 mandates $600 billion in spending cuts at the Pentagon over the next nine years, which minus an assumed 18% savings in interest payments from a smaller federal budget means an actual reduction of $492 billion -- $55 billion per year. That's on top of similarly-sized
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Date:
1/4/2013
In a farsighted strategic move, the Obama Administration has proposed the sale of four RQ-4 Global Hawk high-altitude, long endurance unmanned aerial systems (UAS) to South Korea. The Global Hawk is the premier U.S. high-end UAS, in operation with the U.S. Air Force and soon, as the Broad Area Maritime
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Date:
1/3/2013
Over the last two weeks, several reporters have asked me why I thought the defense industry's efforts to head off sequestration had not succeeded. In light of the last-minute decision to delay implementation by two months, it seems that the premise behind the queries may have been wrong. Congress
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Date:
1/3/2013
In every past defense drawdown since the end of World War Two, the focus has always been on not “breaking the force” and on preserving critical military capabilities. Relatively little attention was devoted to managing the health and capabilities of the defense industrial base. In fact, one former
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Date:
1/2/2013
This week's fiscal compromise in Washington includes a two-month delay in implementing the sequestration provisions of the Budget Control Act. That's even better news for the defense sector than it sounds, because the outcome of negotiations this week strongly suggests that sequestration as currently
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Date:
1/2/2013