Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently broke with a decades-long tradition in the Congress. And almost no one noticed. Congress traditionally has been sensitive to its Constitutional obligation to provide for the common defense. Despite disagreements and rancor on numerous issues, Congress usually cranks out defense appropriations and authorization bills each year. “Those days are… Keep reading →

[updated Wednesday with remarks from Sen. Ayotte, Sen. Kyl, and James Carafano] Tomorrow morning, one of the Republican Party’s rising stars, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, will kick off a new project co-sponsored by two of its long-established institutions, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. The official agenda of the “Project for the Common Defense”… Keep reading →

[Corrected description of Navy test sequence] Unmanned aircraft are relatively easy to fly. Landing one without crashing is hard. Getting one to take off from the narrow, pitching deck of an aircraft carrier is harder still. Landing on a carrier? That’s hard enough to give human pilots nervous breakdowns. Soon, it will be the final… Keep reading →

The President, congressional leaders of both parties and senior military leaders all agreed: Sequestration should never happen. Yet here we are, one month in. Two critical questions arise: Is sequestration really that bad for national security? And what, if anything, should the government do about it? To answer the first question: yes. As then-Defense Secretary… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Japan is the proverbial linchpin of US strategy in East Asia. But linchpins sometimes break. As the US struggles to afford a “pivot” to the Pacific, its most important ally in the theater is undergoing a slow and painful shift of its own. The new prime minister, Shinzo Abe of the Liberal Democratic Party… Keep reading →

Yesterday, the House-Senate conference on the National Defense Authorization Act took steps to strengthen oversight of America’s nuclear arsenal, including reforms at the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration and new restrictions on the administration decommissioning more nuclear weapons. But there’s a deeper issue of whether our nukes still work as designed in the first… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Relations between China and Japan continue to worsen as a Hong Kong Chinese group promised major protests in September. And two of America’s top Peoples Liberation Army analysts tell us things may well get worse, given the long-simmering enmities between the two countries and the “toxic brew” of the region’s unresolved territorial claims and… Keep reading →

Breaking Defense’s February 29 piece, “Hill Turns Up Heat On White House Over ‘Law Of The Sea’” gives a good presentation of the reasons supporters believe the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) should be ratified, but it doesn’t talk about why the treaty was deep-sixed some 30 years ago — and has remained… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: President Obama’s defense budget for 2013 implements the start of the $500 billion in budget cuts required by the Budget Control Act but does not address the additional $600 billion in cuts triggered by the Super Committee’s failure. The most important implication deduced from the chart above would be that the administration has begun… Keep reading →

UPDATED Washington: Few things seem certain at this point from the budget deal struck yesterday. One point that three Hill sources agree on is that the Defense Department budget may well be frozen at or near 2011 levels. That means, a professional Hill staffer says, that the House Appropriations Committee will need to find another… Keep reading →