Category: Emerging Defense Challenges

An Appeal for BRAC to the GOP Majority

By James Hasik

It’s time to look tough on the deficit and tough on defense.   With the mid-term elections behind us, but Halloween in fresh memory, it’s time to ask again about BRAC—the Base Closure and Realignment process (boo!). The Army Department clearly wants another round to balance its books. For years, think-tankers and defense officials have […]

Lunch with the Minutemen of Cyber

Is Internet conflict NATO’s next defense-industrial agenda, or just a matter for industry?   “Where [was] the industrial agenda for the NATO Summit?” Hugo Rosemount of Defense One asked after Wales. Successful industrial engagement has not traditionally been NATO’s long suit, but after the talks had concluded, we had our answer: cyber was priority one. That might seem […]

Open for Innovation

By James Hasik

 The pursuit of intellectual property rights in weapons buying cannot focus solely on today’s price.   About a year ago, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Al Shaffer offered some views about the department’s view on open architectures for information systems. As reported by Inside Defense (13 & 14 November 2013), he had three comments, […]

A Phalanx of Pashto-Speaking Armed Intellectuals

By James Hasik

 What makes us think our militaries have the human and organizational capital for counterinsurgency?   “Counterinsurgency,” John Nagl commented the other day, “can’t be dead as long as insurgency is alive and well — and it is, and is likely to be for some time.” Indeed we may find ourselves, as former Chief of the Australian Army Peter […]

Software is Eating the War

By James Hasik

Economically Unsustainable Spending Requires a Thorough Rethinking of Defense-Industrial Strategy   Software, Josh Marcuse told us, is eating the war. An advisor on innovation to the under secretary of defense for policy, Marcuse was speaking at the 2014 Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF), held from 24 to 26 October at the University of Chicago. Echoing Marc Andreessen’s 2011 essay in the Wall […]

Conglomerates or Alliances?

By James Hasik

  The defense industry may not be headed for another merger wave, but something much more interesting.   Bankers, lawyers, and other business advisors have been waiting for years for that coming wave of mergers amongst military contractors. As one consultant told me recently, his firm was founded on the notion that some post-post-Cold War […]

An Abundance of Caution, But Not Capacity

By James Hasik

The CDC and the DoD wisely funded an air transport technology for Ebola patients—just not enough of it.   In Tuesday’s Washington Post, Josh Hicks observes that Phoenix Air, a jet-charter service based in Georgia, is the only airline flying Ebola patients from West Africa to hospitals in Europe and North America. Help, however, is on […]

Should an End to Urgency Mean an End to Effectiveness?

By Alex Haber

 In defense acquisitions, privileges reserved for urgent needs should be extended to a broader set of systems.   A sense of urgency can bring out the best in us; the US Defense Department’s acquisitions community is no exception. Once the decision was made, it took just 27 months to develop and deploy fully today’s fleet of Mine-Resistant […]

Robotic overwatch for the Baltic?

By James Hasik

  Unmanned surface vessels could supplement navies in peace and war.   General Sverker Göransson, the Swedish chief of defense, is rather upset that a presumably Russian submarine can waltz into, and then out of, the Stockholm archipelago unchallenged. Before we complain about the previous government’s paying-off the Navy’s sub-hunting CH-46 helicopters before securing their NH-90 replacements, we should […]