At the NATO Summit in Brussels, the United States should finalize a plan with its allies to ensure the Afghan air force has the maintenance and logistical support it requires to remain combat effective. The United States and our international partners have worked for years to build an Afghan air force capable of providing effective…
By Bradley Bowman, Ryan Brobst and Jared ThompsonEnterprise-wide training: the Army’s $3.5B program for multi-service combat readiness
The competition for Warfighter Training and Readiness Solutions will bring together training networks, combat training centers and live ranges across the DoD enterprise.
“Our budget accounts for ‘over the horizon’ requirements — it creates some space there as we determine what that will look like,” DepSec Kathleen Hicks said.
By Theresa Hitchens
WASHINGTON: After a small group of forlorn men huddled in the middle of Afghanistan succeeded in their plan to strike the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, America declared a global war against them. That war has sucked almost $3 trillion dollars from the US, according to a study by the respected Stimson Center…
By Colin Clark
This week the White House will issue its second Medal of Honor in recent months for extreme valor in the Battle for Robert’s Ridge, recognizing one of the most intense and influential firefights of the post-9/11 era. It will be awarded posthumously to Air Force Combat Controller John Chapman. Sometimes at night they huddled over a…
By James Kitfield
By most metrics the war in Afghanistan is going badly.
By James Kitfield
President Trump will present the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, to Master Chief Special Warfare Operator Britt Slabinski for embodying the U.S. military’s code of “leave no man behind.” The “Battle of Robert’s Ridge” claimed the lives of seven U.S. elite troops and was one of the bloodiest engagements for Special Forces up to that point in the post-9/11 Global War On Terror.
By James Kitfield
B-21, hypersonics and more: How digital development is driving industry innovation
Technological advancements are key to keeping pace with customer demands and evolving threat landscapes.
The Saudi intervention in Yemen is a strategic catastrophe that has added to regional chaos and fostered the most acute humanitarian crisis on the globe. President Trump must stop making the Saudi intervention in Yemen possible.
By Bonnie Kristian
This is one of two pieces by our contributor James Kitfield, who’s won more Gerald Ford Defense Reporting awards than anyone else (3), on the challenges and mistakes America has made in grappling with the complex threat of global terrorism. As James puts it in his summary sentence: U.S. counterterrorism forces continue to learn and adapt…
By James Kitfield
We’re partnering with the Center for Strategic and International Studies to bring you their fab Bad Ideas series through the Christmas holiday season. We don’t usually pay much attention to this sort of operational policy decision — where to operate and with what — but each new location for drone operations can mean a larger…
By Alice Hunt Friend
Sen. John McCain said in early February that, it “is time for the international community to abandon the absurd fiction of a political solution that leaves Assad in power (in Syria).” McCain, who was reacting to Amnesty International’s report about mass executions by Bashar al Assad’s regime, argued: “Bashar Assad does not belong in a…
By Charles V. Peña
Who are Trump’s generals? Earlier this week, James Kitfield showed us the common crucible that shaped as a group and then profiled James Mattis, the prospective Secretary of Defense. Today, Kitfield tackles Trump’s most controversial general, intelligence officer turned political firebrand Michael Flynn. “Know your enemy and know yourself, and you will not be defeated in…
By James Kitfield
Former National Security Council cyber security director Richard Clarke says the military hasn’t done enough to secure today’s networked weapons systems against hacking and is likely to find out what they’ve missed the hard way once a conflict with a sophisticated adversary begins. “The nightmare scenario that I hear a lot of flag officers worrying about is,…
By Richard Whittle
- Air Warfare, Allies, budget, Congress, Global, Land Warfare, Naval Warfare, Networks / Cyber, Space, Threats
US, Allies Must ‘Stop Fixating’ On ISIL & Friends; ‘Frankly, We Are Losing’
Western democracies and their military instruments of power are struggling with what seems to be the novel and dangerous apparition of radical global extremism. This headline-grabbing new threat, whether called the Islamic State, Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, Boku Haram or something else, captivates both our military’s and the public’s attention. Yet for all the emphasis on dissecting…
By Ben Zweibelson
No one knows precisely what happened inside the White House that resulted in President Trump’s sudden about-face on Syria. One day he was planning to extricate American ground troops from Syria; then he wasn’t. Regardless, whoever is urging the president to leave a small contingent of 2,000 lightly armed soldiers and Marines in a remote corner of Syria is doing the president and the nation a grave disservice.
By Doug Macgregor