“This is an opportunity to hold their feet to the fire and see if North Korea is serious about this,” Rep. Thornberry said. “If they’re not serious, then it’s pretty easy to say those joint exercises that were scheduled for August are now going to happen in September or October.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin is promoting what he says are unbeatable hypersonic weapons, and Capitol Hill is listening closely. The result is hundreds of millions in new funding lines.

The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) John Richardson made a major organizational announcement with major strategic implications when he announced the Navy would re-establish the Second Fleet, which covers the Atlantic. But that would, so far, only mean adding 250 people to the command. Without making larger strategic changes, that is not enough. To respond appropriately to Russian naval… Keep reading →

When House Armed Services Chairman Thornberry proposed eliminating seven agencies and reducing personnel by 25 percent, he faced strong opposition. In the HASC’s draft bill, he scaled the proposal back to eliminating just three agencies. But that didn’t work either. During the committee’s markup of the House defense policy bill, members still pushed back.

“That’ll be the uphill battle, getting this through conference,” a Senate staffer told me. “I told DoD (the Department of Defense), if you don’t like what’s in our mark, you know your strategy: Go talk to HASC (the House Armed Services Committee).

The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act came from freshman Congressman Jimmy Panetta, son of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and a Navy Reserve veteran of Afghanistan.

House Armed Services Committee pushes through most of the Trump administration’s budget requests, absent some of the usual fights. But the return of sequester looms large in 2020.

The budget battles have begun, with Republicans and Democrats already sparring over Rep. Mac Thornberry’s call to slash DoD civilians by 20 percent.

Pentagon planners aren’t only worried about North Korean ICBMs, but Chinese hypersonics and medium-range missiles. That means, according to analysts, that an array of distributed systems are needed to meet a wide range of potential threats.

The push from Capitol Hill follows a year of the Pentagon promising to do more, and do it quickly, when it comes to developing and buying next-generation technologies.