At a meeting in Beijing in December, Chinese president Hu Jintao had a powerful message for officials from the People’s Liberation Army Navy. “Prepare for war,” Hu said, using a Mandarin term — junshi douzheng — that means “conflict in general.” Amplified and misrepresented by the foreign media, Hu’s words echoed across Asia and the […]
After the year 2020 ground wars will be more intense and concentrated in the world’s crowded coastal cities. That’s the consensus from a panel of experts including current and retired Army officers and professional analysts. Over the past decade, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have adapted to the low-intensity wars in Iraq and Afghanistan […]
The challenge for Western democratic institutions is not a lack of capability — it is a structural one.
The nuclear-powered submarine USS Florida was lying in wait, quietly submerged off the Libyan coast, when the order came from then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to launch its cruise missiles.It was the evening of March 19. Two days before, the U.N. Security Council had unanimously voted to approve Resolution 1973, authorizing a no-fly zone over […]
On Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. military possessed just handful of robot aircraft. Today, the Air Force alone operates more than 50 drone “orbits,” each composed of four Predator or Reaper aircraft plus their ground-based control systems and human operators. Smaller Navy, Marine and Army drones number in the thousands. Since they do not need […]
For any Westerner observer struggling to understand Chinese military developments — and let’s be serious, that’s most of us — Andrew Erickson is an indispensable resource. A professor at the Naval War College, Erickson has edited an influential series of books about the People’s Liberation Army, each volume based on close scrutiny of Chinese-language journals […]
U.S. troops will start pulling out of Afghanistan this summer. This raises the basic question — is the Afghan military ready to take over and would it survive the departure of much of the U.S. military. The plan is still to end the “combat mission,” whatever that means, in 2014, leaving behind trainers, advisers and […]
From emerging data networks to missile tracking and cyber resilience, Breaking Defense’s latest eBook brings together essential reporting on the evolving role of satellites in national security.
The future of the Marines, which has been hotly debated ever since Defense Secretary Robert Gates referred to it as our “second land army” days after he announced the closure of Joint Forces Command, may well lie more in the air than on the sea. If you want to glimpse that future you could look […]