I’ve been reading the publicly-released Pentagon Selected Acquisition Reports for decades. They’re the one place you can get a bottom-line price on various U.S. military weapons systems. But they’re generally two-page summaries, not the detailed reports that generate those summaries.
So hats off to Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy …
Every other day in Afghanistan or Iraq, a U.S. soldier or other service member loses a leg or arm to an IED, or other kinds of battle trauma. In 2010, the rate of 16.4 amputations per month was more than double the 2009 rate of 7.3. That’s a growing audience for the latest item slated for display at the U.S. Army Medical Research and …
“With equipment that is falling apart and a war entering its tenth year, the strain on the troops–our most precious resource–can only be described as severe.”
In his May 5 speech at The Heritage Foundation, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, made it clear that even with the recent …
President Obama is going to thank some of those involved in Monday’s mission against Osama bin Laden during his visit to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on Friday. Whether or not the SEALs will be there isn’t known: they’re based 500 miles away, at Fort Bragg, N.C. But some key enablers live at the Kentucky base: the Night Stalkers of Task …
The notion of doing away with traditional big-deck carriers gets a high-profile boost this month in the latest (May) issue of Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute’s official rabble-rouser. It’s written by a friend and colleague, Capt. Henry (Jerry) Hendrix, along with a retired Marine Lt. Col., Noel Williams. Hendrix, a truly …
The mystery mutt who accompanied the SEALs on their mission to Osama bin Laden’s lair is coming in for a fair amount of attention. After all, people love their dogs, and if one can help take out the world’s most wanted terrorist, all the better. Their noses know: the dog’s keen sense of smell, to sniff out …
Having rid the world of a terrorist mastermind, America is celebrating a great victory. Yet the military responsible for this success faces unprecedented wartime budget cuts.
President Obama has announced a goal of $400 billion in defense cuts over the next decade. Reductions of that magnitude will surely undermine the ability of the …
When the President announced his new national security team last week most of the attention focused on David Petraeus at CIA and the problem of winding down the war in Afghanistan. Leon Panetta’s nomination as Secretary of Defense went almost unnoticed, by comparison.
But Panetta has the bigger challenge: how to manage a build down in …
The Congressional Budget Office says killing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in favor of buying more F-16s and F-18s would save $26.9 billion in outlays over the next five years. The F-35 is the biggest Pentagon procurement program in history, slated to buy some 2,500 planes for $382 billion over the next 25 years or so.
There are reports from the subcontinent that India has eliminated the two U.S.-built planes from its $10 billion competition to buy about 126 fighters. Both the Lockheed F-16 and Boeing F-18 have reportedly been scratched from the list of candidates, in favor of a pair of European-built planes. The F-16 is built in Fort Worth. I was …
Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared Tuesday that because Muammar Gaddafi’s residential compound serves as a command-and-control node for his military forces, it is a legitimate target for U.S. and NATO aircraft to attack. But the person who actually does the commanding and controlling? Not so much. “We are not targeting him …
