Defense
Rumsfeld’s Travails are Temporary
Sunday's Washington Post contained a critique of how defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has conducted the Pentagon’s strategy review. The story made it sound like dissatisfaction is centered in the . . .
Land Warfare: Heavy Metal Has a Future
Defense intellectuals have a way of making everything sound too complicated. Consider the notion of "asymmetric" threats. The term came into vogue in the mid-1990's to describe aggressors who compete in . . .
Military Transformation: The Danger of Convenient Ideas
In America's centennial year of 1876, barely a decade after it had enrolled over a million soldiers in its ranks, the U.S. Army was cut to a postwar low of 24,000 personnel -- in a nation of 46 million. Few . . .
Comanche Chopper is Vital to Objective Force
The heart and soul of the Army's plan to transform itself into a 21st Century force, its so-called Objective Force, is the Future Combat System (FCS). As described in Army publications and briefings, the FCS is . . .
The Myth of Aircraft Carrier Vulnerability
On the eve of America's entry into World War One, Senator Hiram Johnson warned that "the first casualty when war comes is truth." It turns out that the truth about some military programs is obscure . . .
Air Power’s Proponents May Be Its Biggest Problem
You don't need to be a Pentagon insider to know where the Rumsfeld defense review is headed. It's going to nudge the military’s force posture in the direction of aerospace and sea power, at the expense of . . .
The Limits of Transformation
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has surprised almost everyone in the Pentagon by taking seriously President Bush's campaign rhetoric about the need to transform the military. The conventional wisdom . . .
Army Leads Transformation
For almost a decade now, the central focus of defense planning in the U.S. and the source of innumerable articles, has been how to transform the military that won the Cold War into a 21st Century . . .
Key Challenges Confronting Naval Shipbuilding II
The Navy’s shipbuilding budget is underfunded. As a result, the service is only building enough vessels to sustain a 200-ship fleet over the long run, rather than the 300 ships called for in the 1997 Quadrennial . . .
Naval Air Power, 2001
The U.S. Navy’s twelve aircraft carriers and ten carrier air wings are the most powerful expression of American military might in the post-communist era. Combined with other sea-based forces, they have . . .