Features

Why our countermeasures fail to keep up with the growing threat

Will the weapon of choice of today’s insurgents also be the weapon of tomorrow? That is the question posed by new …

Why Congress, DoD and industry must share plans openly

“You should be giving us a single, coordinated input.” The senior staffer on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee showed his frustration …

TO THE MARINES CAUGHT ON VIDEO while urinating on the corpses of three Afghan fighters. In dealing a self-inflicted wound to the war effort, the incident once again showed the downside to …

TO DoD LEADERSHIP for rolling out the new military strategy a month before the 2013 budget proposal.

Certainly, the publication date had slipped several times since President Obama ordered up a review …

TO THE NAVY for revisiting Sea Swap for cruisers and destroyers.

The last time the surface fleet’s leaders tried rotating crews on its marquee warships, they botched it up, largely because they …

The impact of the Budget Control Act of 2011 on national defense

The U.S. narrowly averted a debt crisis with the passage in August of the Budget Control Act of 2011. The …

A decade of war has vaulted unmanned aircraft from intriguing peripherals to integral players, at least in the U.S. way of war, and yet we have barely begun to imagine the uses …

TO THE NAVY, for forgetting to factor in basic human behavior.

The epic plumbing failure aboard the carrier George H. W. Bush — since May, the toilets have worked only intermittently and, …

It’s time to get serious about countering unmanned enemy aircraft

America’s wars of the last decade have vaulted the UAV from novelty to workhorse. Yet too little is being done to prepare …

Andrew Marshall’s lessons for strategic forecasting

There are numbers that count, and numbers that don’t. Andrew Marshall has spent a lifetime trying to assess which ones are which. In October 1973, Arab …