The Air Force provides the essential capabilities that make America’s joint operations possible and has been involved in nearly every military operation overseas since 1991. As the Pentagon delves into the details of the 2014 budget, getting the Air Force budget right is critical to ensure that the nation can count on its indispensable role… Keep reading →

Defense contractors are gearing up to show off their latest at the Washington, DC’s biggest conference of the year, the Association of the US Army’s conference in town next week. Don’t expect many earthshaking announcements at AUSA from the Army itself, which is ramping down its presence and spending at the event significantly. The real… Keep reading →

Libya has become the Obama administration’s Iraq. Enthusiasm for intervention without clarity of strategy after intervention is common to both the Bush and Obama administrations. What is different is that George W. Bush took ownership of the Iraq crisis; Barack Obama has not. In the Libyan case, the dynamics are occurring in the background of… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: For years the Air Force has claimed to be the service most suited to understanding and operating in cyberspace and the service fought hard to be the Pentagon’s lead on cyber issues. But top officers recently admitted that the service has never answered key questions such as how it works with the other services… Keep reading →

Mitt Romney’s “major” foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) last Monday appears to have thrown the American national security pundit class into confusion. Some, both from the right and the left, interpret the speech as proof, yet again, of Romney’s neo-conservatism-as reflected by the character of the vast majority of his own… Keep reading →

QUANTICO, Va: Even though the administration’s strategic guidance swears off “large-scale, prolonged stability operations” while emphasizing air and naval forces, the lessons that ground troops learned in Afghanistan and Iraq will remain vitally relevant, both because we will still do stability operations in the future and because those skills apply to other kinds of conflicts… Keep reading →

ORLANDO: The United States has boosted into orbit new spy satellites that mark “the most significant change to our overhead architecture in at least three decades,” said the head of military intelligence, Mike Vickers. Vickers also said these National Reconnaissance Office’s satellites comprise “a truly integrated system of systems for the first time.” Sadly for… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Dov Zakheim and Roger Zakheim, the father-and-son team of national security advisors to the Romney campaign, fenced with skeptical reporters this morning about what their candidate would actually do differently from the Obama administration. The big things, in brief: boost Navy shipbuilding by 66 percent; slash the civil service workforce at the Defense Department;… Keep reading →

ORLANDO: Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, told a standing-room-only crowd at the annual Geoint intelligence conference last year that the NSA and its sister intelligence agencies could save one third or more on their information technology costs by moving to the so-called cloud. Given that Director of National… Keep reading →

[updated 3:45 pm with Todd Harrison’s analysis] CAPITOL HILL: Last month’s congressionally mandated OMB report on the impact of sequestration omitted an obscure provision that would slice another $10.1 billion from Defense Department programs in 2013. Because of that the Pentagon would have to cut $60.6 billion instead of $50.5 billion, a 20 percent increase.… Keep reading →