All the services understand that both their legacy fixed facilities (such as Guam) and new expedient bases will be subject to an an expanded array of threats, including attempts by unconventional forces to penetrate their perimeters. Expedient bases face the additional challenge of providing perimeter security while simultaneously setting up a new base, conducting missions, and eventually conducting a withdrawal. While the main threat to military facilities may come from enemy ballistic and cruise missiles, it is time to consider [ Read More…]

When Barack Obama became president in 2009, he almost immediately set about scaling back missile defense efforts for protecting the American homeland that he had inherited from his predecessor. In the end, he killed almost everything. The only program that remained, Ground-based Midcourse Defense, languished for years. Then Obama’s team discovered that all the warnings they had received about North Korea’s nuclear program were true. So they had to begin building back what they had cut or killed. Will President [ Read More…]

President Trump’s national security policies are very different from the bipartisan posture that has prevailed in the postwar era. Having played a central role for decades in fashioning that postwar consensus, Joe Biden has left an extensive political record of how he would modify the Trump approach if elected president. In essence, Biden would revert to the Obama agenda. Alliances would strengthened, arms control efforts would be renewed, overseas military interventions would be more likely, multilateralism would become commonplace in [ Read More…]

The Navy and Marine Corps are proposing radical changes to their force structures in line with new concepts for maritime and expeditionary operations. All eyes are on what is new, such as the Navy’s desire for fleets of unmanned surface and subsurface vessels and, with respect to amphibious warfare, at least two new proposed ship classes. What has gotten relatively less attention is the growing importance of air power to the Sea Services’ ability to conduct agile, distributed operations across [ Read More…]

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…]