Category: Content Series

Hauling Concrete with Cadillacs

By James Hasik

The gradual decline of stealth may call for a high-low mix in airpower strategy.   In the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2016 budget request, the Long-Range Strike Bomber is a big deal. At $1.2 billion, LRS-B development would account just under 7 percent of next year’s unclassified R&D spending. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is a similarly big deal, ramping […]

“Greece’s gamble”

By Nicholas Burns

New government risks undercutting ties with Europe and the US GREECE HAS never been a leader in Europe’s power institutions — NATO and the European Union. German, French, and British leaders alike considered it too small, poor, and geographically remote to be a major player. But all that changed with Sunday’s landslide victory of the […]

Getting Faster at Revolutionary

By James Hasik

The bureaucratic and technological challenges in speeding up weapons development  Pentagon procurement czar Frank Kendall told the House Armed Services Committee yesterday that his department, as the headline went, “Needs to Get Faster at Developing Revolutionary Weapon Systems”. He also noted that the Air Force, in conjunction with DARPA and the Navy, would soon begin […]

Disaggregating Space, Business, and Politics

By James Hasik

Smaller satellites in bigger constellations could accelerate the restructuring of both the space industry and international security relationships.   Amy Butler of Aviation Week reports today that the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is crafting a strategy to leverage what Director Robert Cardillo calls a pending “explosion” of commercially-available imagery. As Patrick Tucker writes this morning on Defense One, a great deal of the […]

Intelligence in a Dynamic World

Please join the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security on January 21, 2014 from 10:15 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. for a Commanders Series event with Dr. Michael G. Vickers, under secretary of defense for intelligence, to discuss the role of defense intelligence in tracking consistently morphing security threats at a time when technology […]

Arming the Anti-Terror Armies

By James Hasik

Middle Eastern armed forces need practical kit and service from Middle Eastern industry.   As Congressman Mack Thornberry pointed out with a letter in the Washington Post earlier this month, hashtags and placards don’t kill terrorists. People with guns and aircraft do. But what kind of guns and aircraft are best for fighting them is another matter—and who delivers them can matter […]

Distributing Lethality via V-22

By James Hasik

The US Navy deserves credit for taking a risk in procurement.   Secretary Ray Mabus has now all but confirmed that the US Navy will buy 12 HV-22 Ospreys from 2018 through 2020 to replace some of its aging C-2 Greyhound shore-to-ship cargo and passenger aircraft. Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute promptly called the decision “a breakthrough” for […]

Strategic Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century

On Thursday, January 15, 2015, the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security welcomed Admiral Cecil D. Haney, the Commander of US Strategic Command, for a public address entitled “Strategic Deterrence in the Twenty-First Century.” For ADM Haney, the United States must keep a credible strategic deterrent to keep threats at bay in a world of […]