ARMY WAR COLLEGE: Hours before Pyongyang conducted its latest nuclear test, military officers here at the Army War College began waging a wargame whose classified scenario is transparently concerned with North Korea. That is not happenstance. [Click here for more coverage of the Army’s “Winter Wargame”] After a decade of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.CAPITOL HILL: Senate Armed Services Committee leaders released a 100-plus-page report on the administration’s Asia strategy today, including — perhaps inadvertently — four pages of comments from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Congress commissioned the study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in the authorization bill for fiscal year 2012. SASC chairman Sen. Carl…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.As the US commander in Korea requests reinforcements against the Northern threat and the Chinese stage one of their regular river-crossing exercises along the Yalu, conservatives in South Korea are campaigning to keep the joint US-Korean military headquarters that is currently slated to be dissolved in 2015. One of Korea’s most prominent newspapers, the right-leaning…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Crafting A Pacific Attack & Defense Enterprise: The Strategic Quadrangle
The pivot to the Pacific started more than a century ago. The United States first became a Pacific power in 1898, the year the US first annexed Hawaii and then gained Guam and the Philippines (as well as Puerto Rico) from Spain after a “short, victorious war.” The United States is at a turning point…
By Robbin Laird