Early Warning Blog
Working Group: ICBMs Still Vital To Deterrence
Last Friday the Lexington Institute sponsored a working group on the future of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile force. The meeting attracted diverse participation from government, industry and academia, with conversation centering on how the ICBM force is likely to fare in the Obama Administration's nuclear posture review and arms control negotiations. The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) will expire in December, and the posture review is being used to determine what kind of force the U.S. can accept under a successor agreement.
Predicting Future Threats: Poor Track Record Casts Doubt On Current Plans
One thing I've noticed after working in the policy trenches for 31 years is few things move in a straight line for long. Whether it is political polls, economic developments or social trends, our big, unruly nation seems to change awfully quickly.
Tailhook Tells It Like It Is.
You want to hear about future threats? You have to leave Washington DC, where high-intensity warfare is deader than disco. Warnings about tough adversaries were all over last weekend’s Tailhook convention of Navy carrier aviators in Reno, Nevada.
SCIENCE FICTION COMES TO COMBAT
When I was a kid, I used to read a lot of science fiction. Books like Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein. As I grew older, though, I began to realize I was living science fiction -- things were changing so fast
RON SUGAR: THE PAGE TURNS ON AN AMERICAN SUCCESS STORY
When retiring Northrop Grumman chairman Ron Sugar was six years old, his parents packed the family into a old Ford and moved from Toronto to Los Angeles. The trip to California took nine days, and their destination was one of the toughest neighborhoods in South L.A. His parents, both high-school dropouts, operated a beauty salon, and Ron did his best to avoid the kids with knives who frequented school grounds.
Have We Forgotten Why We Have An Air Force?
What are the key attributes of airpower, those essential capabilities that are central to the reason the nation maintains an independent Air Force? This question was posed to me recently by a senior Air Force general officer with the following codicil: “These attributes are the ones over which senior leaders should be willing to resign rather than see lost.”
A Future Trade War? It’s Already Here.
There's a lot of talk in Washington right now that President Obama's tariff on Chinese tires and the dispute over Airbus subsidies could lead to a trade war. That's kind of odd, since the tariff was levied pursuant to agreements China made when it joined the World Trade Organization, and the Airbus subsidies case originated in U.S. efforts to enforce free-trade rules.
We Have Seen The Future Of Warfare – And It’s Not Insurgency
The 2009 National Intelligence Strategy (NIS) has warned that the U.S. increasingly is being challenged in cyber space and warns that China is particularly active in this new domain. This warning comes on the heels of recent massive cyber attacks against Estonia and, in the context of Russia’s military campaign last year, Georgia.
China Using Trade Earnings To Make Strategic Purchases
The United States has incurred a trade deficit of over a trillion dollars with China since the decade began. As a result, the Chinese government has accumulated vast reserves of dollars. A prevailing fantasy in Washington is that Beijing will keep using these dollar reserves mainly to buy U.S. debt, so that Washington does not need to mend its spendthrift ways.
QDR: Future Conflict Scenarios Raise Serious Concerns
If the Department of Defense (DoD) finds it increasingly difficult to manage successfully a relatively limited conflict in Afghanistan, why would it be even considering the possibility of even more challenging scenarios in Eastern Europe, South Asia and the Far East?