Author Archives: Daniel Gouré, Ph.D.
The Navy Is Not Serious Enough About The Threat From Sea Mines While the Army has spent tens of billions of dollars to counter the dangers posed by land mines and improvised explosive devices, the U.S. Navy has done relatively little against sea mines. In the first Gulf War, Iraqi sea mines [Read More...]
Energy Policy: The Green Logic Of More Nuclear Plants We’ve come a long way from the days when nuclear energy was universally reviled by environmentalists. Because nuclear power generates almost no carbon emissions, many environmentalists have come to view it as a far better source of electricity than fossil [Read More...]
Russia and America Headed for Arms Control Collision The future of strategic arms control between the United States and Russia does not look good. Yes, Presidents Dmitri Medvedev and Barack Obama recently signed a joint understanding pledging to complete negotiation of a new strategic arms agreement that will [Read More...]
Gates Crusade Hurts the Army In his single-minded determination to win our current wars, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is gutting all the services’ modernization programs. Even the Army is not immune. On April 6, he cancelled the manned vehicle portion of the Future Combat [Read More...]
The New Face Of Conventional War (II) The Army’s effort to define its future force structure suffers from a critical weakness. This is an inability to provide any clarity regarding the future of conflict or the Army’s role in it. In almost breathless tones, Army documents conjure [Read More...]
The New Face Of Conventional War (I) The new leadership in the Pentagon is fixated on the idea of asymmetric threats at the expense of conventional warfare. Their strategic thinking is driven by the belief that the threats are moving from the center of the conflict spectrum [Read More...]
Don’t Throw Away The VH-71 On April 6 of this year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made one good decision and one bad one. The good one was to terminate the program to build a new presidential helicopter, the VH-71. The program cost had doubled [Read More...]
The Counterinsurgency Crowd May Have It Wrong The counterinsurgency mafia here in Washington would have you believe that the way to win the kind of asymmetric struggle we face in Afghanistan and elsewhere is by turning the U.S. Army and Marine Corps into a hypertrophic neighborhood watch. [Read More...]
Nuclear Weapons Industrial Base Needs Attention President Obama is not the first or only Chief Executive to support in principle the idea of a nuclear-free world. But his Administration has clearly put the process on a fast track with an agreement between Washington and Moscow to [Read More...]
Pay Attention To The Arctic Region Climate change is being felt everywhere but possibly with no more significant strategic impacts than in the Arctic region. Global warming is melting portions of the polar ice cap, opening up new maritime transportation routes and creating new opportunities to [Read More...]