Early Warning Blog
End Of Empire (IV) From Barry Eichengreen's essay on the declining appeal of the dollar as a global reserve currency in the September issue of Foreign Affairs:
Missile Defense: No Third Site, So What Now? Sometime this autumn the Obama Administration will announce it is abandoning plans to build a missile-defense complex in Eastern Europe. Since the administration has repeatedly warned of the danger posed by Iran's development of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, the White House will have to offer some alternate vision of how U.S. allies and forward-deployed forces can be defended against the emerging threat.
Gene Industry Debate Raises Big Security Concerns In 1918, a huge catastrophe culminated in the loss of 50 million lives. No, I'm not referring to World War One, I'm talking about the Spanish influenza pandemic, which claimed more lives in one year than the war did in four. The flu isn't usually fatal to anyone besides babies and the elderly, but in 1918 two pre-existing strains spontaneously combined into a virulent variant for which most people had no immunological defenses. Millions of people in the prime of their lives died.
Gates Got It Right: F-35 Extra Engine Unneeded Despite criticism from President Obama and defense secretary Robert Gates, congressional backers of an extra engine for the F-35 joint strike fighter are preparing to force the program on the Pentagon. The F-35 is a single-engine jet aircraft that will use an evolved version of the Pratt & Whitney powerplant employed on the F-22 fighter.
Beware The Perils Of Insourcing As part of his effort to bring change to the ways the national security establishment does business, the Obama Administration has embarked on a risky strategy of reducing Department of Defense (DoD) and intelligence community (IC) reliance on contractors by insourcing their work. This will mean increasing the size of the government workforce.
AF Insourcing Could Cost A Bundle, Reduce Readiness An interesting split is emerging in the Air Force sustainment and logistics sector, and it could have big implications for the Obama government insourcing agenda. The Air Force has been running a successful logistics partnership for its premier air superiority fighter, the F-22, with original manufacturers Lockheed, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney taking the lead on sustaining the aircraft and running its supply-chain.
Army Truck Award Looks Very Suspicious In late August, with little fanfare, an obscure Army buying command awarded a five-year contract to Oshkosh Corp. to build up to 23,000 trucks under a program called the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV). It was a very big win for Oshkosh, which had never seen annual revenues exceed $3 billion before it bought a construction-equipment manufacturer in 2006.
Black Friday: Airbus Gets The Bad News About Subsidies Today the World Trade Organization will tell Airbus what everybody already knew: launch subsidies from friendly governments give it an unfair advantage in competing with its American counterpart, Boeing.
Gates Not Happy About Bloomberg Budget Story Pentagon sources say that defense secretary Robert Gates was quite unhappy about Tony Capaccio's budget story carried by Bloomberg Business News on Wednesday of this week.
Joint Radio Kill: “Game Over” For Net-Centric Warfare Bloomberg Business News reported yesterday that the Air Force and Navy want to kill their respective versions of the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS, or "Jitters").