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Times are tough for the U.S. Army. After twelve years of fighting -- the longest stretch of continuous combat in the Army's history -- its plans to rebuild are being shredded by across-the-board funding cuts. Desperate to protect soldiers in Afghanistan, it is ransacking its budget for savings
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Date:
5/14/2013
Last month, Army Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Raymond Odierno warned the armed services committees in the House and Senate that their service's readiness is rapidly approaching a crisis state. Budget cuts have resulted in cancellation of new depot maintenance work for the next two quarters
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Date:
5/13/2013
What is the value to the United States of the Army? This is a question which the Chief of Staff, General Odierno, and senior uniformed and civilian leaders of this venerable organization are having trouble answering. They have experimented with a number of different arguments. For example, they
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Date:
4/18/2013
In the perfect defense acquisition world, requirements would be well-defined and reasonable, RFPs clearly written, program cost and schedule would be sensible and attainable, the necessary technologies would have a high readiness level and the end product would be affordable, effective and sustainable.
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Date:
4/3/2013
The history of the U.S. Army is one of long periods of relative quiet punctuated by short episodes of massive engagement. When it was not engaged in major conflict the Army was doing all the so-called “Phase Zero” activities, partnering, capacity building, security assistance, etc. Most of this
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Date:
3/26/2013
1941 was the last time the Army really was at home. After World War II, most soldiers came home but only to be demobilized. The remainder of the Army was doing occupation duty and patrolling the borders of the Free World. In the post-Cold War era the Army shifted its posture from one based on forward
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Date:
3/21/2013
Army planners are rethinking how their service will acquire 700 AH-64E Apache attack helicopters over the next 14 years in light of declining procurement budgets. InsideDefense.com reported on March 6 that the Army's fiscal 2014 budget request will defer any new production of the service's airborne
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Date:
3/14/2013
The rolling farmland of south-central Pennsylvania is shaping up to be the last resting place of America's once mighty combat-vehicle industry. A BAE Systems plant outside the town of York is the sole remaining site where most of the Army's tracked vehicles can be made, and now the service wants
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Date:
3/11/2013
For most of its history, the U.S. Army was basically a constabulary force that mobilized for war. It is only since the end of World War Two that the nation required the U.S. military to be a standing force capable of going to war without extensive mobilization and industrial expansion. Constabulary
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Date:
12/21/2012
There was a time when Army acquisition meant buying 100,000 jeeps from Ford for $800 each. Things aren't that simple anymore. As warfighting technologies have become more sophisticated, so have the service's ideas for how to get the best deal. Today, new weapon programs typically unfold according
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Date:
12/13/2012
Need plumbing supplies, lighting fixtures, tools, building materials, paints and even ornamental plants, go to Home Depot. Need heavy, medium or light combat forces, medical, intelligence, transportation, logistical and signal units, call the U.S. Army. No job too small or too big; overseas or at
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Date:
11/2/2012
Properly handled, deterrence is a subtle instrument. On the one hand, prospective adversaries should not feel so threatened that they will reflexively act out. On the other hand, potential aggressors need to be convinced that they will lose any conflict they start. This is going to be a particularly
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Date:
10/23/2012
The Army is finally making some progress in supplying its combat forces with the kind of software-defined radios that can support robust connectivity even in adverse circumstances. On the one hand, it is sticking with the part of the long-running Joint Tactical Radio System program that seems to
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Date:
10/22/2012
The U.S. Army has come a long way from the days in which Special Operations Forces (SOF) were tolerated, at best and ostracized, at worst. A decade of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has changed the historic arms-length relationship. Working day-to-day with SOF teams to hunt down insurgents, train
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Date:
10/22/2012
In the months leading up to the attacks of September 11, the Department of Defense was working on a new defense strategy and associated force structure. Central to the new plan was a significant reduction in the size of the U.S. Army. The incoming Bush Administration had campaigned on a platform
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Date:
10/1/2012
Republicans know they must have Ohio on their side to win the White House. That's what happened in 2004, when Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush carried the Buckeye State with 50.8% of the popular vote and thus secured the electoral-college majority needed for reelection. So of course
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Date:
9/28/2012
Responding to growing questions regarding the relevance of ground forces to future national security requirements, the Army is beginning to make the case for a new operational concept, one tailored to emerging challenges such as anti-access/ area denial (A2/AD) threats and the loss of forward operating
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Date:
9/20/2012
After a decade of counter-insurgency warfare, the focus of U.S. military planning is returning to state-based threats. Whether President Obama is reelected or not, the joint force will be paying more attention to places like the Western Pacific and less attention to places like Afghanistan. All
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Date:
9/7/2012
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
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
The Department of Defense (DoD) likes to pretend it does not really have to pay attention to the defense industrial base or to develop an industrial policy. It holds firmly to the fantasy that when the government waves money at the private sector the latter will respond rapidly and effectively.
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Date:
7/9/2012
Yesterday, the British Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, announced the latest in a series of cuts to the British military. The new British Army will consist of some 80,000 regulars plus about 30,000 reservists. According to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the new, "leaner" British Army will be able
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Date:
7/6/2012
Over the past twenty years the U.S. Army has achieved a record of successfully implementing major acquisition programs virtually unblemished by success. The list of failures is quite long: Crusader, Future Combat System, Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, Aerial Common Sensor, etc. The most successful
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Date:
6/22/2012
The U.S. Army is beginning a major modernization program of its vehicle fleets. The new programs come on top of tens of billions of dollars spent over the past decade on MRAPs, uparmored Humvees, improved medium and heavy trucks and improvements to the Abrams tank and Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle.
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Date:
5/31/2012
You don't need a crystal ball to figure out what the next big threat to America's soldiers will be. It won't be improvised explosive devices or cyber attacks, because the Army is spending lots of money preparing for those challenges. The next big threat will come from the air. Why? Because after
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Date:
4/20/2012
The U.S. Army is at the start of what is likely to be one of the most wrenching operational, intellectual and organizational transitions in its modern history. The change most people focus on, that from “wartime” to “peacetime,” with an accompanying 100,000 reduction in active duty end strength
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Date:
3/16/2012
The way the Department of Defense does math, two plus two never equals four. Take this simple equation. Add the growing threat from theater ballistic missiles to the Army’s search for relevance in the post Iraq/Afghanistan world and the answer should come up: expand the Army’s role in missile defense.
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Date:
3/12/2012
The leadership of the U.S. Army claims to have learned important lessons from the failure of its multi-billion dollar effort to design and build the so-called Future Combat System (FCS). The FCS was supposed to be a “system of systems” with specially designed manned and unmanned ground and air vehicles,
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Date:
3/5/2012
The U.S. Army sees itself as the service that had to pay the price to get the job done in Iraq and Afghanistan, and rightly so. Ten years of air interdiction of the former and a rapid, air-dominated operation in the latter were not enough to achieve U.S. objectives. Nor was the initial combined
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Date:
2/17/2012
If you open the widely-read Value Line Investment Survey to pages 170-171, you will find corporate profiles of Navistar International and Oshkosh Corporation facing each other. This apparently has given billionaire investor Carl Icahn an idea: merge the two companies into a $20 billion behemoth
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Date:
1/4/2012
One of the worst facets of the federal management culture is the way that politicians and policymakers devalue past investments. That's especially true with regard to Pentagon technology accounts, where every program termination is considered "savings" regardless of how much money was spent on
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Date:
12/19/2011
There seems to be only two topics of conversation in Washington defense circles today. One is sequestration. Regarding sequestration, there is little more that needs to be said. It will be a catastrophe not only due to the magnitude of the reductions in defense spending, around $1 trillion over
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Date:
12/14/2011
Out in the West Texas desert, at the White Sands Missile Range, a miracle is unfolding. For the last three weeks, the Army has been conducting the latest in a series of what it is calling a Network Integration Evaluation (NIE). The immediate goal of the NIE is to evaluate the suitability of near-term
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Date:
11/17/2011
Yesterday, the chiefs of the military services spoke before Congress with a single voice to deliver a simple message: the $600 billion in additional spending cuts required if the super committee fails and sequestration is triggered would be disastrous for the military. According to the Army’s new
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Date:
11/3/2011
Anyone who has ever taken a class on economics knows about the law of supply and demand. Supply and demand functions are usually expressed in terms of prices and quantities. The supply of things rises as the price increases and falls as the price declines. The demand for things will do the opposite;
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Date:
10/14/2011
In his first major policy address, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta presented his vision of the military of the future. There are reports that Panetta has already signed off on a new Defense Planning Guidance, the key document that lays out a U.S. defense strategy and defines the key planning and
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Date:
10/12/2011
The tragic paradox of America's Army is that the only time it truly thrives is when it is dying. When soldiers are under fire in Korea or Indochina or Iraq, political leaders shovel huge amounts of money to the service because the consequences of under-funding warfighters are all too obvious.
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Date:
10/12/2011
The U.S. Army has remarkably little to show for the hundreds of billions of dollars it has spent on modernization since 9-11. Its helicopter fleet is in reasonably good shape because the service decided to keep buying systems like the Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook that had already proven themselves,
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Date:
9/28/2011
In a recent speech, Army Under Secretary Joseph Westphal made public one of Washington’s worst kept secrets: the Army's acquisition system is broken. Over the past two decades, the Army has experienced a continuous record of failure in major acquisition programs. This has been particularly true
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Date:
4/28/2011
The U.S. Army has striven valiantly to respond to the needs of individual soldiers in the middle of two wars. The Army acquired tens of thousands of Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected (MRAP) and MRAP-All Terrain vehicles. It is adding a double V underbody to the Stryker wheeled vehicles to provide
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Date:
3/14/2011
In his last major speech to the U.S. Army Corps of Cadets at West Point, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates continued his habit of using such addresses to prod a service into thinking seriously about its future. The previous time it was the Navy. In a speech last year to the Navy League the Secretary
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Date:
2/28/2011
David Wood, the respected military correspondent of Politics Daily, has written a shocking story of stress among soldiers in the U.S. Army. Based on the findings of an internal investigation commissioned by Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Wood concludes "more soldiers are
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Date:
10/19/2010
The Army's air defense portfolio is taking a beating as the service downsizes its modernization plans. We reported on September 30 that Army leaders want to kill a program called SLAMRAAM that was aimed at fielding an air defense system more capable than the short-range Stinger but more affordable
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Date:
10/14/2010
If you were a betting person, what chances would you give the Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program of actually producing a new system? The GCV is the Army’s attempt to salvage something from the debacle of the Future Combat System program which was sought to create a futuristic system-of-systems
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Date:
10/5/2010
The U.S. Army has been working very hard to reinvent itself. It has published a new Capstone concept that defines the future security environment and broadly what it demands of the Army in the way of capabilities. It has a draft operating concept that defines in more detail the missions the Army
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Date:
7/9/2010
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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Date:
5/21/2010