UPDATED: ManTech Cyber Expert Comment Added WASHINGTON: One day after reports that China has launched powerful and persistent cyber espionage attacks on a wide array of US and allied weapons systems, including stealing blueprints for a new building to house Australia’s top counterintelligence organization, the Pentagon spokesman says this has not led to an “erosion… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Singapore is expected to announce sometime in the next 10 days that it plans to buy its first squadron –12 planes — of some 75 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35Bs, further bolstering what had been the flagging fortunes of the world’s most expensive conventional weapon system. The fact that American allies in the Pacific are… Keep reading →

If the US fails to innovate in its re-shaping of its forces in the Pacific, it cannot effectively play the crucial role which is essential to a strategy focused on our allies. Without innovation, the US cannot protect its interests in the Pacific, ranging from the Arctic to Australia, and will lose the significant economic… Keep reading →

The start of a new year and of a new administration is a good time to think about the future. A key challenge facing the new Obama administration and the Congress is to ensure that US military capabilities continue to innovate and evolve in challenging times. Paul Bracken has underscored that we are in a… Keep reading →

SYDNEY: The early signs from the Australian military’s new strategy make it clear that this demographically tiny nation that fights far above its weight is readying itself to refocus on China and Indonesia as it prepares to cope with the end of the war in Afghanistan. ANALYSIS The Ministry of Defence in Canberra is deep… Keep reading →

Pundits tend to forget that the 21st century is not the 20th repeated. As much as the US competition with a rising China is framed as a reprise of the Cold War with the Soviets or of the Pacific war with Japan, the game has changed. The rise of China changes the opposing player. The… Keep reading →

The pivot to the Pacific started more than a century ago. The United States first became a Pacific power in 1898, the year the US first annexed Hawaii and then gained Guam and the Philippines (as well as Puerto Rico) from Spain after a “short, victorious war.” The United States is at a turning point… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Sloppy number-crunching at the Department of Defense means that the official price tag to move 9,000 Marines off Okinawa to Guam, Hawaii, and Australia – already estimated at a whopping $10.6 billion – is probably short of the real cost, according to a draft Government Accountability Office (GAO) report obtained by Breaking Defense. [Update:… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Old combat pilots warn young ones about “target fixation,” when you get so focused on what you want to bomb that you lose track of everything else and fly into the ground. That’s the danger facing US strategy in Asia as the heavily hyped Pacific pivot gets boiled down to “contain China,” warned a… Keep reading →

GILLIAM COUNTY, OREGON: This isolated test site in rural Oregon is where Boeing subsidiary Insitu takes its drones “to torture them,” said site manager Jerry McWithey. Temperates soar to 110 degrees in summer and plummet to 10 degrees — with 50-knot winds — in winter. The hot-and-cold ordeal the drones go through is a microcosm… Keep reading →