Early Warning Blog
If Joint Radio Dies, Warfighters Will Too During the Cold War, America's military services acquired a diverse collection of radios without much oversight or coordination. As a result, the joint force today is saddled with an aging inventory of incompatible systems that often fails to provide adequate communications in combat. The sheer cost of maintaining so many different radios is huge, but the bigger burden comes when warfighters can't reach each other in life-threatening situations. Some of them die. Or they lose fights that might have been won with better connectivity.
Obama Popularity Stabilizes, Brightening Dem Outlook After a steep fall from Inauguration Day through late August, President Obama's job approval rating has stabilized for three weeks right around his 2008 vote, which was 52.9%. We actually saw a similar pattern last summer, when Senator McCain closed the gap with Senator Obama at the end of August, and even pulled a tad ahead in early September 2008. Then Obama pulled away for good in mid-September.
What Peace Dividend? War Costs Going Up, Not Down One of the unspoken assumptions of the Obama game plan for governance was that lots of money could be freed up for domestic programs if the military got out of Iraq.
Navy Speeds Up F-35 It’s official. Commander Sara “Clutch” Joyner told the big crowd at Tailhook 09 in Reno over the weekend that the Navy air warfare staff is indeed moving F-35C initial operating capability to 2014. That’s a year earlier than the planned date of 2015, and Joyner said it was all about getting the F-35 out to the fleet as soon as possible.
Air Force Sees Need For More Anti-Missile Capabilities According to a recently published white paper, the Air Force believes that it faces a growing asymmetric disadvantage against the growing ballistic missile threat. Based on the 2008 Unified Engagement joint war game, the white paper went on to state that “In future fights there will not be enough air defense assets to cover all our needs even against a moderately developed adversary.” Yet, the Obama Administration has cancelled programs and reduced spending on missile defenses.
Homeland Security: Focus First On Biggest Threats On the eighth anniversary of September 11, the media and cyberspace will be filled with articles and commentaries assessing the extent to which Americans are safer now from the threat of catastrophic terrorism. There is no question that much has been done to improve the nation’s security against terrorist attack and even natural disasters. Yet, the problem is so daunting, the targets the terrorists might strike so many and the ways they may go about causing us harm so varied that it is difficult to be confident that over the long-term we will not be struck again.
WTO Nukes Tanker Plan: Time To Revisit Dual Sourcing The World Trade Organization has handed Boeing's friends on Capitol Hill a powerful tool to block award of the Air Force's next tanker to any offeror using an Airbus airframe. The Northrop Grumman team competing against Boeing for the award has been expected to offer a modified Airbus A330 in the pending re-competition.
The Political Setting For Defense Insourcing While President Obama is having trouble with his largest government insourcing initiative, the national health care "public option," he and his allies are rolling along nicely with their anti-outsourcing initiatives at the defense department. Here are the reasons:
Pax Romana: How Did The Romans Do It? Because the first volume of Edward Gibbon's monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire appeared in 1776, it had a profound impact on the thinking of the Founding Fathers. George Washington paraphrased Gibbon's insight that "they preserved peace by a constant preparation for war" in his first presidential address to the Congress, and every new generation of Americans seems to find in the Romans both a source of inspiration and a source of concern as they assess how their own country is faring.
Obama Policies Maintain U.S. Global Military Role With attention focused on the two wars in Southwest Asia, it is easy to miss the fact that the United States is still the one and only global military power. More than a quarter of a million U.S. military personnel are engaged in or supporting the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.