WASHINGTON: President Trump’s sweeping review of the national security industrial base — from shipbuilding to microchips, strategic minerals to vaccines — is almost halfway done. A score of working groups across the government, not just the Pentagon, will submit their draft recommendations this month and next, an administration official briefed on the review tells me. Then… Keep reading →

CORRECTED: Changed Stealth To Fifth Generation Fighters In Fifth Paragraph.  WASHINGTON: Can the Christmas holidays come quickly enough? Republicans, hungry for their first major legislative accomplishment since the 2016 elections, are focused above and beyond all else on changes to tax law, leaving a dangerous vacuum into which a shutdown could fall. Last week, the… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Jim Inhofe is probably the next chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee – but he definitely doesn’t want to talk about it. The Oklahoma conservative’s refusal to talk, even in private, about succeeding the ailing Sen. John McCain speaks both to Inhofe’s character and the rapidly vanishing senatorial decorum he tries to preserve.… Keep reading →

  Corrected: The article referred to the E-4B command aircraft, but Brig. Gen. Bowen was referring to the E-6B. WASHINGTON: The men and women of US Strategic Command watched a clock count down. When it did, they knew their base would be “a smoking hole in the ground.” It was a simulation, sure, but “it’s deadly serious,”… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The president of China, seeming to cast aside the better part of four millennia of Chinese tradition, declared today that he sees “a new historic juncture in China’s development,” one that clearly calls for his country to flex its global muscles and change the rules that have guided the world since at least World War… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: North Korea probably has its own reasons for putting Guam back on the targeting map, but they did it on the same day President Trump officially refused to certify the nuclear deal with Iran. Trump said he “cannot and will not” certify the deal as being in America’s national interest and threatened to cancel… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: No other administration would have tried to save money on Lockheed Martin’s F-35, according to President Donald Trump. Now, on its face that may not be so surprising a claim from Trump. But he made it during an appearance at the Luis Muñiz Air National Guard Base in Puerto Rico to show support for the people… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: There’s no “feuding” or “chaos” in the Trump White House, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster insisted yesterday. Anyone who pushed their personal agenda at the expense of the president’s is now either gone or neutralized by Chief of Staff John Kelly, McMaster added. Both men are military officers, as is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. McMaster… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: In an interesting twist in the era of software-heavy systems such as the F-35, President Trump has nominated a top cyber expert, Robert Behler, as the Pentagon’s top weapons tester. Behler currently is COO for the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center. Before that, he was president… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: How does Trump’s Defense Secretary feel about one of the Obama Pentagon’s more controversial acts, the outreach to tech start-ups known as DIU(X)? “I don’t embrace it,” Jim Mattis told reporters en route to Silicon Valley yesterday. “I enthusiastically embrace it, and I’m grateful that Secretary Carter (Ash Carter, Obama’s last SecDef) had the… Keep reading →