Part 2 of 3
Editor’s note: Captain Donald Hansen served in Army Air Corps and later the Air Force as a B-24 bomber pilot during World War II and Korea, flying more than 150 combat missions. He wrote this piece sometime in 1968 …
Fighting Men, Then and Now: Part 1
First of three parts
Battleland has a pair of interesting posts going up here shortly.
The first was written in 1968 – at the height of the Vietnam war — by Captain Donald Hansen, who flew more than 150 combat missions …
Hey America: Don’t Do Like the French
CLERMONT-FERRAND, France — Discussions about defense budgets are often shrouded in esoteric and far-fetched considerations about the future of warfare, none of which ever seems to fit into a broader, clear and cogent picture of …
A Woman Scorned: The Navy Responds
LandSea Battle
Army paratroopers fire artillery during the commissioning of the Navy’s newest ship, the USS Anchorage, May 4.
A Woman S(CO)rned by an Officer and a Gentleman
There’s a fascinating letter in the latest issue of the Naval War College Review from a woman who alleges she was treated abominably by an unnamed, still-serving commanding officer in the U.S. Navy. This is an official …
The U.S. Army: “A Learning Organization”
While some folks maintain that armies are always busy fighting the last war, Major Geraldo Pulido argues that the U.S. Army, from his vantage point, did a pretty good job of adapting to changing circumstances during his four …
“Interceptor production for three of Missile Defense Agency’s systems has been significantly disrupted during the past few years due to high-risk acquisition strategies which have resulted in delaying planned deliveries to the warfighter, raising costs, and disrupting the industrial base. Further, MDA continues to follow high-risk acquisition strategies for other programs. For example, its Targets and Countermeasures program is adding risk to an upcoming complex, costly operational flight test involving multiple MDA systems because it plans to use unproven targets.”
— From a Government Accountability Office assessment, here, released Thursday into the nation’s missile-defense efforts. While it may sound critical at first glance, some might argue that, in some cases, using “unproven targets” to help develop defenses against unproven threats makes sense.
So Why Do They Call It the “Accountability” Office?
Government bidders who lose a contract get the right to appeal to the Government Accountability Office, which regularly issues rulings that generally say the agency got it right and the losing bidder is basically asserting sour …
Cyber Insecurity: The 21st Century’s Version of Air Pollution
— Then-defense secretary Leon Panetta referred to the threat of cyber attacks as a “cyber Pearl Harbor.”
— A senior Cyber Command official has declared that we are in the middle of a “cyber arms race.”
— Other …
Sleight of Mouth
Sometimes it’s tough to tell when you’re being misled.
Take this (barely) edited exchange Tuesday between Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus at a hearing into the Navy’s proposed 2014 budget before …
Lost in Transcription…
Even with Battleland’s huge staff, we can’t get to all the important national-security confabs that happen every day in the nation’s capital. So we’re forced to assign our staff to skim transcripts of the gallimaufry that …
“You don't just become a nuclear-weapons designer overnight…I actually took a tour of the Twitter site about three weeks ago. I'm in the Bay Area and it is a different universe, I will say. You know, we are never going to offer our people free lunches, and we're never going to be able to offer, you know, or a massage room, which is what they had.”
— Penrose "Parney" Albright, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, explaining to Congress earlier this week some of the challenges associated with keeping his highly-skilled workers satisfied. “We still,” he added, “remain a destination for the very best and brightest in this country.”