Author Archives: Daniel Gouré, Ph.D.
The Army Needs To Ensure Continuity Of Operations At The Radford Ammo Plant Issue Brief
The Army is in the process of recompeting the contract for a private company to operate and maintain what is the foundation of its ammunition supply chain, the Radford Army Ammunition Plant (RFAAP) in southwest Virginia. RFAAP is [Read More...]
Obama Policies Weaken Economy And Security There is a growing sense among observers that the Obama Administration does not understand or even, perhaps, care about the defense industrial base. In the midst of the deepest recession since the 1930s, the administration has allowed the Department of [Read More...]
Global Economy, Repeating Mistakes of the 1930s There is general agreement among economists that the financial relationship between the United States and China is unsustainable over the long-term. At present, this country relies on foreigners, specifically China, to finance our trade deficits — thereby allowing us to [Read More...]
The Overblown Anti-Access, Area Denial Threat For more than a decade, the national security community has spilt an amazing amount of ink discussing the so-called anti-access, area denial (AA/AD) threat. For the few of you who have been spared the barrage of reports and discussions of [Read More...]
Adversaries That Innovate Are Our Greatest Challenge The greatest challenge to U.S. national security today is not any specific foreign weapons system, terrorist leader or hostile military organization. Rather, what is new and challenging for U.S. national security is the extent to which our adversaries and competitors [Read More...]
Budget Woes Could Mean Greater Reliance On Contractors In April, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates declared his intention to reform how the defense department uses contractors. In order to improve the way the Pentagon manages major acquisition programs, he declared an intent to replace 11,000 contractors with 9,000 [Read More...]
Politicizing Intelligence On Iran There has been a spate of reports that the U.S. intelligence community is considering rewriting its famous 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which concluded that Iran did not have an active program to develop nuclear weapons. These reports raise two [Read More...]
China Moves To Corner Market On Critical “Rare Earth” Metals Readers of the Lexington Institute’s blog are familiar with our concern about the deindustrialization of the United States. The loss of manufacturing capability and hundreds of thousands of generally well-paying jobs means lower national economic performance, a deepening trade deficit, [Read More...]
Iraq’s Bad Credit Rating Shouldn’t Block U.S. Military Sales One of the pillars of the Obama Administration’s approach to national security is called building partnership capacity. The idea is to help partner countries do more for themselves so that the United States is able to do less. This concept [Read More...]
Stryker Is Best Army Move In Many Years Remember when the Stryker armored fighting vehicle was the Army’s red-headed stepchild? The brainchild of then Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki, Stryker was criticized for being wheeled instead of tracked, too light or too heavy, unable to sustain itself [Read More...]