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September 2009
The fate of the best jet airlifter ever built is hanging by a thread on Capitol Hill. If Congress goes along with Senate language to buy ten more Boeing C-17s in 2010, that number combined with eight planes funded in the 2009 supplemental war appropriation will be enough to keep the California
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Date:
9/30/2009
Not every issue facing the nation is a matter of national security. This is the case with cap and trade. Proponents of cap and trade for national security argue that global warming will result in environmental degradation which, in turn, will produce resource scarcity and, finally, instability that
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Date:
9/30/2009
What's wrong with this picture? The Obama Administration embraces the SM-3 missile as its main interceptor for both land- and sea-based missile defense, and then the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) cuts the number of SM-3s it intends to buy far below what it was purchasing before the system was selected.
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9/30/2009
Gen. “Skip” Sharp looks across the demilitarized zone daily in his job as top commander of UN forces in Korea.
Here’s his take on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. “He is in charge,” Sharp told a group of defense writers in Washington on Tuesday. Although he has some paralysis in one arm
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Date:
9/30/2009
When the Air Force launched its 23rd (and last) Defense Support Program satellite on November 12, 2007, it thought it was deploying an asset that would provide global warning of missile launches well into the next decade. Instead, the satellite failed in orbit ten months later, leaving the nation
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9/29/2009
Iran’s weekend saber-rattling with its splashy Shahab 3 missile is a big reminder that in world politics, you just never know. It’s always nice to have the upper hand: specifically, an ability to contain Iran, and threaten back if needed.
Enter the much-maligned F-22 Raptor. Yes, the very glamour
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Date:
9/29/2009
The two most important operational appointments President Barack Obama will make are the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. These powerful agencies are just across the Potomac River from each other, and to say the fate of the nation is in their hands is only a slight
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Date:
9/28/2009
Word has it Vice President Joe Biden is leading the charge within the White House to find some alternative to Pentagon requests for more troops in Afghanistan. Before dismissing his bid to head off a broader counter-insurgency campaign there, consider what he is probably saying to the President.
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Date:
9/28/2009
It is self-evident that the United States military has entered a new world, one marked by strategic uncertainty and the proliferation of asymmetric threats. The devastating consequences of unanticipated dangers such as improvised explosive devices stand as a stark warning of things to come.
The
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Date:
9/28/2009
It didn't take much insight to see who the big loser was in the Obama Administration's decision to reconfigure missile defenses planned for Eastern Europe. Boeing lost the opportunity to be prime contractor on the so-called "third site" in the U.S. shield, an effort budgeted at $3.9 billion in
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9/25/2009
The Pentagon has begun briefing members of Congress on its plan for re-competing the award of a next-generation aerial refueling tanker, and tomorrow the two teams will receive the draft Request for Proposals (RfP). The companies will have several weeks to comment on the draft before it is finalized,
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9/24/2009
The U.S. Air Force is reported to be considering acquiring at least 100 propeller-driven “counter-insurgency fighters.” The argument for such an aircraft is that it can fly low and slow, giving it the ability to engage hard-to-find targets, operate from small, rugged airfields and be useful in helping
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Date:
9/24/2009
Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg Business News today reported the Navy's planned program cuts for fiscal 2011-2015. When combined with other recent Navy actions, they add up to a heavy blow for naval shipbuilders on the Gulf Coast. First, the Navy wants to cut one of two 40,000-ton helicopter carriers
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Date:
9/23/2009
There's been lots of early feedback about my September 22 issue brief arguing that the All-Volunteer Force is becoming unaffordable. One especially interesting insight comes from a seasoned Pentagon insider, who observes the Joint Staff is so dominated by representatives of the ground forces that
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9/23/2009
The President’s decision to conduct yet another review of our strategy in Afghanistan and to ask General Stanley McChrystal, commander of international forces in that country, to delay his request for more resources is inexplicable. Anyone who reads the unclassified version of General McChrystal’s
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Date:
9/23/2009
The Center for Economic and Policy Research has just released its think-tank productivity ratings for 2008. The rankings divide think-tank budgets by number of media hits and web-site visits to determine relative productivity. Lexington Institute was ranked number 2 in a field of 25 for media
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9/23/2009
In June, General Electric Chairman Jeffrey R. Immelt made a widely cited speech to the Detroit Economic Club calling for America to rebuild its export capacity and double the size of the domestic manufacturing workforce. Coming from a company that has shut down dozens of industrial sites in America
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Date:
9/23/2009
With the Pentagon's Bush-era networking initiatives being canceled one by one, the Navy's silence about its planned Next-Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) is rather curious. It has said so little in public since the year began that a casual observer might conclude program managers have entered
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Date:
9/22/2009
One thing I've noticed after working in the policy trenches for 31 years is few things move in a straight line for long. Whether it is political polls, economic developments or social trends, our big, unruly nation seems to change awfully quickly.
Here is another pattern I have noticed: The
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Date:
9/21/2009
Last Friday the Lexington Institute sponsored a working group on the future of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile force. The meeting attracted diverse participation from government, industry and academia, with conversation centering on how the ICBM force is likely to fare in the Obama Administration's
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9/21/2009
Yesterday, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, defended his decision to radically alter the plan to deploy missile defense in Europe. The old plan was to deploy ten ground-based interceptors in silos in Poland supported by a fixed site radar in the Czech Republic. The new plan is to deploy sea-based
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Date:
9/21/2009
Republicans have a problem: their plans for promoting economic growth aren't working. George W. Bush followed the standard Reagan-revolution playbook of tax cuts, deregulation and free trade, and the result was the worst national economic performance since the Great Depression -- huge budget and
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Date:
9/21/2009
What are the key attributes of airpower, those essential capabilities that are central to the reason the nation maintains an independent Air Force? This question was posed to me recently by a senior Air Force general officer with the following codicil: “These attributes are the ones over which senior
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Date:
9/18/2009
When retiring Northrop Grumman chairman Ron Sugar was six years old, his parents packed the family into a old Ford and moved from Toronto to Los Angeles. The trip to California took nine days, and their destination was one of the toughest neighborhoods in South L.A. His parents, both high-school dropouts,
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Date:
9/18/2009
When I was a kid, I used to read a lot of science fiction. Books like Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. As I grew older, though, I began to realize I was living science fiction -- things were changing so fast -- and so I moved on to other genres. I thought about how much reality has come
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Date:
9/18/2009
You want to hear about future threats? You have to leave Washington DC, where high-intensity warfare is deader than disco. Warnings about tough adversaries were all over last weekend’s Tailhook convention of Navy carrier aviators in Reno, Nevada.
That’s because top Navy leaders like Admiral Pat
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Date:
9/18/2009
There's a lot of talk in Washington right now that President Obama's tariff on Chinese tires and the dispute over Airbus subsidies could lead to a trade war. That's kind of odd, since the tariff was levied pursuant to agreements China made when it joined the World Trade Organization, and the Airbus
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Date:
9/17/2009
The 2009 National Intelligence Strategy (NIS) has warned that the U.S. increasingly is being challenged in cyber space and warns that China is particularly active in this new domain. This warning comes on the heels of recent massive cyber attacks against Estonia and, in the context of Russia’s
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Date:
9/16/2009
During the Cold War, America's military services acquired a diverse collection of radios without much oversight or coordination. As a result, the joint force today is saddled with an aging inventory of incompatible systems that often fails to provide adequate communications in combat. The sheer
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Date:
9/16/2009
If the Department of Defense (DoD) finds it increasingly difficult to manage successfully a relatively limited conflict in Afghanistan, why would it be even considering the possibility of even more challenging scenarios in Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Far East? Published reports about the
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Date:
9/15/2009
The United States has incurred a trade deficit of over a trillion dollars with China since the decade began. As a result, the Chinese government has accumulated vast reserves of dollars. A prevailing fantasy in Washington is that Beijing will keep using these dollar reserves mainly to buy U.S.
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9/15/2009
According to a recently published white paper, the Air Force believes that it faces a growing asymmetric disadvantage against the growing ballistic missile threat. Based on the 2008 Unified Engagement joint war game, the white paper went on to state that “In future fights there will not be enough
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Date:
9/14/2009
It’s official. Commander Sara “Clutch” Joyner told the big crowd at Tailhook 09 in Reno over the weekend that the Navy air warfare staff is indeed moving F-35C initial operating capability to 2014. That’s a year earlier than the planned date of 2015, and Joyner said it was all about getting the
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9/14/2009
One of the unspoken assumptions of the Obama game plan for governance was that lots of money could be freed up for domestic programs if the military got out of Iraq. That plan is not working out. Not only is Secretary Gates seeking more troops than the 92,000 add that candidate Obama signed up
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9/14/2009
After a steep fall from Inauguration Day through late August, President Obama's job approval rating has stabilized for three weeks right around his 2008 vote, which was 52.9%. We actually saw a similar pattern last summer, when Senator McCain closed the gap with Senator Obama at the end of August,
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Date:
9/14/2009
While President Obama is having trouble with his largest government insourcing initiative, the national health care "public option," he and his allies are rolling along nicely with their anti-outsourcing initiatives at the defense department. Here are the reasons:
1. Ideological: The new
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Date:
9/11/2009
The World Trade Organization has handed Boeing's friends on Capitol Hill a powerful tool to block award of the Air Force's next tanker to any offeror using an Airbus airframe. The Northrop Grumman team competing against Boeing for the award has been expected to offer a modified Airbus A330 in the
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Date:
9/11/2009
On the eighth anniversary of September 11, the media and cyberspace will be filled with articles and commentaries assessing the extent to which Americans are safer now from the threat of catastrophic terrorism. There is no question that much has been done to improve the nation’s security against
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Date:
9/11/2009
Because the first volume of Edward Gibbon's monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776, it had a profound impact on the thinking of the Founding Fathers. George Washington paraphrased Gibbon's insight that "they preserved peace by a constant preparation for war" in his
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Date:
9/10/2009
In 1918, a huge catastrophe culminated in the loss of 50 million lives. No, I'm not referring to World War One, I'm talking about the Spanish influenza pandemic, which claimed more lives in one year than the war did in four. The flu isn't usually fatal to anyone besides babies and the elderly,
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Date:
9/9/2009
Sometime this autumn the Obama Administration will announce it is abandoning plans to build a missile-defense complex in Eastern Europe. Since the administration has repeatedly warned of the danger posed by Iran's development of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, the White House will have
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Date:
9/9/2009
From Barry Eichengreen's essay on the declining appeal of the dollar as a global reserve currency in the September issue of Foreign Affairs:
It would be no surprise if the dysfunctionality of U.S. financial markets diminished the appetite of central banks for U.S. debt securities.
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9/9/2009
With attention focused on the two wars in Southwest Asia, it is easy to miss the fact that the United States is still the one and only global military power. More than a quarter of a million U.S. military personnel are engaged in or supporting the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time,
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Date:
9/9/2009
In late August, with little fanfare, an obscure Army buying command awarded a five-year contract to Oshkosh Corp. to build up to 23,000 trucks under a program called the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV). It was a very big win for Oshkosh, which had never seen annual revenues exceed $3
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9/8/2009
An interesting split is emerging in the Air Force sustainment and logistics sector, and it could have big implications for the Obama government insourcing agenda. The Air Force has been running a successful logistics partnership for its premier air superiority fighter, the F-22, with original manufacturers
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9/8/2009
As part of his effort to bring change to the ways the national security establishment does business, the Obama Administration has embarked on a risky strategy of reducing Department of Defense (DoD) and intelligence community (IC) reliance on contractors by insourcing their work. This will mean
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Date:
9/8/2009
Despite criticism from President Obama and defense secretary Robert Gates, congressional backers of an extra engine for the F-35 joint strike fighter are preparing to force the program on the Pentagon. The F-35 is a single-engine jet aircraft that will use an evolved version of the Pratt & Whitney
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9/8/2009
Pentagon sources say that defense secretary Robert Gates was quite unhappy about Tony Capaccio's budget story carried by Bloomberg Business News on Wednesday of this week. The story revealed details of the Air Force's proposed 2011-2015 budget request, including proposed terminations of the Joint
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9/4/2009
Today the World Trade Organization will tell Airbus what everybody already knew: launch subsidies from friendly governments give it an unfair advantage in competing with its American counterpart, Boeing. Airbus will respond with three arguments: (1) Boeing gets subsidies too, (2) the bailout
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9/4/2009
A casual observer of recent spending decisions made by defense secretary Robert Gates could easily conclude he is indifferent to military technology. He proposes termination of weapons programs and hiring of additional personnel with such regularity that the Pentagon seems to be headed for the
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9/3/2009
Bloomberg Business News reported yesterday that the Air Force and Navy want to kill their respective versions of the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS, or "Jitters"). Reporter Tony Capaccio is the gold standard for accuracy on such stories, so if defense secretary Robert Gates goes along with the
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Date:
9/3/2009
Boeing made a smart, bold choice this week by elevating 45-year-old Dennis Muilenburg to run its huge Integrated Defense Systems unit. Muilenburg has been managing the unit's sprawling services business, but he is best known within the industry for shepherding the Future Combat Systems program
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9/2/2009
On April 6, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cancelled the manned vehicle portion of the Future Combat System (FCS) program, sending the Army back to the drawing boards. Gates said that the original designs were planned with a different conflict environment in mind. The Secretary said he wanted
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Date:
9/2/2009
If Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his new acquisition chief Dr. Ashton Carter are serious about acquisition reform they should look closely at the experience of the Virginia-class nuclear attack submarine program. Although relatively early in the production run, the program is already delivering
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Date:
9/1/2009