CANBERRA: As the Chinese challenge grows, Australia is clearly concerned about expanded Chinese influence within Australia and with regard to Chinese efforts to reshape the external environment to expand the influence and power of the Chinese authoritarian state. Clearly the United States remains Australia’s core ally in dealing with the Chinese challenge, but as […]
CAPITOL HILL: In the drama-free weeks leading up to Thursday’s overwhelming passage of the compromise $716 billion defense policy bill by the House of Representatives, lawmakers sent a pretty clear signal to the White House: we want more submarines. With concerns rising over the growing prowess of Russian and Chinese undersea capabilities, and standoff air […]
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China's increasingly aggressive rise puts the Pacific theater in play in a way it hasn't been since 1945. In this essay, Singaporean scholar Ben Ho Wan Beng and retired US Marine Gary Lehmann look at what a critical but overlooked World War II battle has to tell us about the potential strengths -- and weaknesses -- of the Marine Corps's new concept for waging the next Pacific war. -- the editors
Australia looking to protect its home waters, while sending a signal to Washington that it is one of the allies that is trying to pull its weight in defending itself.
President Trump announced that the United States would stop flying bombers over South Korea and suspend exercises there to facilitate diplomatic negotiations with North Korea. This echoes President Johnson’s March 1968 decision to halt the bombing of most of North Vietnam, also done to encourage negotiations. In 1968 the effort succeeded, at least in the short […]
"I've never agreed with 100% of what this president says off the cuff like that," Perdue said. The pledge to end exercises -- deemed critical to allied military readiness -- was not mentioned in the official joint statement, he noted, and therefore isn't a binding commitment, only an expression of presidential intent predicated on continued cooperation from Pyongyang.
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.
The Trump Pentagon is undergoing a major shift to focus on great power competition. And it's looking for allies to step up in places that might come as a surprise.
If war is politics by other means, then politics is war by other means, Chinese and Russian leaders believe. And political warfare must be conducted with the same ruthless ingenuity as open war because the stakes are equally high: the survival or destruction of the regime.
The Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) John Richardson made a major organizational announcement with major strategic implications when he announced the Navy would re-establish the Second Fleet, which covers the Atlantic. But that would, so far, only mean adding 250 people to the command. Without making larger strategic changes, that is not enough. To respond appropriately to Russian naval […]
Gen. Gus Perna, head of Army Materiel Command, is a brave man. He came to Pacific Command's AOR and announced he wants the Army to stop building the transport ships and so-called watercraft that could be crucial to any conflict in the Indo-Pacific region.
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
The incoming commander of US Pacific Fleet issues a warning about growing Chinese ambitions while taking charge of the world's largest fleet.
Pentagon planners aren't only worried about North Korean ICBMs, but Chinese hypersonics and medium-range missiles. That means, according to analysts, that an array of distributed systems are needed to meet a wide range of potential threats.
"If at some point in future, you need to expand your capability, expand your military," Maj. Gen. Ryan said, "Australia’s at the end of a very long line of industrial resupply, and we might want to have the capacity ourselves."
While a Trump-Kim summit is a victory for South Korean diplomacy and the policy of maximum pressure, it is also a tremendous victory for Kim Jong Un, and this must be recognized.