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May 2010
A central premise of the Obama Administration’s brand new National Security Strategy (NSS) is the need for the United States whenever possible to act in concert with or even through friends and allies. Under the heading of Pursuing Comprehensive Engagement, the NSS declares that “America’s national
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Date:
5/28/2010
One of the biggest budget puzzles faced by Air Force planners is how to modernize the service's aging fleet of manned electronic-sensing aircraft. These aircraft come in three flavors: the E-3 AWACS planes that provide air surveillance, the E-8 Joint Stars planes that provide surface surveillance,
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5/28/2010
The past several years have seen more than a few conflicts between the Department of Defense (DoD) and defense companies. Defense news seems to be dominated by reports about cost overruns and performance problems on weapons programs, the alleged excessive reliance by Pentagon offices on contractor
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5/27/2010
Pentagon insiders say that defense secretary Robert Gates has seriously considered departing his present position on two previous occasions, and now is contemplating closing out his public career shortly after this year's midterm elections. God knows Gates and his staff deserve a rest, and there
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5/26/2010
Of all the places to fight a war, Afghanistan would be almost last on anyone’s list. There are all the well-documented problems: awful terrain, primitive infrastructure, fragmented social and political structures, the ravages of thirty years of conflict and predatory neighbors. Afghanistan is also
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5/26/2010
The chance exists that the Korean peninsula will be engulfed in war for the first time in nearly 60 years. North Korea’s deliberate sinking of a South Korean warship may have lit the fuse. In response, quite naturally, the Republic of Korea has cut off economic relations with its northern neighbor
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5/25/2010
Later this week, the House of Representatives will decide whether the Pentagon should be directed to consider European aircraft subsidies in comparing proposals to develop the Air Force's next aerial-refueling tanker. If you think that sounds boring, then you probably don't understand what has
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5/25/2010
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates set off a whirlwind of discussion and blogging with his May 3 speech to the Navy League. In his speech, the Secretary appeared to fire a broadside at the Navy and Marine Corps. He criticized the Marine Corps vision of amphibious warfare as well as its investments
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5/24/2010
For all its supposed influence in Washington, the defense industry has a remarkably hard time finding friends. When Dick Cheney was defense secretary, he killed a hundred major weapons programs in a mere four years. Bill Perry told defense executives that two-thirds of their companies needed to
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5/24/2010
Like Greece, Spain and the state of California, the Department of Defense (DoD) is on a crusade to reduce its overhead costs. The Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has set a target of reducing his department’s overhead expenses by $10 billion. With overall defense spending expected to decline
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5/23/2010
The most relentless enemy of U.S. Army combat equipment in the new millennium hasn't been the Mahdi Army or the Taliban, it has been dust. Insurgent violence waxes and wanes, but the dust is constant. It clogs radiators, contaminates fuel, and shorts out electrical connections. Every Army maintenance
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5/21/2010
The United States has lost an average of over a thousand manufacturing jobs every day since the new millennium began. Most of those losses resulted not from productivity gains or other positive trends, but rather from America's decline as a manufacturing power. During the last 30 years, the portion
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5/20/2010
A panel of distinguished former defense leaders and diplomats chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has produced a vision for the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance called NATO 2020. According to this proposal, NATO needs to do more, spend more and be more visible
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Date:
5/20/2010
What everyone feared was the case has now been proven to be fact. North Korea deliberately sank a South Korean patrol boat, killing 46 sailors and risking a war between these two countries (and by extension the United States). This is not simply North Korea, as usual, behaving badly. It is the predictable
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Date:
5/19/2010
On Friday, a letter was delivered to the White House calling on the Obama Administration to move forward with the sale of F-16 fighters to Taiwan. In a demonstration of true bipartisanship 136 members of the House including more than 50 Democrats signed the letter. The letter described Taiwan’s
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5/18/2010
The Obama Administration has completed its first national security strategy. As in similar documents prepared by previous administrations, the strategy calls for continued efforts to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction, defeat terrorism and promote freedom around the world. But this
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Date:
5/18/2010
There has been little movement in public-opinion polls during the eight weeks since national health insurance was signed into law. At that time President Barack Obama briefly dipped to his lowest job approval rating at 46% in the Realclearpolitics
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5/17/2010
While good for U.S.-Israeli relations and the defensive needs of a close U.S. ally, the Obama Administration’s decision to provide a rapid infusion of funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system is also an ominous sign that the security situation in the region continues to deteriorate. Hezbollah
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Date:
5/17/2010
Remember two months ago when Northrop Grumman announced it was pulling out of a partnership with Franco-German aerospace giant EADS to supply the Air Force's next aerial-refueling tanker? The reason Northrop executives gave for withdrawing was that the government's request for proposals favored
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5/17/2010
The Obama Administration is having trouble putting together a package of sanctions on Iran. After a year during which Iran has both thumbed its nose at the White House and accelerated its nuclear programs, the administration is looking to send a strong message. At the same time, it has opposed efforts
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5/14/2010
You don't need a defense expert to tell you that domestic demand for military goods and services is likely to weaken in the years ahead. The war in Iraq is ending, the federal government is running a daily budget deficit of $4 billion, and the Obama Administration has an ambitious domestic agenda.
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5/14/2010
The global trend is clear: privatization of government functions is the way to lower costs, reduced budget deficits, improve efficiency and have a better standard of living. The Greek bailout carried with it stringent European Union and International Monetary Fund conditions which amounted to reduced
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5/13/2010
Over the past few years, Congress has continued to fund production of the C-17 airlifter despite the insistence of Air Force leaders that they had bought all the strategic lift they were likely to need. I supported continued funding for three reasons. First, C-17 is the best long-range airlifter
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Date:
5/13/2010
Every businessman knows you cannot sell a product if your customer thinks you are willing to give it away. Businesses do make judicious use of “freebies” at times in order to get customers in the door, create awareness of products and even make a market by creating the perception in the public of
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5/12/2010
On May 10, the Wall Street Journal published a seminal essay by Rice University scholar Amy Myers Jaffe that explored the huge impact recent breakthroughs in natural-gas development are likely to have on global energy markets. The essay described how new exploitation techniques have unlocked
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Date:
5/12/2010
There are all kinds of stories told about the Pentagon. But until now it has never been said that the building was haunted. It has been three and a half years since Robert Gates became Secretary of Defense. Last week, something amazing happened. He became his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld. This is
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Date:
5/11/2010
Last Sunday, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote an entertaining but one-sided commentary about Representative Norm Dicks (D-WA) that complained Dicks is too close to Boeing. Dicks is so close to Boeing, the writer said, that making him chairman of the House Appropriations Committee
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5/11/2010
The Secretary of Defense is a man on a mission. Well, really several. His first mission is to win our current wars. His second mission is to rebalance the military both in terms of how it is structured to deal with current and future conflicts and in relation to the other instruments of national
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5/10/2010
For more than two years, the Department of Defense and the armed forces of the United States have been undergoing what the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, termed a process of finding balance. Secretary Gates announced his new approach to defense planning in an article in Foreign Affairs in
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5/7/2010
Robert Gates has now been serving as Secretary of Defense for well over three years, and to say the job has been stressful is something of an understatement. Gates and his staff need a rest. Having accomplished the most important goal of his tenure -- averting U.S. defeat in Iraq -- Secretary Gates
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5/7/2010
There is a lot of truth behind the old joke that an elephant is a mouse built to government specifications. So it should not be a surprise to discover that only a year after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a plan to replace thousands of private contractors with permanent government employees
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5/6/2010
Robert Gates knows how to manage bureaucracies. He began his career as a Sovietologist in the intelligence community during the Nixon-Kissinger era, at a time when America's national-security apparatus was an arena of byzantine intrigue. So you can't always take what he says at face value. The speech
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Date:
5/6/2010
This past Monday Secretary of Defense Robert Gates took on the U.S. Navy. In a speech to the Navy League he basically said that virtually the entire structure of today’s Navy was irrelevant to the threats of the future and too expensive to continue to build. Secretary Gates repeated his mantra that
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Date:
5/5/2010
The greatest technological achievement on the modern battlefield has been the introduction of wireless communications devices that can pierce the fog of war. The confusion once thought to be an inevitable companion of combat is gradually dissipating as new ways of exchanging information become
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Date:
5/5/2010
The first rule of arms control, as in medicine, is to do no harm. This is not the approach taken by the Obama Administration. Whether it is through its failure to create a new era of engagement with the Muslim world, the inability to impose meaningful sanctions on Iran, its policy of hostility towards
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5/4/2010
Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James Amos told defense trade publication Inside the Navy last month that his service has no plans to delay fielding of the F-35 fighter despite the fact that the development plan is 13 months behind schedule. In fact, the Marine Corps is so
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Date:
5/4/2010
History repeats itself, but never the same way. The President and the Congress are at odds over placing sanctions on Iran. For the administration it is a complex issue involving not only trying to change Iran’s behavior but also the White House’s commitment to collective action. For Congress, it
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Date:
5/3/2010