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August 2012
The doomsday clock is tick-tocking ever closer to midnight in the Persian Gulf and talk of an Israeli strike on Iran is reaching a fevered pitch. Western leaders are becoming agitated. German Chancellor Merkel felt it necessary to personally call Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to caution him against
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Date:
8/31/2012
A survey of voter sentiment in swing states finds that four out of five likely voters wants U.S. political leaders to avert the danger of automatic cuts to the federal budget before the November election. The across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, are mandated by the Budget Control Act passed
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Date:
8/31/2012
Most discussions of the role of the U.S. Navy in the new defense strategy have focused either on combatants such as nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, Aegis air and missile defense capable destroyers, cruisers and nuclear attack submarines or on airborne systems such as the F-35, P-8, or Global Hawk
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Date:
8/30/2012
The 2012 Republican platform rejects the extremism at both ends of the political spectrum. It explicitly takes the current administration to task for its failures to match its strategic vision with an appropriate investment of resources in military capabilities, its unwillingness to compromise on
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Date:
8/29/2012
TransPro CEO Mark Aesch provides an interesting view of government efficiency. In this posting for the Early Warning blog Aesch explains how good policy makes for better politics.
With the Republican Convention underway and the Democratic convention just days away, there is a major, largely
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Date:
8/29/2012
The U.S. Army is searching for ways of contributing more to joint operations in an increasingly complex security environment. Air dominance, precision strike and global reach belong, more or less, to the Air Force. Command of the Sea and everything that stems from it is the Navy's domain. Forcible
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Date:
8/28/2012
The defense industry will need to consolidate if demand for its products continues softening in the years ahead. Because Pentagon policymakers are ill-disposed to managing sector rationalization, it will probably be driven by who wins or loses the handful of big programs that are still up for grabs.
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Date:
8/28/2012
Students of defense studies are routinely assigned Barbara Tuchman’s excellent study of the outbreak of the First World War, The Guns of August. The thrust of Tuchman’s analysis was that the stars were aligned in favor of war. Over a number of years national politics, alliance relationships,
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Date:
8/24/2012
After suffering a near-death experience on Capitol Hill last year, the Army's Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) is starting to look like a program with a bright future. On August 22 the service announced fixed-price contract awards to three industry teams that now must compete for the right to
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Date:
8/24/2012
We can all agree that Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) have proven themselves one of, if not the single most, useful capabilities the U.S. military has deployed in the last decade. From the hand-held Raven to the larger, rail-launched Scan Eagle up to the Predator (and its bigger and badder fraternal
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Date:
8/23/2012
Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has been struggling to find its role in a complex and changing security environment. Complicating this effort is the fact that most of European NATO’s military forces were oriented towards territorial defense of a Soviet conventional assault on Western Europe.
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8/22/2012
Much has been written about George W. Bush's razor-thin margin of victory in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, but one key factor in the outcome has been largely overlooked. If Eglin Air Force Base had been in Alabama rather than the Sunshine State's western Panhandle, Al Gore would
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Date:
8/21/2012
The Obama Administration’s Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) is long on missions the military will be required to perform. These missions range from the rapid countering of aggression in two different regions of the world to preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and rapidly
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Date:
8/21/2012
Wage and price controls are the last refuge of scoundrels and government officials. They are an attempt to avoid the consequences of bad economic decisions. The last time they were tried in the United States was in the early 1970s by the Nixon Administration. They failed miserably and resulted
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8/17/2012
If you thought the biggest news story between now and November 6 was going to be the U.S. presidential election, guess again. It looks like the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to attack Iran's nuclear program well before election day in the U.S. That is not
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Date:
8/17/2012
The legal basis for the establishment of a no-fly zone over northern and northwestern Syria is no longer a matter for discussion. Yesterday’s deliberate attack by a Syrian fighter-bomber on a civilian neighborhood in Aleppo underscored the reality that the Assad regime is engaged in genocide. This
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Date:
8/16/2012
Next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the program intended to make ballistic missiles impotent and obsolete. Over the ensuing three decades, much has changed. The Soviet Union is no more. The deployed strategic nuclear
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Date:
8/15/2012
The defense industry has become the backbone of what's left of manufacturing in the Northeast. But don't take my word for it, just look out the window of your car as you drive from D.C. to Cape Cod. From the sprawling Northrop Grumman electronics plant near Baltimore to the Boeing helicopter factory
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Date:
8/15/2012
More than 150 years ago, a lone British regiment, the 93rd Regiment (Sutherland Highlanders), was all that stood between the unprepared British camp in the Crimea and charging Russian cavalry. Formed by their commander into two lines, the British infantry faced down many times their number, saving
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Date:
8/14/2012
Last week, a specter rose slowly into the air above Lakehurst, New Jersey. Some seventy five years after the Hindenburg disaster, a new lighter-than-air vehicle is holding out the promise of a second revolution in unmanned air systems (UASs). The Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV)
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Date:
8/13/2012
Since the end of the Cold War, the basic metric for judging the adequacy of the U.S. military has been its ability to fight in two geographically separated regions of the world at approximately the same time. Referred to at different times as Major Regional Contingencies (MRC), Major Theater Wars
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8/10/2012
The debate over the future of manned aircraft has intensified of late as a result of a number of factors: looming defense budget cuts, the termination of the F-22 program and delays in fielding the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), an explosion in the types and numbers of deployed unmanned aerial
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Date:
8/8/2012
Anyone who has studied air accidents knows that seemingly minor problems can cause catastrophes. Air France suffered the worst crash in its history three years ago when malfunctioning air-speed indicators on a Paris-bound Airbus A330 flying over the South Atlantic set in motion a series of cockpit
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Date:
8/8/2012
There are only two winners in war: medicine and technology. The imperative to save lives and then provide wounded warriors with the best care and rehabilitation has been a powerful force producing dramatic advances in such areas as emergency medicine, trauma surgery, the treatment of burns, prosthetic
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Date:
8/7/2012
There was a time when the Air Force wasn't just co-equal with the other military services in the Department of Defense, but first among equals. That time is now long gone. After a smashing success in the 1999 Balkan air war -- it defeated Serbia without assistance from ground forces -- the Air
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8/6/2012
Until this past week, it was looking as if the United States was repeating the fate of other declining great powers, in at least one notable respect, China’s Ming Dynasty. Some 600 years ago, the Ming emperors sent forth into the unknown a series of massive fleets to travel the seas and acquire
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Date:
8/6/2012
Well, you learn something everyday. While reading Tracks, the in-house newspaper of the Anniston Army Depot, I discovered the highly regarded Stryker combat vehicle that has figured so prominently in the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns is named after two Medal of Honor winners. I always
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8/3/2012
What year is this? Is it 1987 or 2012? For a moment as I read the front page of the Washington Post today I wasn’t sure. According to a feature story by Greg Jaffe, the Pentagon’s plan to neutralize the Chinese military buildup, called AirSea Battle, was upsetting military leaders and defense
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Date:
8/2/2012
Colorado certainly seems like Obama Country. One in four Coloradans say they aren't religious (much higher than the national average) and one in five are Latino. Colorado passed the nation's first liberalized abortion law and has a disproportionate number of young professional workers --
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Date:
8/2/2012
If you are a program manager in one of the military services, a budgeter in the Pentagon or a senior executive in the defense industry it must seem as if you are suffering death by a thousand cuts. First the Congress and the President agree to the Budget Control Act (BCA) which was advertised as
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Date:
8/1/2012
If the second round of Budget Control Act cuts occurs, there will be serious job loss in the defense industry. According to the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act, employers are obligated to notify employees of potential job loss at least 60 days in advance. Since budget cuts
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Date:
8/1/2012