Defense
Aircraft Carrier (In)Vulnerability
The Navy’s twelve nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are among the most potent expressions of American military power. In recent years, though, there has been growing concern that changing mission . . .
Rumsfeld’s Reformation: The New Defense Secretary Faces Tough Choices
These are difficult days for Donald Rumsfeld. A quarter century after serving as the nation's youngest defense secretary in the years following the Vietnam War, he has returned to the Pentagon to find it in . . .
Comanche: One Means of Assuring America’s Margin of Safety
According to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense will pursue strategic and force planning "to assure that the U.S. invests in the force for the future to assure that we have the . . .
Naval Shipbuilding: Sinking Fast
Like the people they employ and the products they produce, industries have a life-cycle. They are born amidst hope and uncertainty; they grow explosively in adolescence; with luck they reach stable maturity. . .
Jeffords Defection May Be Good News for Defense
Vermont Senator James Jefford's decision on Thursday to exit the Republican Party and overturn President Bush's majority in the upper chamber is being widely interpreted as bad news for the . . .
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 . . .