CACI is not in the habit of bragging. So few people probably realize that the $6 billion company headquartered in suburban Washington, has become a global leader in defeating unmanned aircraft systems. In fact, it may be the global leader: it has the most deployed systems, the biggest signals library, and the best reviews from customers. Over a dozen federal agencies rely on its SkyTracker suite of solutions for counter-drone technology. Explaining why it has emerged as a leader is [ Read More…]

There is a real danger that in the drive to find someone to blame for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, we will lose sight of the important lessons learned in the fight against them and other violent extremists there. The U.S. military did a remarkable job projecting and sustaining forces half a world away and conducting military operations under the most pressing conditions. It pivoted from a focus on a high-tech fight against the Soviet Union to combatting the equivalent [ Read More…]

Last week Lockheed Martin unveiled the factory of the future at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. It’s a fully digitized, easily reconfigurable space of 215,000 square feet in which automation and virtual reality figure prominently to ease the challenge of building cutting-edge warfighting systems fast and affordably. But the new factory may be something more than that: a model for what American manufacturing must become, and how the federal government can help it to get there. Lockheed Martin [ Read More…]

The threat to the United States military and the homeland posed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAS), also known as drones, continues to grow. Russia, China, and Iran are working hard to compete with the West in the development and deployment of military drones. So too are smaller nations as well as non-state actors of various stripes. Over the past several years, the world has seen a marked increase in the number of drone attacks on both military and civilian targets. The scale and [ Read More…]

The Biden administration is prioritizing the protection of critical U.S. infrastructure, but its plans are missing one big target for adversaries: the American legal system. Repressive, adversarial state actors are using the United States’ legal system to advance their nefarious causes. Efforts to secure America’s cyberspace, its physical infrastructure, its energy network, and its election processes are welcome developments but will be for naught if U.S. leaders fail to protect the foundations of democracy. If the Biden administration truly wants [ Read More…]

The United States has long maintained a nuclear “triad” of land-based ICBMs, sea-based ballistic missiles, and bombers. Now some members of Congress are proposing that Washington forego replacing its aged ICBMs. That would be dangerous, because the number of targets an enemy would need to take out in a disarming first strike would fall from nearly 500 to barely 20. Bombers could be wiped out if not on alert, leaving only a dozen ballistic-missile submarines to deter nuclear Armageddon. If [ Read More…]

Recently France withdrew from a NATO operation in the Mediterranean Sea, apparently in response to the unwillingness of other alliance members to address aggression on the part of Turkish warships against their official allies. This development speaks to a growing pattern of conflict between Turkey and other NATO members, though previously it had been mostly Greece that was the recipient of Turkey’s ire. France has accused Turkey of targeting one of its warships during the inspection of another vessel for [ Read More…]

There is a perennial debate about force sizing that will likely influence the Biden administration’s global posture review. The debate is often referred to in professional literature as the choice between presence and warfighting. Presence in this case means having sufficient forces to deploy forward in hot spots and thereby deter aggression. Warfighting, on the other hand, means having the ability to fight and win a major conflict if one breaks out. There are at least two paradoxes involved here. [ Read More…]

The recent decision by the Swiss Federal Council (SFC) to acquire the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) as Switzerland’s next-generation air defense aircraft has made it all but official: the F-35 is fast becoming the free world’s dominant fighter. The Swiss conducted a comprehensive technical evaluation which found that the F-35A “has the lowest operating costs of all of the candidates evaluated.” The SFC’s decision follows close on the heels of similar choices made by Poland and the UAE. It [ Read More…]

The ultimate customer for defense-industry output is the U.S. political system. That’s who pays the bills. So we shouldn’t be surprised if electoral politics influences how much money goes to weapons, and where the weapons are made. President Biden will likely be no different from his predecessors in trying to leverage weapons spending to win votes for his party. That dynamic will be most apparent in battleground states where a shift of 1-2% of the electorate could be decisive in [ Read More…]