Mitt Romney’s “major” foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) last Monday appears to have thrown the American national security pundit class into confusion. Some, both from the right and the left, interpret the speech as proof, yet again, of Romney’s neo-conservatism-as reflected by the character of the vast majority of his own […]
A telling graphic from the International Institute for Strategic Studies’s newly released report on global military spending (click here for the original). The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) has released its annual series of reports on international defense spending, The Military Balance 2012. The full text is subscriber-only, but a summary press release, detailed […]
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
When the Pentagon released its budget materials and press releases last Monday, the press dutifully reported the numbers. The Pentagon’s “base” budget for 2013 is to be $525.4 billion, and with $88.5 billion for the war in Afghanistan and elsewhere added, the total comes to $613.9 billion. Indeed, if you plowed through the hundreds of […]
The Pentagon will release the details of its fiscal year 2013 budget on Monday. If this year is like most in the past, some of the numbers, specifically those in the Pentagon’s press release, will be the wrong ones, and many of the important and fundamental issues will be distorted or ignored. What follows is […]
Until Tuesday Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had been describing Pentagon budget cuts beyond the $450 billion over 10 years he and President Obama have already committed to in apocalyptic terms: “doomsday,” “catastrophic,” and “shooting ourselves in the head” to describe any cuts in the Pentagon’s budget. But on Tuesday, a new Leon Panetta was […]
The stench of elitism is permeating Washington, just as it did a decade ago when everyone of consequence bought the proposition that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction – and even if there was room for doubt, he was a threat and “had to go.” Today, the subject matter is different, but the methods […]
Cyber resilience has become a frontline mission for the US military. Breaking Defense’s new eBook rounds up key reporting from the 2025 Alamo ACE conference with the latest developments in cyber offense and defense.
Winslow Wheeler, one of the Washington’s most respected defense budget experts, has penned a detailed analysis of how much the Pentagon pays for maintenance and operations to keep its planes in the air. Below, we offer a very condensed version of his report. The Editor. Early in a weapon program’s history, there is virtually always […]
d The invitation came to me from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s public affairs office to attend a “conversation” with Panetta and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton at the prestigious National Defense University in Washington. Although I knew it wasn’t me they wanted to talk to, I sat in the audience to hear Panetta and […]
There are numerous misleading and misinformed assertions being made about defense spending and the grand debt deal. The White House’s Fact Sheet asserts a $350 billion savings in the “base defense budget.” The $350 billion in defense savings that the White House declares apparently uses a different “baseline” (basis of comparison) and pretends that a […]
Robert Gates has been called the best secretary of defense in recent memory. On the other hand, he has a reputation with some as a slick career bureaucrat with a knack for avoiding blame but pocketing credit. Both are true. “Best in recent memory?” It would have been hard for Gates to have been a […]
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.