“I’ve never agreed with 100% of what this president says off the cuff like that,” Perdue said. The pledge to end exercises — deemed critical to allied military readiness — was not mentioned in the official joint statement, he noted, and therefore isn’t a binding commitment, only an expression of presidential intent predicated on continued cooperation from Pyongyang.

“Error is as important as malevolence,” Richard Danzig told me in an interview. “I probably wouldn’t use the word ‘stupidity,’ (because) the people who make these mistakes are frequently quite smart, (but) it’s so complex and the technologies are so opaque that there’s a limit to our understanding.”

Wait for it — the costs of Lockheed Martin’s Presidential Helicopter Replacement program, known as the VH-92, have come down 2.4 percent, about $123 million to $5.06 billion, and it appears on schedule. But — you knew there’d be a but.

While a Trump-Kim summit is a victory for South Korean diplomacy and the policy of maximum pressure, it is also a tremendous victory for Kim Jong Un, and this must be recognized.

HERITAGE FOUNDATION: Just calm down and read the document. That, in essence, is the administration’s response to critics who call its new nuclear strategy irresponsible and dangerous. In fact, deputy undersecretary for policy David Trachtenberg said over and over here this morning, the Nuclear Posture Review is fundamentally conservative (with a small “c”). The 2018… Keep reading →

The National Defense Strategy does a service by getting the diagnosis right. But that is only the first step. To get the right prescription—the defense program—we will have to develop the operational concepts that link the ends sought with the means we can procure to achieve them.

  By MURIELLE DELAPORTE Britain’s decision to leave the European Union could be compared to France’s departure from NATO in 1966. Paris left the integrated military command structure “but not the Atlantic Alliance” just as London intends to leave the EU “but not Europe.” But in defense terms virtually nothing is changing about how Britain… Keep reading →

The Trump Administration’s review of nuclear policy and weapons was leaked half a month before its official rollout, giving advocacy groups, allies and everyone else who cares about nuclear warfare much time to craft their reactions. (Everyone should care about the issues, no matter how scary this topic is). Rebecca Hersman, deputy assistant Defense secretary for… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: The United States government sees a fundamentally more threatening world today, one that requires a more nuanced balance of delivery systems than we’ve deployed since the end of the Cold War. That’s really the change that has driven the results of the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, officially released today. Careful transparency continues to… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: North Korea has cut the warning time America has to a “dozen minutes or so” before an ICBM launch because of the mobile launch trucks it’s using, according to the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “We may have gone from tens of minutes to up to an hour (previously) to a dozen minutes… Keep reading →