WASHINGTON: When Linda Robinson speaks, special operators listen. The “silent professionals” are — for good reason — traditionally tight-lipped. The chief of Special Operations Command, Adm. William McRaven, proved that again today during a panel at the Wilson Center, giving eloquent non-answers to questions about what might transpire in Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen. But McRaven […]
WASHINGTON: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace just released what a spokesman calls the “the first and only unclassified strategic net assessment of the future security dynamic between China, Japan, and the United States-including relative military capabilities and domestic and external variables.” For those who don’t wallow deeply in the Pentagon’s unique world, a net […]
WASHINGTON: Acquisition experts agree that accurate cost estimates can be devilishly difficult to get right. The Pentagon’s top cost estimator, Christine Fox, says current cost estimates are often accurate within several percentage points. That’s impressive, but on programs measured in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, a few percentage points can mean a […]
WASHINGTON: What does America need an army for, anyway? The question has bedeviled policymakers since the Founding Fathers, who wrote their distrust of large ground forces into the Constitution. The question returns as budgets come back down after every land war. This time around, the Army leadership has not given the country a clear answer, […]
WASHINGTON: The Secretary of the Army defended today what he admitted was “an unconventional approach” to fielding the service’s cutting-edge AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopter, saying the only alternative to the current complex workaround would have been to “shut the line down” for a time. “I will grant the unconventionality of it,” John McHugh said. […]
ZARI, Afghanistan: On March 3, 2008, a Taliban suicide bomber driving a green truck packed with explosives barreled through the front gate of a small U.S. outpost in Sabari district, Afghanistan, and blew himself up next to the dining facility where American soldiers were just sitting down to dinner. Taliban foot soldiers streamed in, firing […]
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UPDATED: SAIC‘s Deborah Lee James Rumored To Be Strong Contender For Secretary WASHINGTON: The longest serving Secretary of the Air Force, Mike Donley — harbinger of changing times for the service — is leaving his post after almost five years. [Click here to read a series of op-eds Sec. Donley wrote for Breaking Defense on […]
WASHINGTON: The Army’s problem with its new Apache helicopters isn’t as bad as we thought when we first wrote about it last week. It’s worse. We knew that Northstar Aerospace, the subcontractor making the transmissions for lead contractor Boeing, had fallen behind on building that crucial component. We knew at least seven of the latest […]
The Army’s newest attack helicopter is on track, the colonel in charge said in response to congressional concerns: Delays in manufacturing transmissions for the Boeing-built AH-64E Guardian have neither driven up the price nor slowed its fielding to combat units. [But there are still unflyable AH-64Es on the Army’s hands: click here to read the […]
CAPITOL HILL: Sequestration is not the Navy’s only shipbuilding problem. In the near term, the automatic cuts to the 2013 budget are bedeviling efforts to save money by buying ships in bulk. Negotiators are racing the clock to salvage a multi-year procurement contract to buy 10 DDG-51 Aegis destroyers for the price of nine; Navy […]
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WASHINGTON: Here’s something to raise your hackles, or to Spider Man fans, set your spidey sense tingling. Air Force Secretary Mike Donley told reporters this morning that the budget and strategy talks are “two separate discussions trucking along in parallel.” “The tension between the need to do something to address the deficit and the strategic […]
In a town full of hot air, speeches are a dime a dozen. But money still talks. So let’s compare the new Secretary of Defense’s policy agenda to his first proposed budget. While Leon Panetta, his predecessor, mostly built this budget, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel owns it now and has already spent a considerable amount […]
WASHINGTON: Even the grim, dark and powerful Soviet Union came to share fairly detailed information about the size and potency of its military to ensure nobody made a wrong step by over- or underestimating its military prowess. The current rising power, China, so far, has largely refused to share much information about either how its […]
WASHINGTON: The American Civil Liberties Union, those card-carrying folks, have come straight out in opposition to CISPA, the House cybersecurity bill. The ACLU cited the Obama administration’s “veto threat” in its statement, released soon after the 288-127 bipartisan vote in favor of the bill. But the administration’s veto threat is pretty squishy, if past Obama […]