During today’s public comment period before the U.S. Postal Service’s Board of Governors, the Lexington Institute’s Paul Steidler urged that a semipostal stamp be issued to benefit Ukraine. His remarks are below. A fuller proposal the Lexington Institute submitted for the semipostal stamp can be found here. On Monday, November 7, the Lexington Institute submitted a proposal to the U.S. Postal Service to issue a semipostal stamp that would provide humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and help its postal service, Ukrposhta, [ Read More…]

The Biden administration’s effort to assist Ukraine shines a light on two serious national security problems: the Department of Defense’s inadequate stockpiles of munitions and the difficulties facing the defense industrial base to respond to quickly increase production of critical items. Unfortunately, these problems were not a surprise to senior defense decision-makers. It has long been recognized both in and out of government that the Pentagon’s inventory of munitions, particularly precision weapons, is inadequate to support a high-end conflict lasting [ Read More…]

The bloom is off the rose that was Big Tech. Washington may need to look to other sectors of the economy to sustain the pace of innovation. One candidate for that role is the defense industry, particularly big players with diverse operations, Much of what these companies do involves dual-use technology with relevance to commercial industry, and yet unlike in the commercial world there is a longstanding, bipartisan consensus supporting industrial policy in defense. Thus, if tech companies like Google [ Read More…]

On Thursday morning, November 10, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors will convene for a quarterly public meeting while announcing financial results for fiscal year 2022, service performance (likely including election mail performance), and many other matters. Here are three big issues likely to be addressed, and that should also be top of mind to the Board and policy makers going forward. Impact of Inflation on USPS’s Finances. Inflation hits USPS hard with higher costs, particularly for gasoline [ Read More…]

Barring the unexpected, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is poised to have another solidly successful election season, meaning it will promptly deliver ballots to and from voters. In 2020, amid historically high voter turnout and COVID, the average time for USPS to deliver ballots from voters to election officials was 1.6 days. USPS has built off this by further improving its practices and procedures. Election officials are working better with USPS, the non-partisan leadership at USPS is committed to mail-in [ Read More…]

The Air Force is in the market for another 140-160 aerial refueling tankers to add to the 179 it already plans to order from Boeing. There will likely be a competition for the next increment between Boeing’s KC-46 Pegasus and a Lockheed Martin alternative dubbed LMXT. Boeing thinks it will have important advantages in the comparisons. First, Air Force leaders have expressed confidence in the Boeing tanker, which is performing well in deployments. Second, the KC-46 may be better suited [ Read More…]

In 2016, the U.S. Army began the most comprehensive modernization of its major platforms and weapons systems since the so-called Big Five of the 1980s. Part of the current modernization effort is focusing on defining the characteristics of and requirements for a new main battle tank (MBT). But the Army may not need to undertake this effort. General Dynamics, the company that builds what is currently the best MBT in the world, the Abrams M1A2, has unveiled the AbramsX, a revolutionary [ Read More…]

The joint force is confronting a new kind of threat: swarms of drones that are hard to track and less expensive to replace than the missiles used to intercept them. Over time, these unmanned systems will likely proliferate and acquire features that enable them to overwhelm conventional air defenses. Part of the solution is to rely more on non-kinetic defensive weapons, meaning systems that do not rely on missiles or other munitions to achieve kills. Among the non-kinetic options available [ Read More…]

After a long and difficult gestation, the Air Force seems to be getting comfortable with its KC-46 Pegasus aerial refueling tanker. However, it needs to begin making plans for the next round of tanker procurement, and Congress may not let it proceed without conducting a competition. That would pit Boeing’s KC-46 against Lockheed Martin’s LMXT, the latter based on a tanker variant of the Airbus A330. It might seem like a replay of the contest that resulted in Boeing winning [ Read More…]

The Falls Church-based company Kingfisher has recently published an interesting paper on hypersonic weapons. This is the kind of work that the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment used to do. In the 2000s, Andy Marshall funded research into areas of technological competition with China, precisely to assess what they were working on and where they were ahead of the U.S. Kingfisher has done this using open source materials and large databases but using essentially the same approach. Open sources can [ Read More…]