Congress is setting the defense budget on autopilot and high-tailing it out of town, leaving a lot of unfinished business behind. While President Obama is set to sign the defense policy bill for 2017 into law, this Congress left the funding bills in shambles for the next session to fix. As a stopgap, an extended… Keep reading →

Who are Trump’s generals? Earlier this week, James Kitfield showed us the common crucible that shaped as a group and then profiled James Mattis, the prospective Secretary of Defense. Today, Kitfield tackles Trump’s most controversial general, intelligence officer turned political firebrand Michael Flynn. “Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will not be defeated in… Keep reading →

SIMI VALLEY, CALIF.: You might not think a man nicknamed “Mad Dog” would put America’s allies at ease. But that’s the buzz here at the Reagan Library’s annual defense conference, where Donald Trump‘s choice of Gen. James Mattis to run the Pentagon met with enthusiastic praise from the right, from the left, and from overseas.… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The administration of Donald Trump will probably slash the size of the National Security Council and return it to its traditional role of coordinating national security policy across the national security and intelligence communities. For most of the Obama Administration, conflicting cabinets ruled and battled to often bad effect, one staffed by the actual Cabinet officers… Keep reading →

As Pentagon enthusiasm grows for robotic weapons, and drones proliferate to militaries and terrorists around the world, it’s worth remembering some basic questions of ethics, law, and strategy remain unsettled. For insight, we turn to Rachel Stohl, the director of the Conventional Defense program at the Stimson Center and the primary author of the recently… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Why does the internet still work in Raqqa? That simple question about the Syrian capital of Daesh, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, posed today by retired fighter pilot Rep. Martha McSally, goes to the heart of how the military will use — or refrain from using — cyber weapons. It goes to deep suspicions that… Keep reading →

Dave Deptula was arguably the key player in air power during the world’s first precision guided war, Desert Storm. He offers the principal lessons learned during that war on its quarter-century anniversary. He takes those lessons and applies them to the current fight against the terrorists, murderers, thugs and rapists who comprise ISIL, which we call… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The men who urgently want to be commander in chief of the United States military offered a glum vision of the state of the armed services last night. Jeb Bush: In this administration, every weapon system has been gutted, in this administration, the force levels are going down to a level where we can’t… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: You never know til they deliver the speech, but all the indications are that President Obama is not going to discuss much of interest tonight about the Defense Department or the Pentagon budget and will mostly talk to Congress and to us about America’s future and how much better it could be. What does that… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The cowards who killed at least 129 unarmed innocents in Paris this evening have provoked the French nation, perhaps beyond endurance. America’s Defense Secretary Ash Carter called the killings “an assault on our common human dignity.” French President Francois Hollande, who appeared grave and saddened as he first spoke of the attacks, later went to… Keep reading →