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Although better known for operating helicopters, the Army's aviation community maintains a small fleet of fixed-wing planes for conducting intelligence gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance. Fixed-wing aircraft typically can loiter over areas of interest longer than rotorcraft, fly higher,
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Date:
6/19/2013
The greatest number of Air Force (Army Air Corps in those days) planes destroyed or damaged on a single day was 205 during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. An additional 123 Navy aircraft were destroyed or damaged for a total of 328. To put these losses in perspective, the average daily loss
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Date:
6/18/2013
Over the last few weeks the world has learned a lot about domestic surveillance programs conducted by the super-secret National Security Agency since 9-11. However, there hasn't been much written about why NSA felt it had to turn to companies like Microsoft and Google to keep track of terrorists.
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Date:
6/18/2013
Over the past year, the two makers of large-body commercial airliners, Boeing and Airbus, have each experienced sudden and unanticipated problems with their premier new airplanes. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was temporarily grounded while the company worked out a fix to the overheating of the airplane’s
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Date:
6/17/2013
It is difficult to believe that anyone could view Pablo Picasso's great painting Guernica and not be moved. It is not just that the painting is great art. It is one of the most evocative statements about the horrors of war. Perhaps more important still, it is a clear declaration to all who see it
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Date:
6/14/2013
Calling the F-35 fighter "our highest priority conventional warfare weapon system," Under Secretary of Defense Frank Kendall yesterday signaled that the tri-service program is now progressing smoothly toward initial operational capability in 2015. Speaking before an annual stakeholder conference
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Date:
6/14/2013
All the precincts have reported in and all the votes have been counted. It is official; a team led by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) and Embraer is definitely and absolutely the winner of the competition to build the Light Air Support (LAS) aircraft for the Afghan military. The General Accountability
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Date:
6/13/2013
Deloitte’s most recent assessment of the global defense environment should be required reading for everyone involved in national security. The 2013 Global Defense Outlook assesses the defense policies and budgets of 50 countries whose total defense spending comprises 97 percent of the world’s
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Date:
6/12/2013
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has embraced Teddy Kennedy's political legacy in not allowing her progressive beliefs to obscure what is best for America's warfighters and the Bay State's workers. Warren has closed ranks with the rest of the state's congressional delegation to oppose
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Date:
6/12/2013
The Marine Corps has a plan for emerging victorious from the Pentagon's seemingly endless rounds of budget-cutting. It focuses on explaining the enduring value of sea-based expeditionary forces, as reflected in three measures of military merit: relevance, readiness and realism. Not only are Marine
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Date:
6/11/2013
They say there are no new ideas in Washington. A good example of this are the various recent proposals to reform defense spending and the way the Department of Defense operates in order to cut overhead expenses and avoid catastrophic cuts in military capabilities. These proposals generally fall
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Date:
6/11/2013
According to a story that appeared this week in Germany’s Spiegel news weekly, an internal NATO study finds the Alliance woefully deficient in many critical military capabilities. The report identifies 15 major areas of deficiency. These include: inadequate supplies of precision munitions,
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Date:
6/10/2013
Many wonder if the cancellation of phase four of the European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) was motivated at least in part by Russia’s strong opposition. Moscow was the number-one critic of phase four of the EPAA because the plan included interceptors the Russians claimed would undermine their
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Date:
6/10/2013
For a brief moment last week, it seemed as though both the Left and the Right were going to unite in opposition to the National Security Agency's "domestic surveillance" program. That very destructive outcome was averted when first the Director of National Intelligence and then the President firmly
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Date:
6/10/2013
The National Security Agency's PRISM program to monitor suspicious overseas Internet traffic is provoking widespread concern, despite President Obama's firm defense of the effort. Contrary to some of the criticism, though, PRISM isn't about spying on Americans, or even foreign nationals living
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Date:
6/7/2013
Samuel Johnson once observed that "when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." This observation apparently applies to defense intellectuals. As successive waves of budget cuts coupled with steady increases in indirect and overhead expenses threatens
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Date:
6/7/2013
The future of the U.S. military will be decided not by any single weapons platform or service. It will be determined by how well it can acquire, process, exploit and disseminate information. All the military services are working to improve their networks. They also need to develop a cross-service
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Date:
6/6/2013
The Boeing Company was founded in Washington State's Puget Sound region 97 years ago, and until the closing days of the 20th Century it didn't have much in the way of operations elsewhere. But beginning with its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas in 1997, the company gradually began to expand the
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Date:
6/6/2013
The future of the strategic pivot to the Asia-Pacific region and, perhaps, that of the U.S. Navy as well could hang on the fate of one major procurement program: the Virginia-class nuclear submarine. Simply put, the Virginia-class is the Navy’s single most capable platform, able to conduct anti-submarine
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Date:
6/5/2013
We are still at the early stages of the IT revolution. The performance of sensors and computers continues to improve even as they shrink in size and morph into different shapes. Cars, household appliances, industrial machinery, farm equipment, roads and bridges are now run or monitored by computers
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Date:
6/4/2013
After spending a dozen years fighting enemies that lacked air forces and air defenses, the Pentagon is beginning to focus again on state-based adversaries possessing sizable arsenals. Syria could be an early test case, because influential members of Congress favor creating a no-fly zone over the
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Date:
6/3/2013
What's wrong with this picture? Three months after the sequestration provisions of the 2011 Budget Control Act triggered so-called "across the board" cuts to defense and domestic discretionary spending, Washington's doing just fine while warfighters at places like Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina
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Date:
5/31/2013
My colleague Loren Thompson is fond of pointing out that the most serious problem facing the U.S. military today and the primary reason it is so difficult to make a compelling case for robust defense spending is that the country lacks an enemy. The President’s speech last week during which he declared
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Date:
5/31/2013
Remember the Future Combat System (FCS)? This was a complex “system-of-systems” which involved manned and unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, advanced weapons systems and sensors, some of them remotely operated and an all-encompassing command, control and communications network to hold it all together.
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Date:
5/30/2013
Yesterday’s story in The Washington Post about a Defense Science Board (DSB) report on Chinese cyber espionage sent a chill through the defense community. The list of major defense programs that Chinese hackers had successfully penetrated amounted to most of America’s military crown jewels.
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Date:
5/29/2013
[Correction: Industry sources say that closure of the Abrams tank line has been delayed by about a year from 2014 to 2015 as a result of additional money provided by Congress. However, the Army is now signaling it may not resume tank upgrades until fiscal 2019 -- two years later than its previous
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Date:
5/29/2013
After downplaying efforts to further reduce the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals in the run-up to 2012 elections, President Obama has returned to the subject in his second term. According to published reports, he is securing support from both Moscow and the Pentagon to cut the permissible number
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Date:
5/28/2013
Nations, like Nature, abhor a vacuum. They must be filled. How they are filled, by whom and with what are the questions. Unlike Nature, which seeks to fill a vacuum with whatever is handy and can be stuffed or sucked into the space available, nations rely on power, relationships and institutions
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Date:
5/28/2013
The most interesting part of President Obama’s speech yesterday at the National Defense University wasn’t his articulate defense of the way his administration had conducted the war on terror or the measure he announced to dial down the intensity if not the scope of future efforts against terrorist
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Date:
5/24/2013
The Department of Defense has released its latest estimates of how much major weapons programs will cost to buy, and it says the price-tag for the biggest program of all is shrinking. The official estimate of the cost to buy 2,457 F-35 aircraft over three decades fell $4.94 billion (1.5 %) in the
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Date:
5/24/2013
It has been almost twenty years since the topics of U.S. national security strategy and defense policy were seriously discussed. For the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. defense establishment was preoccupied with managing the drawdown and the – marginal – recasting of
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Date:
5/23/2013
As U.S. defense budgets decline, possibly by as much as $1 trillion over the next decade, the Pentagon, Congress and defense experts are all on the hunt for ways of reducing the cost of defense without having to gut force structure and modernization. One commonly raised question is whether the Pentagon
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Date:
5/22/2013
The defense sector has become a tale of two cities -- or at least, two zip codes. If you live on Main Street where the defense plants and depots are located, things are looking rather bleak. Contracts are being delayed, capital investments are being slashed, and workers are being furloughed.
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Date:
5/22/2013
As part of its ongoing effort to address the twin challenges of declining defense budgets and increasing threats, the U.S. Air Force has begun a conceptual study to define the future force of 2023. It chose that point in time because that would mark the end of the period of budget sequestration
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Date:
5/21/2013
Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) is the biggest builder of warships in the Western Hemisphere, and maybe the world. It was cobbled together from three previously independent shipyards in 2001 by Northrop Grumman, which spun it off ten years later. The company's financial performance has improved
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Date:
5/21/2013
Under Secretary of Defense for AT&L, Mr. Frank Kendall released the long-awaited revision to the defense department’s signature acquisition reform memorandum, Better Buying Power (BBP): “Implementation Directive for Better Buying Power 2.0 – Achieving Greater Efficiency and Productivity in Defense
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Date:
5/20/2013