WASHINGTON: America cannot apply Buy America provisions on a widescale basis and buy the best weapons, no matter how much President Trump and his team may feel otherwise. It’s a simple as that. All the competitors for the Air Force’s next-generation trainer, the T-X, include enormous amounts of foreign content, some including the aircraft. The […]
WASHINGTON: The White House has dropped plans for a 14 percent cut to the Coast Guard, instead promising a budget that “sustains current funding levels.” The bad news is that “current funding levels” are already too low. The Coast Guard has to give almost 600 drug shipments a pass each year because they don’t have the ships or planes to catch […]
Do more with less: streamline workflows, reduce duplication, invest upfront to save long-term.
AFA HQ: William Roper, the man who’s helping shape that future at the well-named Strategic Capabilities Office, told a packed room here that “stealth won’t last forever;” that adapting to the new version of war he’s helping the country ready for “is going to be harder for the Air Force than the other services;” that […]
American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is paying his first visit to Asia this week. Just before he left, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thornton told reporters the Trump Administration “will have its own formulation” of the Pacific pivot, or the rebalance to Asia declared by the Obama Administration. “Pivot, rebalance, etcetera — that was a word that was […]
HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: Determined to deter the rising Russian threat, the US Army is slashing the time it takes for a brigade to get ready for battle once it’s arrived in Europe, from over 40 days to under 10. Normally unloading equipment, getting organized, and moving to the front takes more than 40 days, Maj. Gen. […]
An upstart odd couple has challenged armored vehicle giant BAE for the right to build the Marine Corps’ swimming tank. One is Singapore’s ST Kinetics, maker of the Singapore Armed Forces‘ amphibious Terrex vehicle. The other is McLean, Va.-based SAIC, best known as a service contractor, which is working with the Singaporeans to build a […]
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
Norway faces the challenge of crafting a national defense strategy for the 21st strategy in the face of Vlad Putin’s more aggressive Russia. Because Putin thinks through his use of military power and designs limited objectives to achieve what he considers in the best interest of Russia, Norway faces a double challenge: how to defend […]
WASHINGTON: The deployment of improved US missile defenses to Korea, THAAD, comes at a time of growing disorder across the region. There is one constant in this equation but three major unknowns. The constant is the THAAD system itself, whose capabilities — almost six times the maximum range of current Patriot missile defenses and roughly five […]
The United States — preoccupied with the wars of the Middle East and a pivot to Asia — has largely left the global playing field to Russian President Putin and must now lead NATO by forging a new consensus on the Russian threat and investing in new weapons. The correlation of forces in the European theater has arguably […]
ORLANDO: Want to defeat an enemy? Get inside his decision cycle. Hammer away at his forces, confuse his command, steal his intelligence. Sun Tzu said most of it ages ago, but it remains true today. The key to such success is, first, understanding what you and the enemy are doing and, second, communicating that understanding to […]
The Sixth Domain is not defined by geography. It’s a new kind of conflict in which autonomy and networked systems allow thousand-dollar consumer electronics to destroy multi-million-dollar conventional weapons systems.
American THAAD missile defense vehicles landed at Osan, South Korea today after almost eight months of waiting. Now the question is how the North and China react. Increasingly threatened by North Korean missiles — most recently test-launched just yesterday — the South agreed last July to host the US Army’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense […]
WASHINGTON: Despite a turbulent Trump administration and a plummeting pound, the Anglo-American defense relationship remains strong, said the senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence. “Under any circumstances, we’re going to continue to work very, very closely with the States,” Stephen Lovegrove, Permanent Secretary of the UK Ministry of Defence, told reporters this morning. […]
A bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives is urging Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to budget $1.5 billion a year to reinforce US forces in the Pacific to better support Asian allies, stiffening their spines against Chinese intimidation. Known as the Asia-Pacific Stability Initiative and endorsed by the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, it’s a proposal […]
WASHINGTON: After a decade of debate, the US Army is finally creating permanent units dedicated to advising foreign forces. The six new Security Force Assistance Brigades will be a marked departure from the ad hoc training teams used throughout the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They would also be well suited to build up local […]