BattlelandMilitary Spending
Budgets are important documents: they are the ultimate expression of policy by a President or Congress.
Budgets are also a useful revelation of the character and competence of those who put them together.
President Obama’s …
BattlelandMilitary Spending
[WARNING: For serious national-security budget experts only. May cause headaches, blurry vision and heart palpitations among normal taxpayers. The editors.]
Pentagon budget rollouts are always part fact, part fiction, with …
BattlelandProcurement
The Marines issued a flashy press release last week: “first operational F-35B conducts initial Vertical Landing.” It was an amateurish, somewhat slimy piece of hype.
In one important way, the press release contradicted …
BattlelandWeapons
There’s a new and disquieting Pentagon report on the troubled $400 billion tri-service F-35 fighter.
It includes stunning pilot comments about the aircraft’s survivability (“Aft visibility will get the pilot gunned [down] …
BattlelandPentagon
Watching the Senate Armed Services Committee interact Thursday with former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel—President Obama’s candidate to be secretary of defense—was a profoundly depressing experience.
Hagel’s …
BattlelandNational Security
It’s old, and likely thoroughly forgotten now, but last summer the Washington Post ran an excellent article on the U.S. military‘s “pivot” toward Asia, its origins, and its budget implications. It presented some meaningful …
BattlelandThe U.S. Navy: Troubled Waters
Last of three articles
The prevailing wisdom holds that America’s smaller fleet is more capable than the U.S. Navy of yore because of higher capability per individual ship. It is a dangerous assumption.
To its credit, in …
BattlelandThe U.S. Navy: Troubled Waters
Second of three articles
The shrinking size of the fleet is just one variable in considering its adequacy: the ability to perform assigned missions, especially after withstanding whatever threats may exist, is a far better …
BattlelandThe U.S. Navy: Troubled Waters
First of three articles
During the third debate of the presidential campaign, President Obama hammered Mitt Romney with a clever retort when Romney pointed out—accurately—that the U.S. Navy had become “the smallest since …
BattlelandMilitary Spending
BattlelandMilitary Spending
First of two articles (second one here)
Imposing itself only infrequently on the consciousness of the noise-makers who dominate presidential campaign coverage on TV and in the newspapers, the defense budget has been a …
BattlelandMilitary Spending
Many have predicted that the January 2, 2013 “sequester” of $55 billion out of the $620+ billion Pentagon budget for 2013 would cause a lot of noise, even hysteria, during the presidential and congressional elections.
How right they were. But as usual, the politicians, the advocates and the pundits are paying attention to themselves, …
BattlelandCongress
Senator John McCain (R.-Ariz.) and the Lockheed Martin Corp. have been behaving in ways that parallel one another.
That could be explained by their common political objectives, or by a separate action by McCain — the rehiring …
