Air Force officials say that the ongoing budget impasse in Congress could result in their service delaying modernization plans and canceling training exercises critical to readiness. The problem extends beyond the possibility of operating for part of fiscal 2024 under a continuing resolution rather than a real budget. If a continuing resolution remains in force beyond December 31, funding would dip to 1% less than the enacted level for 2023. If that situation persists through March 31, then the lower [ Read More…]

The U.S. military cannot fight a high-end conflict without a coalition of friends and allies. In order to conduct effective joint operations, all parties must be able to share information rapidly across secure networks. Unfortunately, adversaries such as China and Russia are conducting continuous cyberattacks on critical allied networks, often with significant success. For the U.S. to have confidence in sharing data with allies, those countries must begin now to implement a program of Zero Trust cybersecurity. I have written [ Read More…]

The U.S. president possesses sole authority to launch the nation’s nuclear weapons. That power is absolute; there is no test of competency, and no one beneath the president in the chain of command has the authority to countermand a launch order. Conversely, even in an extreme emergency, not one has the authority to countermand an order not to launch. The president’s unique power in such matters results from the requirements of strategic deterrence, which demand both an ability to retaliate [ Read More…]

At today’s meeting of the U.S. Department of State’s Advisory Committee on International Postal Delivery Services, Lexington Institute’s Paul Steidler applauded the State Department for its work in advocating for reform at the Universal Postal Union (UPU) and urged it to continue to do so. His remarks are below and in the PDF here. Let me begin by giving strong thanks to Stuart Smith for all he has done to prepare the United States for the Universal Postal Union’s (UPU’s) [ Read More…]

Below are comments filed by the Lexington Institute’s Paul Steidler to the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice’s docket on proposed new merger guidelines. The comments are also in the PDF document here and online as part of the docket here. The proposed merger guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice are disconcerting and indeed dangerous because they are so broad and hostile to business combinations that lead to economic growth, substantial innovation, job [ Read More…]

Read the full study as a PDF here. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is set to launch a program in 2024 that will put hundreds of millions of opioid pills in the U.S. mail as consumers mail unused narcotics back to drug companies for destruction. At best, this will be an expensive, inefficient way to dispose of these highly addictive substances. It is quite likely a significant amount of opioids will be stolen and sold illegally, resulting in many [ Read More…]

In an age of global surveillance and long-range precision strike weapons, recent wargames have reanimated an old argument about the survivability of aircraft carriers. Critics have long asserted that large surface ships, especially aircraft carriers, are too vulnerable to play an effective role in a high-end conflict with China. But reality is much more complex than what wargames can reflect. The military forces on both sides are currently in a state of flux. The U.S. military is investing heavily in [ Read More…]

The U.S. Army is in the midst of a generational transformation that will carry it from the industrial age into the digital era. The centerpiece of this shift isn’t a weapon system, it’s a warfighting network that enables what the service calls “multi-domain operations.” Without such a network, soldiers won’t know where enemy forces are or which weapons are best suited to defeating them. But it isn’t enough just to have a network; it has to be accessible, flexible, resilient [ Read More…]

On July 28, Army acquisition chief Douglas Bush signed a decision memorandum signaling that his service will embark on an aggressive upgrade of the Abrams tank. When it begins fielding, the M1A3 variant of Abrams will be more lethal, more mobile, more survivable and more sustainable than any other main battle tank in the world. It has to be to fight and win in the kind of warfare the world is seeing today in Ukraine. I have written a commentary [ Read More…]

Without question, the war in Ukraine is full of lessons for observers and analysts willing to learn. Many of the takeaways focus on the impacts on warfare of new or advanced technologies and systems. These include the effects of long-range precision strike systems, the growing role of unmanned systems, the importance of air and missile defenses, and the need for highly sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities. One lesson for which sufficient data already exists is the vulnerability of traditional command posts (CPs). [ Read More…]