Lt. Gen. (ret.) David Deptula noted the crucial importance to the United States of an expanded role of coalition airpower at a key fighter conference in London. “the future needs an agile operational framework for the integrated employment of allied military power,” Deptula said. “Multi-nationality may be the only way to meet our fighter force requirements.” Clearly, some […]
CAMERI AIR BASE, Italy: The Italians have been significant innovators since the beginning of the airpower era and they continue to innovate with the launch of the F-35. Their facilities here provide support not only for Italian aircraft, but mark the start of an ability to support an allied F-35 fleet operating in the Mediterranean […]
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
“The F-35 is flying, it is a real thing, and progress is real,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh recently said in Japan. Several countries, including Russia and China, are working on fifth generation fighters, he noted. Even if the United States does not go to war with these countries, it will inevitably have to […]
The best term to describe arms export reforms, much touted by the Obama administration and some hopeful membersof Congress, is slow. Irrelevant to this century might be better. The nature of the arms business has changed so much from the late 20th century because of the growth in global manufacturing that debating which widgets […]
President Obama has made it clear that Syria crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons against its own people. The proposed remedy is to execute a limited strike to change the behavior of the Assad government, but without putting troops on the ground, without regime change or without an international stamp of approval. Congress […]
The story of what two Marine aviators did to be the first V-22 Osprey pilots awarded Distinguished Flying Crosses is simple, elegant, and and tactically telling. The double-DFC incident underscores how the Marines are using the unique tilt-rotor aircraft — which can take off and land like a helicopter, then fly long distances at high […]
Do more with less: streamline workflows, reduce duplication, invest upfront to save long-term.
As many as 10,000 Frenchmen — and a few Americans — gathered Sunday to honor an American bomber crew downed 70 years ago on July 4, 1943 off of a small island in northern France. A young French girl, Anne, saw the American fly boys captured by the Nazis after their plane went down in […]
America’s defense industry is deep in economic pessimism but the rest of the world isn’t defined by sequestration and the Afghan drawdown, and that will be very clear at next week’s Paris Air Show. This year’s show will probably be defined by commercial aviation, especially the twin aisle jet market. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner will return […]
An aircraft carrier is nothing without aircraft, and a Navy aircraft is worth little without a carrier. It’s ships and planes in synergy that revolutionized war at sea in the 1930s and with new systems now entering service – the F-35C Joint Strike Fighter and the Ford-class carrier – they can do it again. On […]
I had the privilege to study and work with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski as a student and for my first research job. With Brzezinski, one is always pushed towards the “Zbig” picture. It was no different when I recently visited Brzezinski in his office and we settled down to discuss the current Korean crisis and the […]
As threats rapidly evolve, digital engineering, manufacturing capacity and robust supply chains are critical to meeting challenges.
We have heard much about the anti-access/area denial threat China poses to American and allied forces in the Pacific. We have read much about new Chinese missiles such as the DF-21, which supposedly can destroy maneuvering ships at sea — especially US aircraft carriers. We have read that Pacific allies wish to deploy substantial fleets […]
How do you deter a nuclear power like North Korea when it looks as if they just won’t play by the rules of conventional deterrence? What is the U.S. and allied nuclear and conventional responses to the threat of war on the Korean peninsula? In a world of dynamic learning, the North Koreans watched the […]
We attended the christening last week of the newest US Navy ship, an 80,000 ton (fully laden) vessel that is not an aircraft carrier. Instead, the USNS Montford Point is the first of a new class of Navy ships, a Mobile Landing Platform, in essence a deployed port at sea. The ship, built at General […]
If the US fails to innovate in its re-shaping of its forces in the Pacific, it cannot effectively play the crucial role which is essential to a strategy focused on our allies. Without innovation, the US cannot protect its interests in the Pacific, ranging from the Arctic to Australia, and will lose the significant economic […]