These are huge strategic challenges — and Ryan McCarthy is emphasizing them more than any of his predecessors in at least a decade.

The State Department’s approval of a $6.5 billion deal for F-35 jets comes as Warsaw continues to pull closer to the Trump Administration.

“We have been been given a lawful order by the president to respond to this crisis on the border and we’re doing that,” a Pentagon official said.

The test puts the nail in the coffin of the INF Treaty, which the US withdrew from earlier this month.

A division-scale exercise next year in Europe, Defender 2020, will be the largest in a quarter-century.

As the Polish president visits the White House this week, Polish officials are touring US air bases to check out the F-35.

Just back from a unsuccessful round of discussions with her Russian counterparts in Geneva to discuss the Cold war-era accord, Undersecretary of State Andrea Thompson told reporters today she’s not hopeful of saving the INF Treaty before Feb. 2, when time runs out on the 60 days the Trump administration have given Moscow to acknowledge it had violated the treaty.

“Long-range precision fires… would provide us the capability (to) either, for example, support the Air Force by suppressing enemy air defenses at hundreds upon hundreds of miles or support the Navy by engaging enemy surface ships at great distances as well,” said Army Secretary Mark Esper. But those examples are two distinctly different missions, each most relevant to a different theater of war.

The United States signed off on arms exports worth $192.3 billion over the past year, a full 13 percent increase from the previous year — even as the Trump administration keeps pushing hard to sell more weapons, more quickly, to more allies overseas.

  Gen. Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff, spoke last week with a small group of traveling reporters after attending a conference of NATO Military Chiefs in Warsaw, including Breaking Defense contributor James Kitfield. Dunford described Russia’s strategy for pulling NATO apart and reiterated that Moscow poses the single greatest global threat to the UnIted… Keep reading →