Concerns over a new Okinawa airfield, and how to get Marines across vast swaths of ocean, are complicating American plans to spread forces across the Pacific.

The most profound change resulting from China’s military modernization has been in its space capabilities. Back in 2000 China only had 10 satellites in orbit, and this year it will launch more satellites than any other nation on the planet.

We could see the most direct U.S. challenge to China since 2005, when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld became the proverbial skunk at the globalist garden party in Singapore by bluntly chastising the Chinese for what was then only the very beginning of their military modernization program. 

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 →

“The Battle of Guadalcanal was a brutal campaign, but shows us what the next fight could be like,” Vice Adm. Brown said. “Usually, the CO (skipper), XO (executive officer) and senior officers – even admirals – were killed immediately – but what happened?”

It’s a major shift after decades in which submarines focused on projecting power ashore, with their only anti-ship weapons being their rarely-used torpedoes. Driving the change: increasing anxiety about China.

As President Trump pushes Beijing on trade and cyber espionage, the United States and China are on a collision course. The U.S. urgently needs a new strategy to avoid the traditional fate of rising and status quo powers: catastrophic war.

But while the skies are quiet today, US Pacific Air Forces are preparing for possible conflict: fielding new weapons like the F-35 stealth fighter and the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), adding more space-operations planners to theater staffs, and reemphasizing that old-fashioned initiative so junior commanders can act when an enemy cuts off their communications with higher headquarters.

From militarized atolls in the South China Sea to a growing Chinese navy looking increasingly aggressive, the head of the Indo-Pacom command lays out his needs and concerns.

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.