There are reasons to suspect that the Battle Force 2045 plan for remaking America’s Navy will not come to much. It’s too ambitious and the timing is all wrong. However, there are elements of the plan that are both affordable and enjoy broad political support. One of those elements is sealift, the mission of expeditiously transporting U.S. military supplies to distant war zones. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper stated in unveiling Battle Force 2045 on October 6 that sealift would [ Read More…]

For all the political controversy surrounding the U.S. Postal Service in recent months, there is one issue on which Democrats, Republicans and Independents should be able to come together: the need to better track packages from overseas so that opioids are intercepted, rather than delivered. On October 24, 2018, President Trump signed the Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention, or STOP, Act. A centerpiece of the law is a provision to require advanced electronic data (AED) on all incoming packages by [ Read More…]

On October 6, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper unveiled his outline of what the future U.S. naval fleet should look like. Called Battleforce 2045, there would be more of everything, except for large-deck, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. When it comes to big carriers, Esper thinks the Navy might get by with as few as eight, rather than its present 11. That would mean only two supercarriers forward on a typical day, but Esper says the Navy should fill the resulting gap [ Read More…]

Despite its successes, Army modernization now faces a day of reckoning. Regardless of who wins the November election, the flow of resources which has undergirded modernization is almost certain to decline. The Army’s leaders will have to conduct serious triage on its portfolios of priority modernization efforts. It will also have to revise its modernization strategy overall, in order to achieve a better balance of upgrades and new starts. I have written more on this subject here.

Technologies spawned by the information revolution are transforming every facet of the global economy. Like any other upheaval, the information revolution will produce winners and losers. If Washington does not want its military to be one of the losers, it must do more to assure the health of the domestic technology sector. Many of the tax, trade, immigration and regulatory policies bearing upon the sector’s wellbeing seem to assume that no matter what the government does, America will always be [ Read More…]

Every nation strives for security. Although the phrase “national security” in common usage has military overtones, there are other elements as well—economic, demographic, cultural. For instance, energy security was a major concern of U.S. policymakers in recent decades, and environmental security related to climate change now garners similar interest. What every facet of national security has in common, though, is that it is shaped by technology. The wide oceans separating North America from the Eurasian land mass were once thought [ Read More…]

The president of the United States has unilateral authority to order the launch of nuclear weapons. It is a paradox of the modern age that the most fearsome power the nation’s chief executive possesses is the one power not subject to checks and balances. So when a president’s capacity to function is constrained by medical or psychological issues, there is cause for concern. President Trump’s hospitalization following a positive test for Covid-19, and the administering of powerful drugs to fight [ Read More…]

Long Range Precision Fires (LRPF) are the U.S. Army’s number one modernization priority. The immediate goal of this program is to restore the Army’s erstwhile advantage in indirect fires, both artillery and rockets/missiles. Even more importantly, the program has a long-term goal of having LRPF play a central role in a new American way of war, based on achieving an information advantage in order to conduct coordinated fires of all types across multiple domains. Reinforcing this ability will pose multiple [ Read More…]

The United States’ military is evolving towards a new way of warfare designed to counter adversaries’ efforts to develop a dominant anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capability. This new approach focuses on the proliferation of land units and  air, sea and space platforms employing rapid maneuver, long-range fires, and non-traditional effects such as electronic and cyber warfare to confuse, degrade and eventually disintegrate opposing forces. The pace and intensity of combat will be greater than ever before. This means that U.S. forces [ Read More…]

The defense department plans to build a Space Sensor Layer to track hypersonic weapons. It will likely be concentrated in low earth orbit and be able to track hundreds of incoming weapons simultaneously. Raytheon Technologies is among the companies vying for the contract to architect the system. This week I talked with one of the company’s experts and discovered that the core principles governing its approach are similar to those shaping the approach to other military missions. The system must [ Read More…]