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Russia
It takes a crisis to concentrate the mind. Faced with unusually bellicose rhetoric from the regime in Pyongyang, the Obama Administration reversed course on National Missile Defense (NMD) and is rapidly bolstering its theater air and missile defenses in the region. The Department of Defense will
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Date:
4/5/2013
For more than four years, the United States, along with some allies, has been at war with Iran. It is not the kind of war we have come to expect in this region. There was no official declaration of hostilities, U.N. resolution or act of Congress. The war doesn’t involve the use of the armed forces
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Date:
6/1/2012
Global Zero -- an organization whose sole reason for existence, as its name clearly indicates, is to promote the elimination of all nuclear weapons -- has published a new report calling for deep reductions in the U.S. arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons. Despite the prestigious credentials of the
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Date:
5/16/2012
The amusing thing about clichés is that they have a basis in reality. “Stuff” really does happen. So it can be hard to resist using clichéd phrases on occasion because they can be extremely apt.
Having read recent published reports regarding the breakdown in talks between the United States and
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Date:
3/23/2012
Because the Soviet Union is no more, it is relatively easy to both forget that it spent almost a decade in Afghanistan and dismiss the possibility that there is anything to be learned from Moscow’s experience in that long-benighted country. The Soviet Union was one of the big losers, on the world
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Date:
3/20/2012
An election year is a bad time to propose dramatic new national security policies. The Obama Administration has just submitted a fiscal year 2013 federal budget to Congress that the White House Chief of Staff admits has no chance of passage even in the Democratically-controlled Senate. The Pentagon’s
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Date:
2/15/2012
According to The New York Times, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is poised to reveal the Pentagon’s new leaner but not meaner defense strategy. As expected,
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Date:
1/3/2012
Missile defense is coming to Europe. The initial pieces of the Obama Administration’s European Phased Adaptive Architecture (EPAA) are in place. The USS Monterey (CG-61), with the Aegis ballistic missile defense 3.6.1 weapon system and the SM-3 Block IA missile, is currently in theater. This is
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Date:
12/6/2011
In 2009 the Obama Administration cancelled the plan to deploy a version of the U.S. national missile defense system in Europe, the so-called Third Site. Instead, the White House proposed a tailored regional missile defense based on its Phased Adaptive Architecture (PAA) concept that sought to leverage
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Date:
11/28/2011
The conventional wisdom in Washington is that defense budgets will have to be slashed. For many, including the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reduced spending is viewed as an important part of the effort to restore U.S. economic strength. To some, particularly in Congress, defense
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Date:
9/28/2011
The Obama Administration has a troubling habit of pursuing policies that make sense individually but when taken together are at the very best contradictory and at the worst produce dysfunction. In the Middle East the White House says to some despots that they must go but are silent with respect
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Date:
7/18/2011
The past 20 years has been a tale of near-continuous decline for the ex-Soviet military. Once it was the largest military force on the planet. Of late it has fallen to a mere shadow of its former self. So low have the fortunes of Russia’s conventional military fallen that it was barely able to defeat
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Date:
7/12/2011
The announcement that China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy is only one reason to pay renewed attention to the Asia-Pacific region. While not unexpected, the rise of China to superpower status economically is still a major event, one with significant implications for the
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Date:
2/14/2011
The Obama Administration has made much of its efforts to “push the reset” button with respect to the U.S.-Russian relationship. There is a new START agreement providing for modest reductions in the two countries’ strategic arsenals. Washington has gotten Russian agreement to a new round of sanctions
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Date:
6/24/2010
Following its success in negotiating a new START Treaty with Russia, the Obama Administration and the Global Zero posse are energized to move forward on their plan for the elimination all nuclear weapons. Those who think that it is a bad idea for the U.S. to pursue further deep reductions in strategic
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Date:
6/1/2010
Two events this week underscore the Obama Administration’s schizophrenic thinking about the nuclear threat to the United States. The first was the signing of the new START treaty which re-established the centrality of the U.S.-Russian strategic nuclear relationship in global affairs. The second
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Date:
4/15/2010
Yesterday’s op-ed in the New York Times by former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Secretary of State George Schultz (“How to Build on the START Treaty”) is an example of how arms control thinking can run amok. The two former U.S. government officials start by proposing some
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Date:
4/13/2010
Good news: the Obama Administration is seeking to ensure that the U.S. remains the world’s sole superpower. Contrary to the views expressed by critics on the right and left, the administration’s ostensible efforts to reduce nuclear weapons on the way to its announced vision of a world without them,
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Date:
4/8/2010