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October 2011
The shift in U.S. national security policy and defense strategy to the Asia-Pacific region is going to put additional pressure on the Navy. Over the past decade there has been a global proliferation of threats to U.S. air and naval forces led by China. The various arms of the People’s Liberation Army
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Date:
10/31/2011
Barack Obama may be the luckiest politician in modern American history. Repeatedly throughout his meteoric rise from obscurity to the presidency, the way forward has been opened by the errors and misconceptions of his opponents. Now it is happening again. The free-market economic ideology of the
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Date:
10/31/2011
Being a thirty year veteran of the Washington policy scene, some of my “light” reading consists of reports and analyses published by this town’s numerous government departments, federally-funded research organizations, independent think tanks and policy centers. Whatever the topic, somebody in Washington
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10/28/2011
Army Lt. Gen. Robert Lennox yesterday provided the House Armed Services Committee with a welcome clarification as to where the service stands on plans for a much-needed electronic reconnaissance aircraft. The Army finds itself confronted with a rapidly expanding array of hostile emitters in war zones
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10/27/2011
With all eyes on the Congressional Super Committee and potential sequestration of defense department funding, many observers are wondering what Washington's budget wars may mean for the $100 billion military logistics and sustainment business. Over the last ten years years this sprawling enterprise
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Date:
10/27/2011
The leadership in the Department of Defense (DoD) has succumbed to a new religion. This one is called affordability. The high priests of this new religion in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and particularly in Acquisition, Technology and Logistics have been writing a new catechism that directs
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10/26/2011
Despite softening military demand and politically-driven delays in contract awards, defense-industry bellweather General Dynamics outperformed its peers and market expectations in the third quarter. The company's earnings results released this morning indicate that Chairman Jay Johnson managed
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10/26/2011
The U.S. Navy is developing a much-needed airborne jamming system to replace its Vietnam-era jammers. It's called the Next Generation Jammer, and if all goes as planned then U.S. aviators will soon have an electronic warfare tool with greater power, precision and agility than any previous jammer.
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10/25/2011
Until recently, the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) has struggled to overcome the impression that it was the U.S. Navy's "ugly duckling." There were questions regarding the mission for the LCS -- operations in littoral waters, the possibility of building warships in commercial shipyards according to
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10/25/2011
October is turning out to be a real bad month for troubled technical services provider Science Applications International Corporation, known throughout the federal contracting community as SAIC. First CEO Walt Havenstein announced that he would depart the company next June, having spent barely
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Date:
10/25/2011
Army leaders suddenly realized last summer that their planned replacement for the Humvee was in danger of being killed by Congress. The Government Accountability Office was estimating each of the so-called Joint Light Tactical Vehicles might cost $350,000, and that's not even counting on-board
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10/24/2011
When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002, it brought together 22 separate government organizations ranging from the Secret Service to the Border Patrol. A number of these had been operating fleets of maritime and aerial patrol platforms. The leadership of the new department
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Date:
10/24/2011
The Department of Defense in conducting a strategic review in order to determine where funding can be cut without impairing the nation's global military posture. The review could result in reducing the number of Navy aircraft carriers, terminating several Army vehicle programs, and trimming the
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10/21/2011
Two unassailable realities are aligning to drive the reshaping of the U.S. military. The first is a shift in the focus of U.S. strategic interests and planning to the Asia-Pacific region. The reasons for this are obvious. The region from India eastward around to East and Southeast Asia and then
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Date:
10/20/2011
In a recent story for Bloomberg Businessweek, Tony Capaccio, one of the best defense reporters in Washington, broke the story about the use by Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan of a Switchblade. As the capitalization of the word might indicate, the Switchblade to which I am referring
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Date:
10/19/2011
Yesterday, Israel and the Palestinians began the process of exchanging prisoners. One Israeli soldier captured five years ago in Gaza by Hamas is being returned while about a thousand Palestinian prisoners are being freed. This is not the first of such lopsided swaps. In 1985, the Israelis got a
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10/18/2011
The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal both ran stories yesterday about the controversy surrounding how the government goes about procuring space launch services. The stories were balanced and informative, but as usual they depicted the controversy as a David-versus-Goliath struggle
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10/18/2011
The Global Works Foundation reported a startling statistic last week. Between 2007 and 2011, the equity that U.S. families had in their homes declined from $12.9 trillion to $6.2 trillion. In other words, 52 percent of all home equity in the U.S. disappeared over the last four years.
What
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Date:
10/17/2011
Discussion of President Obama’s decision to send 100 U.S. Special Forces to Central Africa has focused largely on the political nature of the decision. Much less attention has been given to the fact that the United States is one of the few nations that is capable of rapidly deploying military power
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Date:
10/17/2011
Everybody in the defense business seems to be focused on the deliberations of the congressional "super committee" set up by the Budget Control Act. If the panel fails to recommend $1.2 trillion in deficit reductions over ten years -- or Congress fails to enact the recommendations -- automatic cuts
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Date:
10/17/2011
Anyone who has ever taken a class on economics knows about the law of supply and demand. Supply and demand functions are usually expressed in terms of prices and quantities. The supply of things rises as the price increases and falls as the price declines. The demand for things will do the opposite;
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10/14/2011
Former Congressman and Base Closing Chairman Jim Courter turns 70 today. Courter is also Chairman of the Lexington Institute, where he has been a key organizer, policy advisor and fundraiser since we opened our doors in 1998.
I met Jim Courter in 1984 when he was a member of the House of Representatives,
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Date:
10/14/2011
The latest Army-Marine Corps solicitation for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) replacement of the Humvee isn't a refinement of the previous approach, it's a whole new competition. The terms contained in the solicitation rearrange contractor incentives in a way that is likely to lead to the
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10/13/2011
Although you would not know it from the current political debate in Washington on federal spending, the government does try to save money. One way of reducing costs is by adopting commercial practices and standards. Another way is by buying commercial products and systems.
The Department of
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Date:
10/13/2011
I discovered after writing my previous posting today that the Army didn't announce termination of the Joint Air-to-Ground Missile on Tuesday. The news was broken by Inside Washington Publishers, also known as insidedefense.com, which reported that the Army and Navy are recommending termination
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10/12/2011
In his first major policy address, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta presented his vision of the military of the future. There are reports that Panetta has already signed off on a new Defense Planning Guidance, the key document that lays out a U.S. defense strategy and defines the key planning and
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Date:
10/12/2011
The tragic paradox of America's Army is that the only time it truly thrives is when it is dying. When soldiers are under fire in Korea or Indochina or Iraq, political leaders shovel huge amounts of money to the service because the consequences of under-funding warfighters are all too obvious.
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Date:
10/12/2011
So far, the U.S. military has pretty much enjoyed a free ride when it comes to the employment of remotely-piloted vehicles (RPVs) or drones. Under the direction of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the Air Force invested in enough Predator RPVs to conduct around sixty continuous orbits.
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Date:
10/11/2011
When Northrop Grumman Chairman Wes Bush addressed a meeting of government officials and contractors at the company's new headquarters in Virginia last week, he began by thanking local officials for their help in moving to the location. Bush disclosed the decision to move the headquarters from Los
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Date:
10/11/2011
Because the focus of my research and analysis is U.S. national security, in general, and force structure and programmatic issues, in particular, I have plenty of opportunities to learn about new, innovative and even radical ideas for military capabilities. Over time it is easy to become jaundiced
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Date:
10/10/2011
For the past three years I have been arguing on this site and elsewhere that the Obama Administration’s campaign of insourcing, which is taking work done for the government by the private sector and turning it over to government employees and facilities, was misguided. I believe that insourcing
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10/7/2011
There's a long-running debate among deterrence theorists about what influences the behavior of enemies more -- certainty or uncertainty. Are aggressors more deterred when they know precisely what response their actions will provoke, or when the response is left to their imagination?
I am reminded
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Date:
10/7/2011
Like most educated people above the age of 40 in the Washington metropolitan area, I have the Washington Post delivered to my home each day. But I don't read it carefully the way I once did, and I can't remember the last time a colleague mentioned to me a piece he or she saw in the paper.
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Date:
10/6/2011
In many ways, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is the antithesis of his predecessor, Robert Gates. He is a consensus-builder who tries to work with the military services rather than dictating to them. But when it comes to concerns for the future of the NATO alliance Panetta appears to be channeling
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Date:
10/5/2011
Pentagon policymakers keep saying they want contractors to be healthy and profitable, but their actions indicate otherwise. The latest installment in a litany of destructive measures is to threaten subpoenas if companies selling commercial items refuse to turn over competition-sensitive information
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10/5/2011
The Army has just published its long-anticipated Request for Proposal (RFP) for the next phase of its Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program. The JLTV was intended initially to replace the venerable Humvee while improving on that system’s survivability and performance. At the same time, the
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Date:
10/4/2011
When the White House went looking for a credible figure to replace retiring defense secretary Robert Gates, Leon Panetta looked like the perfect candidate. His two-year tenure at the CIA had been a smashing success, and Panetta knew President Obama well from attending his daily intelligence briefings.
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Date:
10/3/2011
After a decade of trying, the United States appears to have worked out a viable counterterrorism strategy. Using a combination of on-the-ground intelligence from friendly sources, remote sensing and armed Predator drones, the U.S. was able to locate, track and take out Anwar al-Awlaki and Al Qaeda
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Date:
10/3/2011