Author Archives: Daniel Gouré, Ph.D.
Can Another BRAC Be In The Pentagon’s Future? The Department of Defense is struggling to figure out how it will absorb its share of the $400 billion in budget reductions called for by President Obama. DoD has sought refuge in a comprehensive strategic review intended to weed out [Read More...]
CSIS Study Pounds Final Nail Into Insourcing’s Coffin For the past two years the Department of Defense (DoD) has been pursuing a mirage. This false vision is that the Pentagon can both save money and perform better by replacing a significant fraction of its private contractor workforce with [Read More...]
The Libyan Intervention And The End Of COIN Over the past decade, the U.S. military have mastered the fine art of counterinsurgency, or COIN. When the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan began, the military had neither the theories nor capabilities to practice counterinsurgency. Slowly, painfully, it developed the [Read More...]
Putting New Energy Into The Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle Program We are about to see the results of the Army’s latest effort to fix its broken acquisition system. The Army currently is evaluating three proposals for its new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). Last year, confronting the likelihood of a procurement [Read More...]
U.S. Needs Consistency In Its Arms Sales Policy Over the past several years the U.S. government has pursued a policy of aggressively promoting the sale of advanced military equipment to the Middle East and South Asia. Just last year the administration agreed to a massive arms sale to [Read More...]
A “Warren Buffett” Approach To Defense Industry Would Not Include Insourcing Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn claims that the Department of Defense (DoD) is taking a long-term view of its defense industrial base, one that seeks to ensure that the private sector remains profitable. According to an article in Bloomberg, [Read More...]
The bin Laden Raid Black Hawk And The Battle For Stealth The successful raid that killed Osama bin Laden has generated all kinds of public and professional interest. One of the most intriguing aspects of the operation was the use of what appears to be a modified MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. [Read More...]
Arab Spring Reveals Deep Social And Cultural Divisions The wave of revolutions that swept Europe and eventually much of the world between the late Eighteenth and mid-Twentieth Centuries reflected the desires of the economically and politically disenfranchised for a measure of power. The current tsunami of unrest that [Read More...]
The bin Laden Raid And The Case For High Defense Spending How are the U.S. military and intelligence communities being rewarded for their spectacular success in getting Osama bin Laden? There has been lots of praise for the enormous effort undertaken by intelligence analysts to find and fix bin Laden’s location. [Read More...]
Presidential Helicopter Recompete May Show That Pentagon Finally Has The Acquisition Process Right In April, 2009 as part of his effort to change the culture in the Department of Defense, Secretary Robert Gates cancelled the competition for the VH-71, a new presidential helicopter. The preceding competition produced a vehicle that was overdesigned and [Read More...]