The National Defense Strategy called the Indo-Pacific the DoD’s priority theater. “But all of us also recognize that strategy is budget and budget is strategy, and the budget numbers have not supported, to date, the Indo Pacific’s role as the primary theater.”
By Paul McLearyModernizing our supply chain is a national security imperative
Closing supply chain gaps in innovating technology will reposition the industrial base to be a strategic source of value.
A mix of US ships have probed waters illegally claimed by China in the South China Sea in recent weeks, as the PLA Navy continues to harass civilian ships of neighboring countries.
By Paul McLeary
“With only limited warning, Beijing or Moscow could exploit their
time-distance advantage to seize allied territory before the United States and its allies could respond, thereby creating a fait accompli that would be difficult to reverse after the fact,” CSBA finds.
The Roosevelt “is operationally capable if called upon to do so,” Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said, “but we are pulling the ship into Guam. Nobody from the ship will be allowed to leave the ship other than on the pier.”
By Paul McLeary
Intended as a prudent reprioritization, the dramatic shift in demand for more “great power gurus” threatens to shelve the experience and institutional knowledge accumulated over the last two decades.
By Alexandra Evans and Alexandra Stark
Concerns over a new Okinawa airfield, and how to get Marines across vast swaths of ocean, are complicating American plans to spread forces across the Pacific.
By Paul McLeary
Gray Eagle is the low-cost, low-risk answer to Army modernization
Gray Eagle STOL and Gray Eagle 25M are the best options for Army aviation as it assesses where to move from its current inflection point.
The most profound change resulting from China’s military modernization has been in its space capabilities. Back in 2000 China only had 10 satellites in orbit, and this year it will launch more satellites than any other nation on the planet.
By James Kitfield
We could see the most direct U.S. challenge to China since 2005, when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld became the proverbial skunk at the globalist garden party in Singapore by bluntly chastising the Chinese for what was then only the very beginning of their military modernization program.
By Thayer Scott
It’s one of the fundamental questions about China and its future place in the world: does the great civilization still view the world through the traditional lens of the Middle Kingdom, or does the world face a new China, unbound by many of the structures under which it has operated for most of the last…
By Dickson Yeo
“The Battle of Guadalcanal was a brutal campaign, but shows us what the next fight could be like,” Vice Adm. Brown said. “Usually, the CO (skipper), XO (executive officer) and senior officers – even admirals – were killed immediately – but what happened?”
By Paul McLeary
It’s a major shift after decades in which submarines focused on projecting power ashore, with their only anti-ship weapons being their rarely-used torpedoes. Driving the change: increasing anxiety about China.
By Paul McLeary
As President Trump pushes Beijing on trade and cyber espionage, the United States and China are on a collision course. The U.S. urgently needs a new strategy to avoid the traditional fate of rising and status quo powers: catastrophic war.
By James Kitfield
But while the skies are quiet today, US Pacific Air Forces are preparing for possible conflict: fielding new weapons like the F-35 stealth fighter and the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), adding more space-operations planners to theater staffs, and reemphasizing that old-fashioned initiative so junior commanders can act when an enemy cuts off their communications with higher headquarters.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Without recruit training, the services will lose .5 percent of their end strength every month (unless stop loss is imposed, and that has its own costs). Because the training pipeline is several months long, units will not feel that gap for several months, but when the pipeline begins to runs dry, units will shrink.
By Mark Cancian and Adam Saxton