There was a time within living memory when America was the world’s biggest builder of commercial oceangoing vessels, and its ships carried a third of global trade. Those days are long gone. The U.S. now typically produces less than ten such vessels annually, compared with over a thousand in China. And barely one-percent of U.S. trade is carried on U.S.-registered ships. The U.S.-flagged commercial fleet consists of less than 200 oceangoing vessels, in a global fleet of 44,000 vessels. As [ Read More…]

The Marine Corps and Navy are moving aggressively to redefine how they will conduct amphibious operations and reshape their fleets of amphibious warships. Perhaps they are moving too fast. The Sea Services are conducting wargames, exercises, and experiments to validate a radically new approach to amphibious operations. However, the Navy has already awarded concept design studies for a new Light Amphibious Warship (LAW) and plans to procure the first of this new class in FY2023. The trouble with this acquisition [ Read More…]

The Government Accountability Office put out a report earlier this month purporting to show that the F-35 fighter costs more to operate and sustain than U.S. military services can afford to pay. Somehow, though, the report failed to mention that F-35 is already more reliable and maintainable than the aircraft it will be replacing–not to mention more effective at executing key missions. This is just the latest in a long series of GAO products criticizing the most successful military aircraft [ Read More…]

The U.S. Postal Service is in dire need of a clean, modern, and customized mail truck fleet and after rigorous and careful study has a sensible plan to get there. But Congress could mess this up and create additional problems by demanding an all-electric, non-emitting fleet as soon as possible while also imposing huge mandates on USPS which will needlessly cost the American people billions. Congressional interference will have far ranging negative consequences including higher costs, a dirtier fleet, and [ Read More…]

The United States’ reentry to the Paris Climate Change Agreement on February 19, 2021 pledged the U.S. to reduce its emissions by more than it is currently projected to achieve. The solution to this dilemma is to embrace nuclear power. Despite being an effective source of clean energy, nuclear power currently makes up less than 20% of the United States’ total electricity production. There is room to expand nuclear energy production, which will help meet the Paris Climate Change Agreement [ Read More…]

The U.S. Air Force wants to buy 140-160 commercial derivative tankers following completion of the present KC-46 production run in 2029. The effort is called a bridge tanker because it is the transition to a next-generation aerial refueler. Boeing and Airbus are both are likely to bid, in a replay of the competition that Boeing won ten years ago. There isn’t much reason to expect it will go differently this time since they are bidding the same basic airframes. The [ Read More…]

The Department of Defense (DoD) has mercifully put the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) out of its misery. Along with the announcement of JEDI’s cancelation, the Pentagon said that it would begin the process of implementing a new, enterprise-wide cloud. However, unlike JEDI, which the Department argued had to be a single award to ensure efficiency and security, the new contract, known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC), will be what is called an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity award with multiple vendors [ Read More…]

The U.S. Navy is facing a crisis: it is too small to meet the operational requirements being imposed on it. Furthermore, in terms of overall capacity, it is falling behind China, which is building warships and submarines at a prodigious rate. If the Biden administration and Congress want to help the Navy build up the fleet while mitigating the risk of a delay in planned new shipbuilding programs, they need to fund a new multi-year procurement for the advanced DDG-51 [ Read More…]

President Biden’s executive order promoting competition by halting the trend toward market concentration is not a blanket prohibition on corporate mergers. In some cases, mergers are necessary to prevent key market segments from consolidating to monopoly. A case in point is the rocket motor business, where dominant player Northrop Grumman could force its sole major competitor, Aerojet Rocketdyne, out of the large solid rocket motor market. This process was already well under way before the Federal Trade Commission allowed Northrop [ Read More…]

The 2021 NATO summit put members on the record that they would build a flexible, agile, and resilient force architecture “with the right forces in the right place at the right time.” U.S. and NATO forces along the eastern flank facing Russia are the equivalent of the stand-in force Commandant David Berger envisions for the U.S. Marine Corps. They will be operating from the start of a conflict within the engagement zones of Russian long-range anti-access and area denial capabilities. [ Read More…]