Northrop Grumman’s acquisition of Orbital ATK is raising doubts about the future of competition in the market for large solid rocket motors.  The Federal Trade Commission has conditioned approval of the transaction on implementation of measures aimed at protecting Northrop’s competitors in the missile business.  However, the Consent Order it has prepared does little to protect Aerojet Rocketdyne, the only other domestic producer of large SRMs.  Because Northrop will be both a missile producer and a supplier of SRMs, it [ Read More…]

On July 26, the Department of Defense (DoD) released the final Request for Proposal (RFP) for its much anticipated and politically sensitive Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud. The solicitation envisions a full and open competition leading to a single award for a contract that could last up to 10 years and be worth $10 billion if all options are exercised to provide commercially-based cloud services. JEDI is the first attempt by DoD to create an enterprise-wide cloud infrastructure capable [ Read More…]

The Navy’s Virginia class of attack submarines is one of the Pentagon’s most successful weapons programs.  It consistently delivers the world’s most capable multi-role submarines on time and on budget.  But the Navy doesn’t have enough attack subs, and that problem is growing: legacy subs are being retired faster than new ones are being commissioned.  That could pose a challenge for warfighters, because few of the missions assigned to attack subs can be performed by other types of vessels.  The [ Read More…]

From the outset, the Trump Administration has been committed both to rebuilding America’s military and revitalizing the industrial base that supports it. To serve both of these goals, the White House made the decision to substantially increase the production of the latest variant of the Abrams main battle tank. In Fiscal Year 2019, the Army will receive 135 Abrams tanks in the state-of-the-art M1A2 System Enhancement Package Version 3 (SEPv3) configuration, a number sufficient to equip 1.5 Armored Brigade Combat [ Read More…]

Over the last two decades, the U.S. Marine Corps has transformed its aviation arm.  The U.S. Army has not; instead, it has upgraded helicopters that debuted during the Cold War.  Efforts to introduce new Army combat helicopters have failed.  Now the Army has an opportunity to try again, in the form of its Future Vertical Lift family of rotorcraft.  If the Army sticks with its existing plan for FVL, it won’t begin bending metal until around 2030.  If, on the [ Read More…]

The U.S. Navy’s Aegis combat system is the most advanced air and missile defense architecture in the world.  It is also the most survivable, given the fact that it is mobile at sea rather than sitting at a fixed site on land.  Aegis is becoming more important to both national and regional missile defense as overseas threats proliferate — partly because threats are becoming more diverse, and partly because upgrades are making Aegis much more capable than it was only [ Read More…]

Damages from natural disasters in 2017 alone cost $306 billion, the most expensive year on record. Flying debris and downed trees from high winds, coastal flooding, and fires in dry regions can cause significant damage to the U.S. electricity system. While utilities encounter different weather-related risks based on local and regional threats, several options are available to boost the resiliency of the power grid. I have written a commentary about this subject for RealClearEnergy here.

As the Nord Stream II pipeline is beginning construction in the Baltic Sea, President Donald Trump warned that Germany has become “captive to Russia.” Representatives in Congress are also worried about European dependence on Russian energy. To ensure stable operation of critical sites, especially military assets abroad, backup power solutions should be an imperative. I have written a commentary for RealClearDefense about this topic here.

For years, law enforcement agencies and others have warned that large amounts of Chinese opioids are flooding into the country via international mail. The Senate should act quickly to stop this.

Russia is a military power primarily because of its large arsenal of nuclear weapons. So central are these weapons to Moscow’s foreign and defense policies that it was even willing to deploy a new long-range, land-based cruise missile in violation of the long-standing Intermediate-Range Nuclear Weapons Treaty to bolster Russian theater nuclear force capabilities. NATO and the U.S. must accept as an absolute priority the need to recreate a solid, credible and capable escalation ladder with clearly delineated and identifiable [ Read More…]