Reps. Mac Thornberry, Adam Smith Lead House Push For More Foreign Military...
CAPITOL HILL: Sequestration, Continuing Resolution, and snow be damned; the House Armed Services Committee met this morning to wrestle with long-term strategy. In a hearing not only overshadowed but...
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Army Shows Cheek, Elbows Its Way Into AirSea Battle Hearing
CAPITOL HILL: With half a million soldiers on active duty, you’d think the Army would be hard to overlook. When the House Armed Services Committee organized a hearing on the hot interservice concept...
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US Bombs ISIS To Aid Kurds: Strikes By USS George H.W. Bush, Drones
[UPDATED with details on latest strikes] Yesterday, President Obama ordered humanitarian airdrops to Iraqi refugees and authorized — but did not actually launch — airstrikes on Islamic State forces...
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Iraq Airstrikes Are Strategic, Not Humanitarian
[CORRECTED number of Mt. Sinjar airdrops] The Obama administration and the mainstream media can make the airstrikes in Iraq sound like a humanitarian war, a New Age operation driven not by realpolitik...
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ISIS Force Remains Low-Tech: DoD Data
UPDATED: INCLUDES TEXT OF OBAMA SPEECH AS PREPARED Just hours before President Barack Obama goes on the air to explain his strategy to destroy the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the US...
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DISA, CYBERCOM Stand Up New Cyber HQ
[UPDATED with Central Command statement on Twitter/YouTube hack] CRYSTAL CITY: There’s a new cyber sheriff in town — and none too soon. When the Pentagon’s social media accounts get hacked, as they did...
View ArticleCut Pay? Trim COCOMs: How To Act Wisely On Military Pay
Imagine a business that’s restructuring costs. The idea is to restrain employee compensation and free up money for operations and investment, thus allowing the company to grow. Everyone’s familiar with...
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4,817 Targets: How Six Months Of Airstrikes Have Hurt ISIL (Or Not)
[UPDATED with McCain comment] The war is escalating. But what have six months of airstrikes against the self-proclaimed Islamic State actually achieved so far? Last week, Jordan launched its...
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Trench Warfare With Wings: Can ISIL Airstrikes Go Beyond Attrition?
Airpower sounds swift and surgical, but sometimes it’s really closer to trench warfare with wings. Earlier this week, with the smoke still rising from the retaken Iraqi city of Tikrit, Central Command...
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SP-MAGTF Commander Details ISIL Strikes; Notes 1st Marines ‘Could Clear’ Iraq
BALLSTON, Va: Since early November, three Marine Corps MV-22B Ospreys and 26 marines have been on alert at Al Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, on 30-minute alert to fly in and rescue a U.S. or coalition pilot...
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‘Carrier Gap’ In Gulf Is A Symptom, Not A Crisis
The geostrategic sky isn’t falling because the US won’t have an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf region for a period this fall. Land-based aircraft will do an excellent job of striking ISIL,...
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Navy Likely To Fill “Carrier Gap;” Readiness Will Suffer
WASHINGTON: The Navy says it won’t have an aircraft carrier in the Middle East for a couple of months this fall. That news has caused a lot of anxiety — but we may be worried about the wrong thing. The...
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Navy Seizes 1,700 Iranian Weapons Bound For Yemen’s Houthi Rebels
We write a lot on this site about high-tech, high-cost weapons. But it’s worth remembering that most of the killing around the world, an estimated 200,000 deaths a year, takes place with low-tech...
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NATO AWACS Likely For CENTCOM
NATO HQ: As Central Command continues to hammer Daesh with bombs, rockets, bullets, and more, that’s straining the limited supply of AWACS, the airborne radar/command post aircraft that form the...
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Airstrikes Up In Iraq & Syria, Afghanistan Eats ISR: CENTCOM
America is waging two very different wars at once. New data from the Defense Department shows the air campaign against the Islamic State escalating back to near-record intensity after a four-month...
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CENTCOM Rebuts Breaking D’s Air War Critique
CORRECTED strikes per day figure WASHINGTON: The air war against the Islamic State is not “anemic,” a Central Command spokesman told Breaking Defense, rebutting a critique of the campaign we published...
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Everybody Loves ‘Mad Dog’: Mattis Pick Reassures Allies
SIMI VALLEY, CALIF.: You might not think a man nicknamed “Mad Dog” would put America’s allies at ease. But that’s the buzz here at the Reagan Library’s annual defense conference, where Donald Trump‘s...
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Trump’s Generals, Part 2: Jim Mattis vs. Iran
Who are Trump’s generals? Yesterday, James Kitfield told us what these retired soldiers have in common as products of our post-9/11 wars. Now we’ll go deep into the formative experiences and...
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Coast Guard Dodges Big Trump Budget Bullet; But Coasties Fix Roofs
WASHINGTON: The White House has dropped plans for a 14 percent cut to the Coast Guard, instead promising a budget that “sustains current funding levels.” The bad news is that “current funding levels”...
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Mother Of All Bombs Dropped On ISIS Terrorist Mothers
WASHINGTON: There’s a lot we don’t know about MOAB, the bomb originally designed to terrify and obliterate Iraqi troops and used in combat for the first time today in Afghanistan. We know that it is...
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