Early Warning Blog
Air Force Cyber Warriors The Air Force set off almost 4 years ago to get serious about cyber. Air, space and cyber became the new mission. Initial plans for a major command for cyberspace stalled but smoothed the way for the real warfighting organization which stood up August 18: 24th Air Force.
Airbus Threats Signal It Has Lost WTO Case After long deliberations, the World Trade Organization is about to rule on a complaint that the European Union's launch subsidies to Airbus are an unfair distortion of free trade. Apparently Airbus believes it will lose the case -- and have to give up its subsidies -- because the head of its North American unit is warning there will be
The New Face Of Conventional War (I) The new leadership in the Pentagon is fixated on the idea of asymmetric threats at the expense of conventional warfare. Their strategic thinking is driven by the belief that the threats are moving from the center of the conflict spectrum (an image that appears as a bell curve) to the ends of that spectrum (a drawing that looks like a
The Achilles Heel Of Chinese Anti-Access Missiles The growing Chinese ballistic-missile threat was undoubtedly on the mind of Joint Chiefs vice chairman Gen. James Cartwright earlier this year when he disclosed that the Missile Defense Agency would put increased emphasis on protecting U.S. forward-deployed forces. But intercepting hostile missiles is only one of several
JSTARS Moving Target Intel Has Many Users In War Zones Ever heard of airborne forensics? One of the hottest tools for hunting Taliban in Afghanistan is something called ground moving target indicator, produced by the Air Force’s JSTARS radar plane. JSTARS flies nightly missions with a crew of 20 or more, some of whom are Army soldiers, over Afghanistan and Iraq.
OMB Reforms More Likely To Waste Money Than Save It When President Obama declared shortly after taking office that reforms in the way the government buys goods and services could save $40 billion annually, many longtime observers of the federal bureaucracy rolled their eyes. Every new administration launches such initiatives, and they always involve the same bright ideas:
Don’t Throw Away The VH-71 On April 6 of this year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made one good decision and one bad one. The good one was to terminate the program to build a new presidential helicopter, the VH-71. The program cost had doubled over four years to over $13 billion because the customer (the U.S. Navy working for the White
Proliferation Of Unmanned Aircraft Produces Push-Back Defense secretary Robert Gates seems to be waging a counter-transformation, terminating Rumsfeld-era tech programs and shifting to a more labor-intensive military posture. But there is one technology Rumsfeld championed of which Gates is similarly enamored: unmanned aircraft like Predator. No doubt about it, unmanned
The Counterinsurgency Crowd May Have It Wrong The counterinsurgency mafia here in Washington would have you believe that the way to win the kind of asymmetric struggle we face in Afghanistan and elsewhere is by turning the U.S. Army and Marine Corps into a hypertrophic neighborhood watch. The idea is that our forces should focus not on fighting the Taliban but on
China As Security Threat: Big Bad Wolf Or Wounded Bear? Conventional analysis of the Chinese economy is it is an unstoppable juggernaut, and those following China through a security prism note the growing resources that nation has to spend on its military. But some analysts wonder if the Chinese economy may not be quite as muscular as advertised.