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February 2010
After four years and $200 million in expenses, Northrop Grumman may have reached a dead end in its bid to build the Air Force's future aerial-refueling tanker. That can't come as a total surprise to newly-minted CEO Wes Bush, who doubted the wisdom of pursuing the tanker contract from day one.
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2/26/2010
While everyone was focused on the health care tsunami working its way through Congress last year, President Obama started a small ripple in the waters of government that could soon grow to a mighty torrent. In October, 2009 the President signed Executive Order 135114, Federal Leadership in Environmental
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2/26/2010
Even before the defense department unveiled its final strategy for acquiring a new aerial-refueling tanker yesterday, Northrop Grumman was deep into preparations for announcing that it would not bid. Pentagon officials had sent Northrop and its rival, Boeing, clear signals that the final acquisition
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2/25/2010
Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. leaders have recognized the need to establish a more balanced relationship with friends and allies. Under the Bush Administration there was a policy of coalitions of the willing, a recognition that in the absence of an existential threat to the survival of all,
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2/24/2010
If you want to understand why President Obama's job-approval level has fallen to 38% among independents in Ohio -- the most important "swing state" in the electoral system -- then take a look at what our Republican-holdover defense secretary is saying about weapons systems. Having already wiped
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2/24/2010
A story by Sean Naylor in Defense News this week about the success of the Army's sole Stryker brigade in Afghanistan contains important lessons about how future armored vehicles should be designed. Naylor reports that eight-wheel Stryker armored vehicles are faring better than heavily armored
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2/23/2010
According to the U.S. military, the current battle for the town of Marjah is intended to showcase the new Western way of counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than focusing on destroying the enemy, this operation is intended to separate the civilian population from the Taliban and do so in ways that encourages
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2/23/2010
For more than a decade, the Department of Defense (DoD) has pursued a deliberate strategy of trying to better integrate the public and private industrial bases supporting military needs. The centerpiece of this strategy is the creation of public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the implementation
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2/22/2010
There has been too much attention focused on President Obama’s refusal to do the “pivot” with respect to domestic policy. A pivot is moving from one position on the political spectrum to another. The notion was that in the aftermath of the Massachusetts senatorial election with the loss of the Kennedy
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2/19/2010
When defense secretary Robert Gates recommended cancellation of the Army's planned family of future combat vehicles last April, he emphasized the need to develop vehicles that incorporated the operational lessons of recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those lessons, which center on the threat
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2/19/2010
President Obama has a problem. Well, he has many but this one is his arms sales strategy, particularly in East Asia. On the one hand, the United States has major security interests in the region as well as very clear commitments to friends and allies. In addition, the Obama Administration has made
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2/18/2010
In the years after the Vietnam War, the nation's increasingly polarized political parties became binary opposites of each other on virtually every policy issue. In general, Democrats wanted to throw money at domestic programs while slashing defense outlays, while Republicans wanted to throw money at
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2/17/2010
The transformation of the U.S. military is all but completed. Nothing marks the change more than a comparison of the 2004 battles for Fallujah in central Iraq and the 2010 campaign for Marja in the Helmand Valley of southern Afghanistan. In both cases, insurgents initially had total control over these
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2/17/2010
The defense strategy articulated in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) places a great deal of emphasis on enhancing the relationships between the United States and its friends and allies. Building the security capacity of partner states is identified as a key U.S. defense objective. This objective
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2/16/2010
The Democratic Leadership Council put out an interesting trade brief last week about President Obama's pledge to double U.S. exports in five years. That pledge, contained in the president's State of the Union speech, would require lifting total exports from $1.5 trillion last year to $3 trillion in
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2/16/2010
Over the past year, the Obama Administration has decimated Al Qaeda, killing twelve of the terror group’s top twenty leaders as well has hundreds of rank and file. The very week that the Christmas Day bomber conducted his abortive attack, U.S. drones conducted multiple attacks against Al Qaeda on the
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2/15/2010
The Department of Defense has embarked on another crusade to reform the weapons acquisition process. It's a worthwhile effort, because the department wastes billions of dollars every year on poorly managed programs and processes. But the ranks of military reformers seem to be populated with people
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2/14/2010
A few days ago the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published the first Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR). Like its older cousin, the Department of Defense’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the QHSR
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2/12/2010
You don't have to be a political scientist or an engineer to see what the Obama Administration plan for NASA's manned space flight program means. It is the end of the road. The brave vision of human beings walking on the Moon and Mars that was born in the Kennedy years is dying, overwhelmed by
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2/12/2010
One set of program details conspicuously absent from the Obama Administration’s proposed 2011 budget is for Impact Aid, the federal Department of Education’s funding mechanism to public schools serving children from military families. The budget request sent to Congress earlier this month contained
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2/11/2010
Conservatives are wrong when they accuse our President of being against private business and the free enterprise system. In the administration’s proposed 2011 budget, America’s manned space flight program is turned over to the private sector. So, on the one side of the ledger we have government
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2/11/2010
On Monday I wrote an issue brief arguing that the defense department can no longer afford to sustain second sources for military systems. I used General Electric's alternate engine for the F-35 joint strike fighter as an example, and warned that rather than
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2/11/2010
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. He came to power following years of ineffective leadership, economic decline and growing restiveness within the so-called Communist bloc. Although not initially a self-avowed
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2/10/2010
There isn't much mystery about who will be the next chairman of the House appropriations defense subcommittee. The new chairman will be Congressman Norm Dicks, who has earned the job by virtue of his seniority, expertise and tireless support of the Democratic Party. Dicks was elected to Congress
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2/10/2010
The key assumption behind the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is that the United States will have sufficient time and warning with which to win the wars it is in now and then “pivot” to address future high-end or more complex threats. In the meantime, the military will also be participating in
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2/9/2010
Friday's announcement that BAE Systems has settled long-running corruption cases with the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.K. Serious Fraud Office is very big and very good news for the world's number-two military contractor. Press releases from both governments and the company obscured the
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2/5/2010
On February 2, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Admiral Dennis Blair, USN (Ret.) and his main subordinates from the CIA, DIA and FBI, appeared before Congress to deliver their annual threat assessment. According to Admiral Blair, the nation’s cyber infrastructure is “severely threatened.”
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2/5/2010
Sixteen months ago, in October of 2008, I wrote an improbable issue brief titled, "Five Reasons Weapons Spending Won't Fall." It argued that if Barack Obama won the White House, he wouldn't slash weapons outlays the way other recent Democratic presidents had. That thesis contradicted a model of
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2/4/2010
On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to give testimony on the FY2011 defense budget. In response to a question from Colorado Senator Udall on the likelihood of the Department of Defense having to accept future budget reductions, the Secretary
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2/4/2010
During budget briefings this week, defense secretary Robert Gates has gone out of his way to insist that the time has come to end production of the C-17 airlifter. Gates acknowledges that the C-17 is a versatile carrier of cargo, troops and other items, but argues that the 223 planes on order are
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2/3/2010
One of the innovations in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) much lauded in the media is the abandonment of the so-called two major regional conflicts or wars standard. This was the central metric by which the force structure was sized and the dominant challenge by which the adequacy of that
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2/3/2010
An important feature of the future security environment according to the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) will be something called “hybrid warfare.” This is the idea that states will use a variety of traditional and asymmetric tactics, techniques, and procedures including the use of surrogates
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2/2/2010
The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is supposed to take a twenty year view of the threats to U.S. security and the requirements for U.S military forces. One of this QDR’s assumptions is that the United States can afford to take risk in the area of conventional forces in favor of investments
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2/1/2010
If you've been following congressional hearings about the near collapse of America's financial system, then perhaps you have already figured out why both political parties were so blind to the danger. They were blind because they did not want to see. Anyone who cared to look could see something
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Date:
2/1/2010