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August 2009
The study by the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, of the situation in that country is an admission of defeat. According to published reports today, the full report clearly indicates that the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan of separating the Taliban from the
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8/31/2009
We received a lot of positive comments about my August 18 brief suggesting that policymakers are a bit too enamored of unmanned aircraft. The brief argued that such systems would be far less effective against well-armed adversaries than they are against rag-tag enemies like the Taliban. Here is
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8/31/2009
Every once in a while I stumble across an item that, while not directly related to national security, raises questions about our nation's ability to maintain its standing as the world's leading economy and culture in the years ahead. I put such items in my "End of Empire" postings. Today's depressing
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8/28/2009
STRATCOM is emerging as the only consistent proponent of modernizing the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is strongly in favor, too, but nuclear warhead money is spent at the Department of Energy, not the Department of Defense.
Overseas, things are different. All
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8/28/2009
While the Army has spent tens of billions of dollars to counter the dangers posed by land mines and improvised explosive devices, the U.S. Navy has done relatively little against sea mines. In the first Gulf War, Iraqi sea mines damaged two major surface combatants. Iran has an inventory of tens
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8/27/2009
“China’s okay with holding Los Angeles hostage. The U.S. is not okay with counter-value targeting.” So stated a senior STRATCOM official who was in town last week, talking about how to maneuver to lower nuclear force levels and still deter other nuclear powers.
What top strategists stress
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8/27/2009
We've come a long way from the days when nuclear energy was universally reviled by environmentalists. Because nuclear power generates almost no carbon emissions, many environmentalists have come to view it as a far better source of electricity than fossil fuels. Of course, they'd prefer to get
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8/27/2009
The Pentagon's decision to kill the F-22 fighter was barely public before proponents of other priorities began calling for cuts in the nation's only other stealth fighter program, the F-35 Lightning II (also known as Joint Strike Fighter). Washington seems to be drifting into a low-threat / high-deficit
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8/27/2009
Will the Pentagon give USAF the green light to develop a new bomber? It seems like a no-brainer, since the Air Force has only 20 stealthy B-2s it can use to penetrate defended airspace. That’s probably less than 4 or 5 missions per day in wartime.
Still, nothing is certain. The USAF is trying
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8/26/2009
The future of strategic arms control between the United States and Russia does not look good. Yes, Presidents Dmitri Medvedev and Barack Obama recently signed a joint understanding pledging to complete negotiation of a new strategic arms agreement that will lower the levels of nuclear armaments
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8/26/2009
This year marks the 50th anniversary of a seminal lecture at Cambridge University about modern society by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow. Snow argued that the elites running postwar society were divided into two distinct cultures: those who had studied science and those who had studied
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8/26/2009
He’s been pounding the table for two years about cyber issues. Now, a senior official explains some of the thinking behind the imminent stand-up of United States Cyber Command.
The prototype sub-unified command already has all the tactical execution they need. Help comes from units tasked to
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8/25/2009
Although much of the jargon surrounding military transformation is being jettisoned in the current Gates counter-transformation, the concept of "asymmetric" threats continues to be widely used. In Bush-era usage, asymmetric threats were those aimed at areas where America was ill-prepared. The
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8/25/2009
In his single-minded determination to win our current wars, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is gutting all the services’ modernization programs. Even the Army is not immune. On April 6, he cancelled the manned vehicle portion of the Future Combat System (FCS) program and truncated the Army’s effort
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8/25/2009
Forbes just released its list of the world’s 100 Most Powerful Women. Chancellor Merkel is on top again, and rightly so. It’s impossible to quarrel with top ten CEOs like PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, DuPont’s Ellen Kullman or Anne Lauvergeon who runs French nuclear giant Areva. Nancy Pelosi, Hillary
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8/24/2009
If new White House budget projections for the coming decade are correct -- deficits averaging nearly a trillion dollars per year -- then the joint force is going to have to get along with a lot less money. That means fewer weapons programs, fewer warfighters, and fewer overseas commitments. It
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8/24/2009
There’s hope at STRATCOM for space sensors in mid-course tracking of enemy missiles. Missile tracking after the booster rockets shut off…it’s like the holy grail in the complex equation of missile defense. Right now, infrared cues space-based systems as a rogue missile ascends. Radar handles
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8/24/2009
Whatever else you might say about George W. Bush, he stuck to his guns in Iraq. Despite abysmally low approval ratings and mixed results from the war zone, he never betrayed a willingness to accept defeat. Will Barack Obama do the same in Afghanistan? Don't count on it. Although he attacked
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8/21/2009
You can manage your mobile phone plan, but not your household electricity. That’s because the electricity grid that powers America hasn’t changed much since the early 20th Century.
But it won’t be that way for much longer.
Smart grid is the name for new electricity meters that have two-way
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8/21/2009
With the Obama Administration moving to put more emphasis on manufacturing policy, the Lexington Institute is releasing a report this week detailing just how severe the nation's industrial decline has become. Here are some key facts you may not have heard. China produced five times more steel
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8/20/2009
Bloomberg Business News reported yesterday that Northrop Grumman plans to sell its TASC technical services unit. On its face, the move seems like a simple divestiture of a non-core business -- possibly hastened by new federal rules about conflicts of interest among companies that provide both hardware
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8/20/2009
Yes, a politician running for office would be thrilled with the numbers routinely posted by Americans polled on whether they support nuclear power. Gallup pollsters started asking the question back in 1994. Since then, nuclear power never dipped below a 50% approval rating except for one slip
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8/20/2009
Today President Obama is below his 2008 vote for the first time. His vote was 52.9% and his job approval today is 52.0% in the RCP average (www.realclearpolitics.com)
Merrick “Mac” Carey
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8/19/2009
The well-sourced insidedefense.com website reports this week that the Navy will spend $6 billion over the next five years on unmanned aircraft such as the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) system. Proponents of using unmanned aircraft for every mission under the sun might feel that one percent
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8/19/2009
It's the dog days of August here in River City, but reporters still have to earn a living. Maybe that explains why there is so much nonsense floating around about Air Force weapons programs. Anyway, here are three rumors you can safely ignore.
First, there will be no two-year delay in the
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8/19/2009
The Army’s effort to define its future force structure suffers from a critical weakness. This is an inability to provide any clarity regarding the future of conflict or the Army’s role in it. In almost breathless tones, Army documents conjure up images of titanic social, demographic, economic, ideological
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8/19/2009
You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.
The Air Force set off almost 4 years ago to get serious about cyber. Air, space and cyber became the new mission. Initial plans for a major command for cyberspace stalled but smoothed the way for the real
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8/19/2009
After long deliberations, the World Trade Organization is about to rule on a complaint that the European Union's launch subsidies to Airbus are an unfair distortion of free trade. Apparently Airbus believes it will lose the case -- and have to give up its subsidies -- because the head of its North
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8/18/2009
The new leadership in the Pentagon is fixated on the idea of asymmetric threats at the expense of conventional warfare. Their strategic thinking is driven by the belief that the threats are moving from the center of the conflict spectrum (an image that appears as a bell curve) to the ends of that
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8/18/2009
The U.S. Navy has become increasingly concerned about China's efforts to develop a maneuvering warhead for its theater ballistic missiles. There have been at least three ground tests of the necessary technology, and if the tests lead to an operational weapon, that will increase the threat to U.S.
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8/18/2009
Ever heard of airborne forensics? One of the hottest tools for hunting Taliban in Afghanistan is something called ground moving target indicator, produced by the Air Force’s JSTARS radar plane. JSTARS flies nightly missions with a crew of 20 or more, some of whom are Army soldiers, over Afghanistan
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8/18/2009
When President Obama declared shortly after taking office that reforms in the way the government buys goods and services could save $40 billion annually, many longtime observers of the federal bureaucracy rolled their eyes. Every new administration launches such initiatives, and they always involve
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8/17/2009
On April 6 of this year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made one good decision and one bad one. The good one was to terminate the program to build a new presidential helicopter, the VH-71. The program cost had doubled over four years to over $13 billion because the customer (the U.S. Navy working
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8/17/2009
Defense secretary Robert Gates seems to be waging a counter-transformation, terminating Rumsfeld-era tech programs and shifting to a more labor-intensive military posture. But there is one technology Rumsfeld championed of which Gates is similarly enamored: unmanned aircraft like Predator. No
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8/14/2009
The counterinsurgency mafia here in Washington would have you believe that the way to win the kind of asymmetric struggle we face in Afghanistan and elsewhere is by turning the U.S. Army and Marine Corps into a hypertrophic neighborhood watch. The idea is that our forces should focus not on fighting
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8/14/2009
Conventional analysis of the Chinese economy is it is an unstoppable juggernaut, and those following China through a security prism note the growing resources that nation has to spend on its military. But some analysts wonder if the Chinese economy may not be quite as muscular as advertised.
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8/14/2009
Loren is right to worry about the UCAS delay (posted August 13). But there’s a bigger issue. Remarkably, the Navy has so far failed to buy its fliers stealth fighter-attack aircraft (around since the early 1980s) or big unmanned planes (nearing 10 years of operational use.)
Despite the fact
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8/14/2009
One of the nice things about being out of power is that parties can restore consistency to their agendas. Rather than catering to every constituency that might sway an election outcome, they can craft a coherent platform with which to inspire their base and assail the party in power. The Republican
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8/14/2009
Economists are in transition from the end-of-the-world pessimism that they express at the bottom of every recession to the all-is-well optimism they evince when recovery begins. We will soon be treated to non-stop praise of the American economy's strength and adaptability. Few experts will be
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8/13/2009
A continued steep fall in President Obama's job approval rating could have a dramatic impact on current defense spending and warfighting plans. But a careful look at the president's position in current polls brings back the old adage about Russia: It is never as strong, or as weak, as it appears.
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8/13/2009
President Obama is not the first or only Chief Executive to support in principle the idea of a nuclear-free world. But his Administration has clearly put the process on a fast track with an agreement between Washington and Moscow to write a new treaty to substantially reduce those two nation’s nuclear
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8/13/2009
Aerospace Daily reports the Navy has delayed the first flight of its Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS) in order to investigate "anomalies" in the system's performance. The current delay probably won't last long, but the program is facing the prospect of much longer delays if some skeptics in the
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8/13/2009
A lot of workers and managers in the defense sector are reeling this summer from the fast, deep cuts the Obama administration has undertaken on a range of military platforms and programs. But they should not feel too lonely. In the first six months of his presidency President Obama has proposed
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8/12/2009
The Pentagon has begun building its fiscal 2011 budget request, which will be sent to the Congress next February. 2011 is the year that production of the Virginia-class attack submarine -- the only class of subs the U.S. is currently building -- will ramp up to two boats per year. Prime contractors
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8/12/2009
Climate change is being felt everywhere but possibly with no more significant strategic impacts than in the Arctic region. Global warming is melting portions of the polar ice cap, opening up new maritime transportation routes and creating new opportunities to exploit the region’s mineral resources.
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8/12/2009
According to QDR insiders, Air Force leaders are pushing ahead with plans to buy a small fleet of propeller-driven planes for irregular warfare. The planes are better suited than jets to some tactical applications, and easier for unsophisticated partners like the Afghans to use. But there is an
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8/11/2009
One of the most important lessons of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is the danger posed by the excessive use of force not just for U.S. troops on the ground but to the overall strategy for defeating the insurgency. Collateral damage – the military euphemism for the killing of innocents –
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8/11/2009
With Pentagon insiders taking bets on when defense secretary Robert Gates will depart public service (see my posting of August 7), some observers have started to handicap the field of potential successors. It isn't a very big group. Some of the best candidates, like Bill Perry and Paul Kaminski,
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8/10/2009
Although the Army has officially terminated its massive Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, the real situation is a bit more complicated. It still wants to build the System of Systems Common Operating Environment network that was to be the glue holding FCS together. It still wants to "spin out"
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8/10/2009
All the talk a few months back about President Obama and defense secretary Robert Gates doing a mind-meld that would result in Gates staying on for four years is gone. The prevailing view now is that Gates will leave relatively soon. A reporter who travels with Gates says he is signaling he will
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8/7/2009
The Times of London reported this week that the Hezbollah terrorist group has stockpiled 40,000 short-range rockets within range of Israel. Many of these are capable of hitting that country’s major urban centers. This report says that Hezbollah may even have rockets able to carry a 1,000
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8/7/2009
The most frustrating experience Raytheon executives have had to deal with in recent years is the Navy's decision to kill its next-generation DDG-1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer after only three vessels. Raytheon won the competition to build the ship's electronic combat system, and by most accounts
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8/7/2009
News outlets and web sites around the world yesterday reported the startling news that after a nearly twenty year hiatus a Russian attack submarine was conducting a combat patrol off the East Coast of the United States. During the last decades of the Cold War, Soviet submarines routinely prowled
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8/6/2009
Quadrennial Defense Review insiders say all the participants understand that current trends in military pay and benefits are unsustainable, but no one has a solution. The basic problem is that the nation is trying to conduct big, protracted military operations with an all-volunteer force, and that
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8/5/2009
It is now nearly a year since the 23rd and last Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite failed in orbit. DSP-23 was the most advanced in a series of satellites designed to detect ballistic missile launches anywhere in the world using infrared sensors. A more capable replacement constellation called
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8/5/2009
On July 30, the Missile Defense Agency and the U.S. Navy conducted a successful test of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (Aegis BMDS). A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block IA intercepted a target simulating a short range ballistic missile. This is the 19th successful test since 2002 for an
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8/5/2009
The Pentagon has requested $277 billion in fiscal 2010 to fund operations and maintenance (O&M) activities in the regular military budget and overseas conflicts. That's more than any other country spends on its entire military establishment, so you'd think pundits would be scrutinizing the account
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8/4/2009
The U.S. Army deserves a lot of credit for the way it responded to defense secretary Gates’ decision to cancel the manned vehicle portion of the Future Combat System (FCS) program. Rather than seeing the decision as a defeat, the Army stood up a special task force to rethink its approach to future
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8/4/2009
The construction of Lockheed Martin's first Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was nobody's idea of a smooth sail. Although the vessel performed well in sea trials, there were production setbacks, cost overruns and other problems -- caused in part because construction began before the Navy had finalized
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8/4/2009
One of the most important lessons to emerge from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is the importance of airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR). Increasingly, U.S. forces are dependent on information acquired by and relayed from airborne platforms. The ability of ground troops
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Date:
8/3/2009