Hell hath no fury like a lawmaker betrayed. This week, the House will take up the crucial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress’ primary instrument to oversee the U.S. military. Though the NDAA has passed for 58 straight years, partisan political choices threaten to end that streak.     The Democratic House passed out of… Keep reading →

The Department of Defense can make smarter and faster acquisition decisions if it uses people more thoughtfully. Instead of involving top-level leaders at every decision point in the acquisition process, senior leaders should determine the organization’s enterprise-level goals, then communicate them to empowered and capable leaders who can decide how best to meet those goals.… Keep reading →

Critics of modernizing the U.S. nuclear triad have called to delay or even terminate the GBSD. Their arguments do not make strategic, technical or economic sense.

The Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments has some new ideas for how even relatively poor allies can help keep the peace in the Pacific.

Fifth gen or fourth gen? F-35A or F-15X. Stealth, sensors and fusion or lots of missiles? Lockheed or Boeing? See what the Mitchell Institute says.

It’s one of the fundamental questions about China and its future place in the world: does the great civilization still view the world through the traditional lens of the Middle Kingdom, or does the world face a new China, unbound by many of the structures under which it has operated for most of the last… Keep reading →

Born as what most thought was a joke in March 2018, President Trump’s Space Force had by June become a White House directive to the Pentagon. Since then the Trump Administration has been considering possible variants in the Force’s subordination, authorities, size, and budget, while Acting SecDef Shanahan has already created a working group to… Keep reading →

The best way for America to develop a consensus on what our defense and global security commitments should be is for Congress to have a lengthy series of posture hearings that delve deeply into these issues.    They could be jointly held by the Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees from the two chambers, patterned… Keep reading →

President Trump is breaking with the past. He’s arguing that Washington must cut its losses, withdraw its forces, climb out of the Middle Eastern and Afghan money pits, and acknowledge that Seoul (with U.S. backing) won the war on the Korean Peninsula. Washington hates him for doing these things, but most Americans and future generations of Americans will love him for it.

One of our primary goals here at Breaking Defense is to try and avoid the madness of the daily news cycle and tell our readers what is really happening, as best as any human can tell at any time. The following explanation by two experienced defense budget experts of what really happened to $28 billion discussed in a… Keep reading →