WASHINGTON: Donald Trump’s election is mostly good news for the Marine Corps — but there are a couple of important caveats. Both his campaign promise to increase Marine combat battalions by 50 percent and his public lambasting of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could cause problems for Marine Corps leaders as they struggle to explain […]
WASHINGTON: The day before intelligence analysts brief a skeptical Donald Trump on Russian interference with the 2016 elections, the Director of National Intelligence told supportive senators that he had only grown more confident the Kremlin was the culprit. DNI James Clapper not only repeated his assessment that Russia had tried to manipulate the election with […]
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.
WASHINGTON: Of the four armed services, the Navy seems set for the smoothest sailing under Donald Trump. The President-Elect’s pro-Russian sentiments cast doubt on the US Army’s main mission, even as he seeks to swell the service’s ranks. His personal intervention in programs like Air Force One and the F-35 has alarmed the Air Force. […]
President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on December 22 to say “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” He later called MSNBC TV host Mika Brzezinski and reportedly said, “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them […]
WASHINGTON: More than any other service, the Army’s future is uncertain under Trump. On the upside, the President-Elect has promised to boost the Army‘s budget and grow its ranks by almost 15 percent. On the downside, Trump seems deeply skeptical of what has become the service’s driving mission: deterring Russian aggression in Europe. [We rolled […]
President-Elect Trump’s recent announcement that he is considering acquiring the F/A-18 Super Hornet in place of the F-35 Lightning II does not add up for a leader who seeks “to make America great again.” Too much is at stake for the United States to rely on a fighter aircraft design whose roots extend back to […]
The challenge for Western democratic institutions is not a lack of capability — it is a structural one.
With the election of Donald Trump as the next President of the United States and with Trump’s nomination of Gen. John Kelly for Secretary of Homeland Security, life is going to change for the US Coast Guard. Trump’s campaign focused intently on border security, asking a fundamental question: Why do we send thousands of troops […]
The biggest shocker of the year was how Donald Trump’s candidacy for president evolved from marginal to “deplorable” to victorious. But what kind of president will Trump be? While Trump’s tendency to tweet from the hip has upset the defense industry and foreign allies alike, his statements on the campaign trail and, above all, his […]
The military’s top generals have called Russia the number one threat. The incoming administration doesn’t seem convinced that Russia is a threat at all, with Trump himself speaking warmly of Vladimir Putin and dimly of NATO allies. But whatever Putin’s intentions for the future, Russia has proved what its capabilities are in Estonia in 2007, […]
The phone call between President-elect Trump and the President of Taiwan sent shock waves through the diplomatic community. But it is time to turn the page and include Taiwan in shaping a 21st century deterrence strategy for Pacific defense. The People’s Republic of China has made it clear that the regime is moving out into […]
Congress is setting the defense budget on autopilot and high-tailing it out of town, leaving a lot of unfinished business behind. While President Obama is set to sign the defense policy bill for 2017 into law, this Congress left the funding bills in shambles for the next session to fix. As a stopgap, an extended […]
Who are Trump’s generals? This week, James Kitfield has already told us about James Mattis and Michael Flynn, both men shaped by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now we come to John Kelly, whose time in Latin America, ironically, led him to similar conclusions about America’s enemies. As chief of US Southern Command, General […]
Who are Trump’s generals? Yesterday, James Kitfield told us what these retired soldiers have in common as products of our post-9/11 wars. Now we’ll go deep into the formative experiences and geopolitical worldview of each man, starting today with the prospective Secretary of Defense, Gen. Jim Mattis. He’s been nicknamed both “Mad Dog” and “Warrior […]
WASHINGTON: Who is Vincent Viola, Donald Trump’s pick for Army Secretary? “He knows how to build teams of young men. And what is the Army? Mostly teams of young men,” said Maj. Gen. Bob Scales. On the trading floor of Viola’s successful trading company, Virtu, which has earned billions from high-tech trading algorithms, “they’re all […]