WASHINGTON: With the House Armed Services Committee marking up its annual defense bill next week, the outspoken chairman of HASC’s seapower subcommittee told Breaking Defense he wants to undo last year’s budget deal — which he opposed and which drops Pentagon spending in 2017 — to get more dollars for defense. That’s political heavy lifting, I told Forbes. House speaker […]
One of the Capitol’s top defense lawmakers, Rep. Randy Forbes, will write an exclusive monthly opinion piece for Breaking Defense. What topics will he cover, Pentagon and industry leaders may want to know? Well, Forbes chairs the House Armed Services seapower and power projection subcommittee. That puts him smack in the middle of the debate […]
China, Russia, and most Asian countries are rapidly modernizing and expanding their submarine fleets. At the same time, the supply of American submarines is going down while demand for American submarines is going up dramatically. Today, we have 52 multi-mission “attack submarines” (SSNs) of the Los Angeles, Seawolf, and Virginia classes. Even with those 52 boats, we are only […]
WASHINGTON: Leading Republicans hastened today to denounce China’s deployment of anti-aircraft missiles to the South China Sea. But what can the US actually do about it? The arrival of the sophisticated HQ-9 missiles in the Paracel islands — claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan but occupied by China — is just the latest step in Beijing’s steady extension […]
CAPITOL HILL: As predicted, House Seapower subcommittee chairman Randy Forbes was swift to slam the Navy’s 2017 budget request. I asked him about the Navy’s proposals to deactivate a carrier air wing, sideline seven Ticonderoga-class cruisers, and replace the UCLASS drone program with a drone fuel tanker with “limited strike” capabilities, CBARS. Here’s what the fiery […]
PENTAGON: Of the four armed services’ budget plans for 2017, the one most likely to make Congress apoplectic is the Navy’s. On top of reintroducing a cruiser modernization plan repeatedly rejected by the Hill, the Navy proposes deactivating a carrier air wing — which tangles with the touchy issue of how many carriers the US […]
[UPDATED with experts’ analysis; “innocent passage” confirmed] WASHINGTON: Just two days after the head of US Pacific Command, Adm. Harry Harris, pledged to push harder on Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, the destroyer USS Curtis Wilbur sailed within the 12 nautical mile limit around Triton Island. Situated in the Paracels, which are claimed […]
WASHINGTON: In the brutal naval battles of the future, the first clash of arms will be a clash of electrons. If you don’t win the invisible battle of the airwaves, you can’t win the visible battle of missiles. Before warships can concentrate their fire on the enemy, they first must communicate with each other. Before they […]
CAPITOL HILL: The Navy’s 2017 budget will include a new authority similar to the Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office to improve the speed with which it can deploy new capabilities, especially classified ones, the head of Navy acquisition told the House Armed Services Committee today. “There will be something that closely mirrors the Air Force […]
[UPDATED with Rep. Forbes & Robert Martinage comments] WASHINGTON: Presence? What’s “presence”?” Once a primary measure of naval power and a driving factor in shipbuilding decisions, the word “presence” appears not once in the new Chief of Naval Operations’ strategic vision, out today. Instead, Adm. John Richardson‘s eight-page “Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority” mentions “war,” […]