Early Warning Blog
Energy Policy: The Green Logic Of More Nuclear Plants We've come a long way from the days when nuclear energy was universally reviled by environmentalists. Because nuclear power generates almost no carbon emissions, many environmentalists have come to view it as a far better source of electricity than fossil fuels. Of course, they'd prefer to get as much of our electricity as
What Cutting F-35 Would Mean For America The Pentagon's decision to kill the F-22 fighter was barely public before proponents of other priorities began calling for cuts in the nation's only other stealth fighter program, the F-35 Lightning II (also known as Joint Strike Fighter). Washington seems to be drifting into a low-threat / high-deficit era where there is no agreed
Future Bomber Plans Up In The Air Will the Pentagon give USAF the green light to develop a new bomber? It seems like a no-brainer, since the Air Force has only 20 stealthy B-2s it can use to penetrate defended airspace. That’s probably less than 4 or 5 missions per day in wartime.
Russia and America Headed for Arms Control Collision The future of strategic arms control between the United States and Russia does not look good. Yes, Presidents Dmitri Medvedev and Barack Obama recently signed a joint understanding pledging to complete negotiation of a new strategic arms agreement that will lower the levels of nuclear armaments by about twenty percent.
AT&L: Carter & Kendall Put Emphasis Where It Belongs — On Technology This year marks the 50th anniversary of a seminal lecture at Cambridge University about modern society by British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow. Snow argued that the elites running postwar society were divided into two distinct cultures: those who had studied science and those who had studied the humanities. The latter group,
Make Way for USCYBERCOM He’s been pounding the table for two years about cyber issues. Now, a senior official explains some of the thinking behind the imminent stand-up of United States Cyber Command.
Asymmetric Threats: Not A New Idea Although much of the jargon surrounding military transformation is being jettisoned in the current Gates counter-transformation, the concept of "asymmetric" threats continues to be widely used. In Bush-era usage, asymmetric threats were those aimed at areas where America was ill-prepared. The idea was that relatively weak
Gates Crusade Hurts the Army In his single-minded determination to win our current wars, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is gutting all the services’ modernization programs. Even the Army is not immune. On April 6, he cancelled the manned vehicle portion of the Future Combat System (FCS) program and truncated the Army’s effort to create more flexible
Note to Forbes: Powerful Women in Defense Forbes just released its list of the world’s 100 Most Powerful Women. Chancellor Merkel is on top again, and rightly so. It’s impossible to quarrel with top ten CEOs like PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, DuPont’s Ellen Kullman or Anne Lauvergeon who runs French nuclear giant Areva. Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama
Military Not Tapping Full IW Potential Of JSTARS In Afghanistan If new White House budget projections for the coming decade are correct -- deficits averaging nearly a trillion dollars per year -- then the joint force is going to have to get along with a lot less money. That means fewer weapons programs, fewer warfighters, and fewer overseas commitments. It should also mean getting as much