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November 2009
The winning bidder in the Army's recent award of a contract for 23,000 trucks is providing fresh evidence that the service erred in assessing its qualifications to carry out the contract. Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Corporation is seeking $40 million in state and local tax breaks to assist in construction
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11/30/2009
With President Obama’s decision on a revised strategy for Afghanistan imminent, both sides in the debate have heated up their rhetorical warfare. On the one side, there are those who view Afghanistan as the central front in the war on violent Islamic extremism. They argue that there is a close linkage
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11/30/2009
President Barack Obama has just fallen below the 50% job approval rating mark for the first time in the RCP polling average (www.realclearpolitics.com).
The RCP average is useful because it averages many polls over a several week period,
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11/25/2009
The reputations of Jefferson, Hamilton and Adams tend to ebb and flow with cultural, economic and political trends, while George Washington is a massive glacier, grinding down the generations and leaving little in his path. Only Lincoln can compete with him, because Lincoln rescued Washington's life
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11/25/2009
The White House announced that the president will unveil his new strategy for Afghanistan next Tuesday night. When he goes before the Nation he will own the war in Afghanistan. By all accounts, the president will come close to providing our commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, with most of
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11/25/2009
This blog has raised some issues over the months about the actual as opposed to perceived strength of the Chinese economy, their published economic statistics, and underlying social and political pressures in that country. The Financial Times reminded us a few weeks ago that China is #104 in the world
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11/25/2009
President Barack Obama has put together a high-powered team of political, uniformed and civilian appointees at the Navy Department.
Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus is a politician's politician with strong Gulf Coast/shipyard connections. He was an active Obama supporter in the Deep South,
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11/24/2009
Defense budgets are going to decline, even as the United States continues to fight two wars. In addition, there are critical modernization programs such as the F-35 joint strike fighter, expanded Stryker deployments, additional Virginia-class attack submarines and new DDG-51 surface combatants that
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11/24/2009
Last week, the House Armed Services Committee held hearings on the implications of long-term U.S. defense budget trends. The common conclusion reached by four witnesses, including senior analysts from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Congressional Research Service (CRS), was
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11/23/2009
Global warming appears to have stalled, according to scientists interviewed in the November 19 issue of Spiegel Online. "Climatologists are baffled by Global Warming Time-out" is the headline.
Britain's
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11/23/2009
Oppenheimer & Co. financial analyst Myles Walton foresees a major contraction in U.S. defense demand over the next several years. In a November 5 note, Walton stated, "We still expect a typical multi-year downcycle in investment spending, which could amount to 40% declines in the annual addressable
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11/20/2009
Defense appropriations insiders say Representative Jack Murtha is resisting a major unit-cost increase for the C-17 cargo plane in ongoing negotiations over the fiscal 2010 budget. Although Murtha is frequently depicted in the media as being a bit too helpful to the defense industry -- as long
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11/19/2009
As a life-long believer in free-market capitalism and someone who opposed TARP, the stimulus package, the pay czar and cap-and-trade, it pains me to say that it is time for the government to take responsibility for one sector of the economy: defense. Up to this point, the Obama Administration has
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Date:
11/19/2009
Unity of command is one of the basic principles of war. It means that the forces employed for a given operation, regardless of its magnitude, complexity or duration, must be under a single command and be guided by one plan. All the subordinate commanders must share this ultimate vision of the operation.
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11/18/2009
Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Business News reported on Monday that China is "close to fielding the world's first anti-ship ballistic missile." Citing sources in U.S. naval intelligence, Capaccio stated
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11/18/2009
Last June, General Electric Chairman Jeffrey Immelt visited Detroit and issued a clarion call to America's leaders. He warned that America could not remain an economic superpower if it produced
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11/17/2009
Weapons systems cost too much, take too long to be designed and built, and then are often a nightmare to modernize and maintain. This is why the Obama Administration has made acquisition reform one of its top management priorities. However, the track record on such reform efforts is not good.
There
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Date:
11/17/2009
Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision Friday to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in U.S. federal court would seem to be yet another piece of evidence that the Obama Administration considers the war on terror to be over. Holder’s action was a natural consequence of the decision to close the Guantanamo
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11/16/2009
Last week, the Government Accountability Office dismissed my November 6 blog posting that raised the possibility it might have a conflict of interest in judging tanker protests. GAO is responsible for reviewing such protests, but as I pointed out in the blog posting, its workers were recently organized
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11/16/2009
The Missile Defense Agency faces some big challenges as it adjusts its investment agenda to the priorities of the Obama Administration. First, it has been directed to put more emphasis on interception of hostile missiles early in their trajectories, but funding has been cut for most of the defensive
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11/13/2009
Andrea Shalal-Esa of Reuters reported this week that deliveries of the alternate engine being developed by General Electric and Rolls Royce for the F-35 joint strike fighter will be delayed by a year. Repeated testing failures are forcing the engine team to redesign an important part, driving up
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11/12/2009
Since he was reappointed as Secretary of Defense by the Obama Administration, Robert Gates has been on a crusade to reshape the U.S. military. As he has said repeatedly, his dominant strategic concern is to be able to win the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. To that end he has fired senior
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11/12/2009
Northrop Grumman sent us the following rebuttal to my tanker brief of November 9, in which I explained why Boeing believes the recent World Trade Organization finding on commercial-transport subsidies is relevant to the Air Force's tanker competition. The rebuttal
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Date:
11/12/2009
On April 8, two days after defense secretary Robert Gates proposed huge cuts to military investment programs, the Pentagon's comptroller signaled where all the money saved will end up going. It will go to paying for more bureaucrats -- 33,000 to be exact, many of whom will paradoxically be added
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Date:
11/11/2009
With all the media’s attention being focused on health care legislation, strategies for Afghanistan and rampaging shooters in Texas, it is not surprising that virtually no one noticed the publication of yet another report by a government-sponsored commission. But this report by the Review of Human
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Date:
11/11/2009
The Army is getting ready to roll out its vision of the new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), the system intended to serve the role once planned for the manned ground vehicles of the defunct Future Combat System (FCS). The GCV will exploit the technologies developed for the FCS program in order to be
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11/10/2009
December 17 will mark the 40th anniversary of the day in 1969 when the first C-5 Galaxy cargo plane was delivered to the U.S. Air Force. In some quarters that milestone might be cause for celebration, but in the current congressional debate of airlift options, the longevity of the C-5 is being
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Date:
11/10/2009
Tragically for the people of Iran, the Obama Administration’s efforts to engage that country are likely to end in failure. In the aftermath of the June 12 popular uprising against the rigged presidential elections, the leadership in Teheran has purged itself of moderate elements. Washington is trying
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11/9/2009
It was twenty years ago today when the Berlin Wall came down and democracy began spreading fast into Eastern Europe. I made two predictions that day.
The first was since socialist economics had been discredited with the collapse of the old Soviet Union, the energies, money and power of the
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Date:
11/9/2009
It was distressing to open yesterday’s Washington Times, a newspaper that I believe provides some of the best coverage in the country of defense issues, and find an article on the Stryker wheeled combat vehicle full of inaccuracies, half truths and just plain silliness. It would not warrant
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11/6/2009
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11/6/2009
It is not a good sign when America’s allies have to make the argument for a sustained commitment to a conflict that this country began. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown today delivered what may be the best speech of his life, given in honor of his country’s soldiers who had sacrificed their lives
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Date:
11/6/2009
“It is disturbing that the future of the strategic Triad -- a deterrent force composed of manned bombers, land-based ICBMs, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles -- is in question just as a mutually reinforcing mix of forces has become more important than ever.”
That’s not me. That’s the
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Date:
11/6/2009
If you think an Aegis radar in a cornfield is odd (see Rebecca Grant's preceding post), how about a whole fleet with no ships? That's what the Navy's Tenth Fleet is -- a virtual warfighting formation being stood up as the naval component of the U.S. Cyber Command at Fort Meade, MD. Fort Meade
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Date:
11/5/2009
The Navy has done a real about-face on ballistic missile defense during this decade and that’s a good thing. “Aegis ashore” is the Navy’s new catch-phrase for moving the phenomenally successful anti-ballistic missile capability off ships and onto land sites in allied nations. “Aegis ashore” is
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Date:
11/5/2009
InsideDefense.com reported on November 2 that the program executive officer for the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) program had cast doubt on part of an issue brief I wrote concerning
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Date:
11/4/2009
Late last week the Air Force gave a tantalizing hint about its possible F-35 basing plans. Where to “bed down” the F-35 as the blue-suiters say is a huge decision. First, it’s the only major fighter program left, and second, nearly every Air Force base is home to some seriously geriatric aircraft.
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11/4/2009
Like the lyrics to the once popular song “Bali H’ai” from the musical South Pacific, the next U.S. intervention in a failed state to defeat Al Qaeda may be calling to advocates of counterinsurgency warfare. According to reports from the Associated Press (AP), the Al Qaeda-linked insurgent group
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Date:
11/4/2009
The Pentagon's revised strategy for selecting a next-generation tanker looks likely to become a price shootout. The performance features of the competing planes will be compared using a series of yes-no mandatory requirements in which thresholds are either met or not met, and there will be no evaluation
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11/3/2009
On April 6, the Obama Administration presented the country and the world with half a plan for ballistic missile defense. The Secretary of Defense announced that the so-called European third site consisting of ten ground-based interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic would be cancelled
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Date:
11/3/2009
General Electric responded to my November 2 posting concerning the alternate engine it is developing for the F-35 fighter. Here is the text of the message from media manager Rick Kennedy, offering a more positive assessment of where the program stands.
“In response to your Monday blog,
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Date:
11/3/2009
The decision by challenger Abdullah Abdullah to withdraw from the run off election for a new Afghan president appears to throw U.S. plans for a new strategy in that country into disarray. Without honest elections, there is no way to remove the stain on Hamid Karzai’s presidency created by the rampant
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Date:
11/2/2009
Election Day is scheduled in early November because in the Good Old Days when everyone was farming the onset of winter was the first time anyone actually had time to vote. It also comes right after Halloween, and I went trick-or-treating with my six year old Saturday night dressed as a Republican
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Date:
11/2/2009
The alternate engine that General Electric is developing for use on the F-35 joint strike fighter has run into problems. After nine months of "system development and demonstration" testing, it has only managed to run for 52 hours and had four failures. At the same stage in development, the competing
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Date:
11/2/2009