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October 2012
The Navy plans to release a draft solicitation for a new kind of sea-based aircraft in December. Called the Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance & Strike (UCLASS) aircraft, it will be able to carry a suite of sensors and weapons 2,000 nautical miles or more from the carrier that hosts it without
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10/31/2012
The late year hurricane that assaulted the East Coast provided a reason to consider one of the most important roles of the U.S. military: support to civil authorities. In the United States, the first line of defense against natural disasters is provided by “first responders,” local fire, police
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10/30/2012
In some ways, the first four years of the Obama Administration were not that bad for U.S. national security. Defense budgets for the past three years have remained higher than anyone would have imagined. The President ended the U.S. involvement in Iraq, albeit without gaining an agreement with Baghdad
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10/29/2012
Defense executives in the nation's capital are less worried about Hurricane Sandy than they are about the budgetary storm that will befall federal spending at year's end, but if Mitt Romney is elected president their fears are likely to dissipate quickly. The Obama Administration has set defense
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Date:
10/29/2012
The hallmark of the Obama Administration’s new defense strategy is the so-called pivot to the Asia-Pacific region. The administration argued that such a move was necessitated by the growing importance of the Asia-Pacific region economically and politically, the presence in the region of the only
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10/26/2012
Even as the United States and Israel were engaged in their largest ever missile defense exercise, life stepped in to underscore the volatility of the region and the need for continuing close cooperation between these two democracies. 1,000 U.S. Army soldiers are on the ground in Israel operating
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10/25/2012
President Obama's reelection campaign has lost ground in every swing state over the last month as voters took a closer look at Republican challenger Mitt Romney. The most immediate cause for the shift was Romney's performance in the first debate, which made him look more presidential than the incumbent.
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10/25/2012
Unlike many of my colleagues, I found last Monday’s foreign policy debate informative. For example, I found out that the President’s views on weapons systems, force structure and sequestration are simplistic, at best and completely cockeyed, at worst. Responding to Governor Romney’s statement that
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Date:
10/24/2012
Properly handled, deterrence is a subtle instrument. On the one hand, prospective adversaries should not feel so threatened that they will reflexively act out. On the other hand, potential aggressors need to be convinced that they will lose any conflict they start. This is going to be a particularly
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Date:
10/23/2012
The results from last night's debate are in, so it's official: foreign policy is boring. So boring that the debate isn't going to have a discernible impact on the race for the White House. That means Mitt Romney's recent momentum in key battleground states such as Ohio and Florida will
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Date:
10/23/2012
The Army is finally making some progress in supplying its combat forces with the kind of software-defined radios that can support robust connectivity even in adverse circumstances. On the one hand, it is sticking with the part of the long-running Joint Tactical Radio System program that seems to
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Date:
10/22/2012
The U.S. Army has come a long way from the days in which Special Operations Forces (SOF) were tolerated, at best and ostracized, at worst. A decade of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed the historic arms-length relationship. Working day-to-day with SOF teams to hunt down insurgents, train
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10/22/2012
Bill Sweetman, one of the most respected aerospace journalists in the business, has written a biting
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Date:
10/19/2012
Over the past four years, the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) and the industrial base that exists to serve it has devolved into something akin to a Cold War. What began as an effort by the Obama Administration to rationalize DoD’s modernization program, rein in the costs of
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Date:
10/18/2012
On November 6, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama will carry almost all the states in New England, and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will carry almost all the states in the Deep South. A hundred years ago, that result was almost exactly reversed: Republicans dominated
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Date:
10/18/2012
On October 5, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and John McCain (R-AZ) sent a letter to defense CEOs letting them know how they plan to respond to the aftermath of sequestration. Despite recent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) against sending out Worker Adjustment and Retraining
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10/17/2012
If you happen to be traveling along U.S. Highway 70 through the town of Independence, Missouri, you will pass by the entrance to the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant (LCAAP). Built in 1941 as a part of the defense industrial mobilization that preceded U.S. entry into World War II, LCAAP is now the
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Date:
10/17/2012
America’s adversaries have learned a lot from watching how we have conducted military operations since the end of the Cold War. In particular, they have noted the ease with which our joint and coalition forces destroyed fixed targets and defeated all enemy conventional forces. One of the primary
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10/16/2012
Here's a quick quiz about U.S. air power. Question One: What do the Air Force's F-15, F-16, and F-22 fighters all have in common? Answer: They are all operated by pilots who learned to fly jets on the T-38 Talon trainer. Question Two: What else do they do they have in common? Answer: They
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Date:
10/16/2012
Politicians and policymakers seldom understand the technology used in cutting-edge weapons, but they usually think they know what the price-tag will be. On close inspection, though, it turns out they don't understand the price-tag either -- not just what a weapon will cost, but why. So it is with
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Date:
10/15/2012
In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin, already the Soviet Union's dictator, desperately needed funds to support his plan for rapid industrialization. He acquired the needed resources by confiscating the produce of Russia's farms and selling abroad. This amounted to "stealing low and selling high." The
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Date:
10/15/2012
On September 23, 1999, Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush gave the major defense and foreign policy address of his campaign for the White House. He chose a military academy in South Carolina called The Citadel as the setting for his remarks. U.S. embassies in Africa had recently
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Date:
10/12/2012
There has been much written about the lessons learned from recent conflicts regarding how U.S. forces need to be organized, trained and equipped. Much less has been written about the critical lessons learned regarding the needed reforms for the Pentagon’s acquisition and logistics systems. One
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Date:
10/11/2012
BAE Systems and EADS couldn't get the terms they needed from European governments to move ahead with their proposed merger, so the deal is now dead. BAE Chief Executive Ian King said throughout the process that it was an opportunity rather than a necessity, which certainly rings true: companies
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Date:
10/10/2012
In 2007, the United States Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the Implementing the Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act. One provision of the Act mandated 100 percent screening of all U.S. bound cargoes for both nuclear material and explosives by December 31, 2011.
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10/10/2012
For decades, the U.S. military has been the world’s leader in airborne electronic attack (AEA). A branch of electronic warfare, AEA involves the use of aircraft and airborne systems to neutralize, destroy, or suppress enemy air defenses, communications networks, command and control capabilities
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Date:
10/9/2012
Last week, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued memorandum M-12-19 regarding defense-contractor responsibilities under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. OMB has concluded WARN notices are unnecessary precautions against potential sequestration layoffs that
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Date:
10/9/2012
The Obama Administration has requested $156 billion in funding for the Navy in the fiscal year that began October 1. That's a $10 billion reduction from what the White House sought in the prior fiscal year, but still more than any other nation spends on its entire defense establishment (China's
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Date:
10/8/2012
Historically the focus of the defense acquisition and sustainment system has swung pendulum-like between two policy objectives. At one end of the arc, the goal is effectiveness: insuring that the military gets the best equipment and support available as rapidly as possible even if this means choosing
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10/5/2012
Merger discussions between BAE Systems and European aerospace giant EADS are rapidly approaching a climax. Despite weeks of intensive media coverage, though, one of the most important factors bearing upon the valuation of the two companies has barely been mentioned. That factor is commercial-transport
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Date:
10/5/2012
This week the Air Force held one of its periodic meetings of four-star officers to discuss high-priority challenges facing the service. One of the agenda items was figuring out how to integrate and exploit the diverse array of intelligence that its various sensor systems are collecting. In addition
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10/4/2012
Caught between the escalating price for its major acquisition programs and shrinking budgets, perhaps the Department of Defense (DoD) could be forgiven for going overboard in its efforts to control costs. Unfortunately, many of the Pentagon’s initiatives in this area are ill-considered and likely
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Date:
10/4/2012
The past ten years of war have seen a wide array of advances in critical military capabilities. Supported by a robust R&D establishment and a very capable industrial base, the U.S. military has deployed leap-ahead capabilities in such diverse areas as cold weather clothing, night vision equipment,
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Date:
10/2/2012
The Pentagon acquisition process seldom gets a fair shake from major media outlets, because editors aren't interested in stories unless something big and unexpected has happened. They know it takes a catastrophe (or a celebrity) to get their audience interested in most subjects, so the only time
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Date:
10/2/2012
In the months leading up to the attacks of September 11, the Department of Defense was working on a new defense strategy and associated force structure. Central to the new plan was a significant reduction in the size of the U.S. Army. The incoming Bush Administration had campaigned on a platform
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10/1/2012
Republican presidential candidates can't afford to ignore Ohio: no GOP candidate has ever won the White House without carrying the Buckeye State. Right now, Romney and Ryan are running behind in Ohio, but if they focused more on the military vote they might even up the race. "Military vote" in
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Date:
10/1/2012