Trump nominee for Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett “is a force to be reckoned with and has the leadership, experience, and knowledge to lead our Air Force into the future during a time of increased global threats,” says Sen. Martha McSally.

Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James traveled through Asia, visiting Indonesia, India, Singapore, and the Philippines at the end of the summer. We didn’t hear a great deal about the trip in the US at the time but her meetings with her defense counterparts clearly impressed. In this op-ed, James shares the lessons she learned. China… Keep reading →

Lost in this month’s headlines is the fact that the democratically elected leaders of three countries close to the United States and important for its security strategies — France, Mali, and Turkey — have declared (or in France’s case, extended) formal states of emergency. All three states cited good reasons for doing so: France and… Keep reading →

The concept of “distributed lethality”—what Navy leadership has described as “holding more adversaries at risk across a wider geography”—was a recurring theme at the recent Surface Navy Association Symposium on surface warfare strategy. But the Navy needs to make clearer what it means and how will it be implemented. At the symposium, Vice Adm. Thomas Rowden said distributed… Keep reading →

The Program Executive Officer for the KC-46, Brig. Gen. Duke Richardson, made a rare public appearance today at the Air Force Association to discuss his program, which has been hammered by schedule programs and cost growth. Fortunately, none of this costs the taxpayer a dime because it’s a fixed price contract. But the problems have cost Boeing at… Keep reading →

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is calling for significant change to the laws and policies that govern all military personnel management. This “Force of the Future” initiative may mean far-reaching changes in how military personnel are recruited, evaluated, assigned, promoted, retained, separated and compensated. Designing new personnel systems is like painting landscapes of mountains: they may provide great… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: “We have found that the PLA suffers from potentially serious weaknesses.” That is the simple and powerful declaration of a new study of China’s military by the RAND Corp., done at the behest of the congressionally-mandated U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. What are those Chinese weaknesses? The report, again, is admirably clear. “The first is… Keep reading →

Sitting in the cockpit of her A-10 Warthog somewhere over Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base on Jan. 10, Maj. Olivia Elliott flipped a switch. In an instant her blunt, twin-engine warplane with the 30-millimeter cannon in the nose was transformed. No longer just the Air Force’s most heavily-armed attack jet, now the A-10 was also… Keep reading →