Last year, the U.S. Navy decided to buy a second flight of the LPD 17 amphibious dock ship, meaning that by mid-century most of the vessels responsible for moving Marines and their equipment will be of that class. It was a smart move and not just because LPD 17 is the most survivable, habitable amphib in history. It is also turning out to be remarkably versatile, a true force multiplier because it can accomplish so many missions from a single [ Read More…]

The Coast Guard’s vigorous push to equip its entire Cutter fleet with deck-mounted surveillance drones offers an interesting window into the service’s expanding mission scope – to include an increased focus upon great power threats and potential military attacks such as small boat raids, submarine missions, enemy surveillance drones and even incoming fire. The Coast Guard is not diminishing its historic and vital mission of defending the homeland against terrorist attacks, narcotics traffic and other kinds of intrusions, per se, [ Read More…]

Last December, the U.S. Army published the latest version of its concept for competing with Russia and China. The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028 (MDO 2028) is intended to guide the Service’s thinking on organizational change, future combat operations and modernization priorities. Today and into the near future, the Army must contend with potential great power adversaries that will have local quantitative superiority. Most significantly, these adversaries have built, and are continually modernizing, an intricate and multi-layered system of [ Read More…]

In the ten years since Pratt & Whitney delivered the first production version of its F135 engine, the F-35 fighter program for which it was intended has taken off. It is now clear the fighter will be flown not only by three U.S. military services, but over a dozen allies. None of that would have been possible without the F135 engine, the most powerful fighter engine ever built. Power, though, is far from being the whole story — F135 is [ Read More…]

Six months after major opioid legislation was enacted, Chinese crime syndicates still send opioids into the US at will through the U.S. Postal Service. More than 47,000 Americans are dying from opioids annually and the fabric of our society is under great stress. It is time for the Postal Service to stop delivering mail and packages from China that do not have advanced electronic data and for law enforcement budgets to be bolstered. Paul Steidler has written a commentary for [ Read More…]

As a result of bipartisan demands at a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing today, the Postmaster General will provide a turnaround business plan by early July. Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) began his questioning of Postmaster General Megan Brennan by noting he had been an advocate for the Postal Service who had spent political capital on its behalf. The Congressman said he was “very upset at a lack of follow-up from you” in reference to a January 4 meeting [ Read More…]

Electromagnetic pulse disturbances are among the most potentially catastrophic and under-addressed vulnerabilities for America’s electric grid. These can occur naturally, or via terrorists and enemy nations. Through a far-ranging executive order, the Trump Administration has launched a game plan to assess and preempt these threats. Lexington Institute’s Paul Steidler has written a commentary for RealClearEnergy about this topic here.

The U.S. Navy is facing an existential crisis in the Western Pacific as China builds up its military at a much faster pace than other players in the region.  Among the various strategies the U.S. Navy is considering in response is to deploy unmanned warships, both submarines and surface vessels, to augment its manned fleet.  The goal is to saturate adversaries with so many tasks that they cannot cope, and thus must rethink their order of battle.  U.S. Navy leaders [ Read More…]

The Department of Defense (DoD) recently announced that two companies, Microsoft and Amazon, made the cut to compete for a contract to build the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI). The decision to allow Microsoft and Amazon to compete head-to-head for JEDI undercuts the arguments by some critics that the contract was wired for the latter. Moreover, even if Amazon were to win JEDI, this amounts to no more than 16 percent of overall Pentagon demand for cloud services. Regardless of [ Read More…]

Great Power competition is back and with it the requirement that the U.S. Army be able to deter heavily armed peer adversaries. In Europe, the Army found itself outnumbered, outranged and outgunned. One of the few steps it could take immediately was to put a bigger gun on its thousands of Stryker IFVs. As an experiment, it added a new gun and turret to a handful of vehicles in one brigade. This was the Stryker Dragoon. This effort proved so [ Read More…]