CSIS

Hoss Cartwright Heralds New Era In Warfare: ‘No longer do we troll for trouble; we predict it’

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WASHINGTON: A combat patrol is four soldiers walking, under orders to look for trouble and react to it. For most of modern history, infantry squads have been the military’s principal sensors, forcing an enemy to respond, allowing American forces to judge the situation and respond. But that is an always risky, often bloody way to generate intelligence.
“Essentially, you are asking them to troll for trouble,” the retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Hoss Cartwright, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies today.

But the squad’s role is changing, part of a monumental shift underway in the US military, as enormously powerful computers gather data from a huge array of sources and turn that data into predictive tools. Keep reading →

Published January 24, 2013 at 5:05 PM

Obama’s Pacific Tilt Comes Under Fire

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The Obama administration’s highly touted “rebalancing” of U.S. military forces to the Asia-Pacific region attracted a barrage of flak during a briefing at an influential Washington think tank Monday.

A group of former senior defense and State Department officials criticized the Pacific tilt at the Center for Strategic and International Studies saying the U.S. lacked a coherent, understandable strategy and failed to adjust the plan in light of shrinking funding and trying to hide the strategy’s aim to counter an increasingly aggressive China. (Of course, some in the national security community praise this “strategic ambiguity,” saying it allows us to manage the relationship with China without as much nationalistic chest-thumping as there might be.) Keep reading →

Published September 25, 2012 at 11:15 AM

Don’t Push China: Vice-Chief of Joint Staff Says “We Can All Get Along”

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WASHINGTON, DC: “Don’t push China.” Even as the Chinese and America’s Philippine allies engage in their latest standoff at sea over the disputed Scarborough Shoal, the message from an array of elder statesmen is that the U.S. needs to avoid any kind of confrontation with China – and the Obama Administration seems to be listening. Keep reading →

Published April 12, 2012 at 6:30 AM

F-35 Production Move Was ‘Acquisition Malpractice:’ Top DoD Buyer

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WASHINGTON: Given earlier comments by the F-35 program head, today’s remarks by the acting head of Pentagon acquisition that “putting the F-35 into production years before the first test flight was acquisition malpractice,” isn’t really news so much as confirmation that senior Pentagon leaders know mistakes were made.

Frank Kendall, who has been nominated to take the chair as undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, told a Feb. 6 event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, that the decision “should not have been done” and that “now we’re paying the price for being wrong.” This was Kendall’s first public appearance since he was nominated to lead the Pentagon’s acquisition efforts.

He went on to say that the Pentagon “didn’t model everything as precisely as we thought.” Improvements in modeling and simulation were thought to help make possible the aggressive approach to concurrency that the Joint Strike Fighter’s builder Lockheed Martin adopted and the Pentagon approved. It looks as if they just weren’t that much better. The F-35 isn’t alone in having gone to production too early, Kendall said: “I think there’s been a tendency to go to production too early and the F-35 is an extreme example of that.”

Perhaps the most interesting comment from Kendall was about Sen. John McCain’s floor speech, in which the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee slammed the F-35 as a “scandal and a tragedy,” among other things.

Kendall, who claimed he wasn’t “sucking up” to the senator, said the remarks were “pretty much spot on.” Later in the event, Kendall mentioned that he had met with Sen. McCain last week, though he provided few details.

If Lockheed Martin, builder of the F-35, can take comfort from Kendall’s comments today, it is because he made clear that the Joint Strike Fighter was not the only major program that the Pentagon and industry have screwed up.

Pointing to the Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle and its predecessors, Kendall said the Pentagon’s “biggest problem” in acquisition may be “starting programs we should never have started.” Do we hear a few amens from the audience?

Published February 6, 2012 at 5:01 PM