Anti-corruption programs established to combat graft and fiscal malfeasance in Afghanistan are struggling with a daunting mission. Sparsely resourced, US military and civilian groups battle malign networks that connect distracted American officials, for-profit corporations, predatory Afghan insiders and the Taliban in a toxic system so pervasive that American taxpayers are funding both sides of the […]
WASHINGTON: It’s spring, and 70-ton Marine Corps M1 tanks rumble through the flowers in southern Afghanistan (pictured above), while at home, both chambers of Congress are adding funds for armored vehicles to the Pentagon spending bill. It may seem counter-intuitive that a nation shifting from hearts-and-minds counterinsurgency to “AirSea Battle” in the Pacific would need […]
As missions stretch farther and comms grow less reliable, predictive software could become the edge that keeps missions afloat.
THE CAPITOL [updated 9:40 pm with details from Senate press release]: The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously passed its mark-up of the annual defense spending bill, rejecting all proposed cuts to the Air National Guard, cutting the Defense Department’s civilian and contractor workforce by 5 percent over five years, and restricting aid to Pakistan. The […]
We aren’t leaving Afghanistan — except, of course, to the extent we are. That’s the high-wire balancing act that the top commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, had to perform in his remarks today ahead of the upcoming NATO conference in Chicago. “We will say to the Afghan people with one voice, ‘we are […]
Pakistan reopens US supply lines to Afghanistan, drops demand for apology for friendly-fire deaths, gets more $$$: http://econ.st/LacJLL. SydneyFreedberg
The Air Force will choose a winner in its troubled Light Air Support competition without actually flying the two contending planes, the Embraer Super Tucano and the Hawker-Beechcraft AT-6, and it will even disregard what it has data from the limited “flight demonstration” it conducted last year. That’s a disturbing departure from best practice in […]
Absolute positioning is critical in contested and denied environments.
WASHINGTON: He may come to regret it, but Gen. Martin Dempsey today offered what may come to define his tenure as the president’s top military advisor, a doctrine that the United States should never send the military to war by itself. Here’s the phrase Dempsey uttered: “The military instrument should never be wielded alone.” Before […]
WASHINGTON: State governors are complaining to Congress about Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s offer to give the Air National Guard two dozen C-130 aircraft and add back almost 1,200 jobs, saying it isn’t enough. The president’s budget originally proposed cutting 5,100 Air Guard jobs; last week, Panetta offered to restore 1,179 (by the governors’ count) and […]
WASHINGTON: With the Taliban reeling, it is the Afghan government’s own corruption that is the biggest threat to US goals and the biggest reason to keep US advisors in place through 2014 and beyond. That’s the verdict of Marine Maj. Gen. John Toolan, who just finished a year commanding the international force called Regional Command […]
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD: Trucks, not sports cars – that’s the Chief of Naval Operations’ vision for an affordable and upgradeable future fleet. And that’s good news for an array of programs, from the controversial Littoral Combat Ship, to the LPD-17 amphibious ship, to a Marine Corps initiative called Harvest Hawk that straps missiles to a […]
Artificial intelligence is reshaping adversarial cyber operations at machine speed, requiring defenders to increase operational tempo while imposing pain and cost.
What the hell is hybrid warfare, anyway? While the other services increasingly fixate on China, “hybrid” is becoming the buzzword du jour in the U.S. Army, invoked even in Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno‘s official “marching orders” to the service. But like “counterinsurgency” before it – and like “transformation” before that – the term […]
More missions, less money: That’s the dilemma the U.S. Army faces as it looks beyond Afghanistan. The service is certainly grateful that the all-consuming commitments of the last decade are finally winding down, but it’s still struggling to shift gears on a shrinking budget. After ten years of optimizing itself for protracted counterinsurgency – a […]
A YouTube video of an American AH-64 Apache attack helicopter crashing in Afghanistan has gone viral, with commentators expert and otherwise chiming in on the pilot’s mistakes and appropriate punishments. The International Security Assistance Force told the Pentagon-supported newspaper Stars and Stripes that they “believe the video shows a crash which occurred in Paktika province […]
The commandos came under the cover of darkness. It was mid-February in Laghman province, just east of Kabul in mountainous eastern Afghanistan. A team of U.S. Army Special Forces swept in together with an elite unit of the Afghan police, known as the Provincial Response Company. But this time the target was not a Taliban. […]