Archive for September, 2013

Smaller Corps | Personnel overhaul | Simpler weapons

Days after Marine Commandant Jim Amos argued that his Corps should be sized at 174,000 Marines, Aaron Haubert begs to differ. The Corps could do its vital jobs with 120,000 to 150,000 …

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Navy’s ‘wasted year’ | Buy fewer UAVs | Sequestration woes

At Information Dissemination, Galhran sounds the alarm bell on rifts in the Navy’s leadership: “It is shocking how much of a wasted year this has been for the Navy to make a …

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Deptula: ‘Combat cloud’ is ‘new face of long-range strike’

Deptula: ‘Combat cloud’ is ‘new face of long-range strike’

Lt. Gen. (ret.) David Deptula

Lt. Gen. (ret.) David Deptula, the USAF’s first deputy chief of staff for ISR and newly the dean of the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute, headed a …

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Sino-U.S. space | SCMR frames choices | NSA locks down

The Stimson Center’s Michael Krepon introduces a collection of essays about ways the U.S. and China will cooperate and collide in space. (Defense One)

Here’s a quick piece by Frank Hoffman: the …

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Strategy: art, not science | Fiddler-crab effect | Fixing amphib warfare

Strategy isn’t a lost art — we’ve just forgotten that it was never a science, argues Antulio Echevarria at the Strategic Studies Institute. There’s a response from @zenpundit here. (Via @aelkus)

Why …

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Decrying sequestration | Strategic myopia | Obama/DoD reset

Writing in Defense News, Christine Fox, a former director of the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, defends the SCMR review, says real savings lie in BRAC rounds and compensation reform, …

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1950: For helicopters, a baptism of fire

Navy corpsmen carry a wounded man from a U.S. Marine Corps HO3S-1 evacuation helicopter to a hospital in Korea on Oct. 3, 1950.

Navy corpsmen carry a wounded man from a U.S. Marine Corps HO3S-1 evacuation helicopter to a hospital in Korea on Oct. 3, 1950.

From the archive: Sept. 16, 1950

Flying ‘Eggbeaters’

Lt. …

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1964: Bomb-hunting submarine

The Aluminum, the world's first aluminum-hulled submarine, would recover a hydrogen bomb lost in the Mediterranean Sea.

From the archive: September 12, 1964

Editor’s note: No one knew it at the time, but the Aluminaut — built for research — would in 1966 be used to recover a hydrogen …

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U.S., unexceptional? | Dempsey on Syria | Generals & politics

Are we moving into a “post-American” world? Oxford prof and Hoover fellow Timothy Garton Ash writes in the L.A. Times, “Maybe after some years spent putting its own house in order, it …

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McMaster on war | ISAF’s next phase | CGSC broken?

Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster, commander of the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence and all-around big brain, offers his suggestions for approaching the study of war and warfare at the DEF2013 blog.…

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