Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz revealed in his major speech at the Air Force Association con­fer­ence that the ser­vice began a wide-​​ranging tech­nol­ogy study to come up with approaches that may help the ser­vice answer some of its press­ing mis­sion chal­lenges and help find tech­nolo­gies that should under­write our future..

Schwartz told reporters after the speech that the study is being led by the ser­vices chief sci­en­tist, Werner Dahm. The hori­zon study was launched in July and should be fin­ished by next sum­mer. One promis­ing tech­nol­ogy ahs already been iden­ti­fied, Schwartz said. Virtual machines could be used to help pro­tect the util­ity and integrity of the ser­vices net­works. That tech­nol­ogy is close at hand. I would not have known about that if our chief sci­en­tist had not told me, Schwartz noted.

Schwartz also addressed a wide range of other acqui­si­tion issues, includ­ing that the Quadrennial Defense Review may result in the ser­vice los­ing some capa­bil­i­ties it hoped to develop. It may e that in many areas we might, in (Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. James) Hoss Cartwrights word, not end get as exquis­ite sys­tems as per­haps the ser­vice had planned for.

Schwartz on other programs:

The tanker RFP: Speaking per­son­ally, Schwartz said he wants the Air Force to run the KC-​​X pro­gram but ulti­mately this is a deci­sion for the Secretary of Defense to decide. He also said ser­vice had done a much bet­ter job of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the com­pa­nies since the GAO protest was issued. I think Jim Albaugh (Boeing) and Ron Sugar (Northrop Grumman) and Paul Meyer (Northrop) will tell you that there has been far bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion than had been the case he said.

Read the rest of this story and more cov­er­age of the Air Force Association 2009 con­fer­ence at DoD Buzz.

– Colin Clark

I attended the same inter­view at the Pentagon with Colin and Greg Grant where MGen. Terry met with a select group of reporters. It’s too bad he didn’t say much, but I’ll go ahead and give Colin some props for spin­ning out a story on it and get­ting the debate started.

The incom­ing com­man­der of the famous 10th Mountain Division, Maj. Gen. James Terry, sat down with defense reporters today to talk about the future of Army mod­ern­iza­tion. Terry, a very per­son­able com­man­der with a refresh­ingly can­did approach, wouldnt offer spe­cific answers about what the Armys Brigade Combat Team Modernization would look like. After all, its one of the biggest acqui­si­tion deci­sions the ser­vice will make for years and its not unrea­son­able for him to go slow. But there is a larger issue that a major gen­eral dares not address in pub­lic are the Pentagon and Army mov­ing in the right direc­tion when it comes to redesign­ing the force? The answer we got from a respected ana­lyst is a resound­ing No!

Terry knows a great deal about the past and future of Army mod­ern­iza­tion from his job as direc­tor of TRADOCs Future Force Integration Directorate, known fondly as FFID. But he is also an offi­cer in the chain of com­mand and the Army is in the midst of decid­ing just what the suc­ces­sor to FCS will be, so he couldnt say much.

Terry did say that the Army is prob­a­bly going to do more of tak­ing Operational Needs Statements from com­man­ders in the field and turn­ing them into pro­grams of record, those won­der­ful bud­get­ing tools that allow the ser­vice to build a pro­gram into its reg­u­lar annual fund­ing plan. At the end of the ses­sion, I asked him if the Army was mov­ing from a force bent on fun­da­men­tal change which the ser­vice declared was the case with the devel­op­ment of FCS to a more incre­men­tal approach. Terry said he thought the ser­vice was prob­a­bly headed to some­thing much closer to a step by step approach.

Eager to get some per­spec­tive on whether the ser­vice is gen­er­ally headed in the right direc­tion since the demise of the Manned ground Vehicle pro­gram, I called one of the best out­side ana­lysts who fol­lows the Army, Dan Goure of the Lexington Institute. Goure was adamant. The Army has, under enor­mous pres­sure from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, begun to turn into an insti­tu­tion plan­ning for the last war one of the great­est sins of which a mil­i­tary can be accused.

The Armys cur­rent course almost guar­an­tees sur­prise, tech­ni­cal and oper­a­tional sur­prise in our next con­flict because the ser­vice is rebuild­ing to cope with the wars it has most recently fought Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates has declared repeat­edly that he is act­ing to rebal­ance the US mil­i­tary in light of the lessons he has learned since com­ing to the Pentagon.

Why would you think you are going to get your­self in the same sit­u­a­tion in five years” Goure asked. On top of that, Army offi­cials have said repeat­edly they are plan­ning for uncer­tainty and for the long war. The Army uses the term uncer­tainty thats not a plan for the future, he said. Instead that leads the ser­vice, Goure opined, to oper­at­ing with­out a greater vision, a greater pur­pose than the imme­di­ate fight. And that takes us back to his ini­tial premise, that the cur­rent course of the Army will place the coun­try in peril because it will be vul­ner­a­ble to an enemy able to tar­get our tech­nol­ogy that has been devel­oped with the cur­rent fight in mind. You dont have a core pur­pose for the Army, whether it might be devel­op­ing the capa­bil­ity to read and react to an enemy attack, mobi­lize quickly and stop the enemy in its tracks almost any­where in the world, pacify the Indians or stop the Soviets at the Fulda Gap.

Read the rest of this story and join the dis­cus­sion over at DoD Buzz.

– Colin Clark

One of the rea­sons I lis­ten closely to Gen. James Mattis is that he is an avid stu­dent of his­tory, and uses lessons from past wars to guide the work he and other folks down at Joint Forces Command are doing to re-​​craft oper­a­tional concepts.

Mattis says future wars will be of the hybrid vari­ety, char­ac­ter­ized by a mix­ture of con­ven­tional and uncon­ven­tional oper­a­tions blend­ing both high-​​tech attacks, such as cyber, and low tech, such as IEDs, all on the same battlefield.

Because of a hybrid ene­mys adapt­abil­ity and fluid nature there is no sin­gle tem­plate for the threat, such as there was in Cold War days when one could tem­plate a Soviet Motorized Rifle Battalion down to the indi­vid­ual vehi­cle. But there is a text­book exam­ple of a hybrid war, Mattis says: Israels fight in south Lebanon against Hezbollah in 2006. Frank Hoffman, who writes exten­sively on hybrid threats, said the Lebanon war is the Grozny for the 21st cen­tury; a con­tem­po­rary war that will be picked apart and ana­lyzed for poten­tial lessons.

In our con­tin­u­ing explo­ration of hybrid threats and their impli­ca­tions for doc­trine and orga­ni­za­tion, we drill down a bit deeper into some of the lessons Israel took from that con­flict. Long revered as one of the most for­mi­da­ble mil­i­taries in the world, mil­i­tary pro­fes­sion­als took notice when the IDF was roughly han­dled by Hezbollah. The Israeli mil­i­tary itself launched some 50 inter­nal probes to deter­mine what went wrong.

IDF Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, for­mer leader of the IDFs Intelligences Research Division, was tasked with re-​​writing IDF doc­trine and oper­a­tional meth­ods to avoid a repeat of the mil­i­tarys dis­mal per­for­mance. I was passed along a brief­ing given last year by Brun sum­ma­riz­ing lessons learned. He called the war a wake-​​up call, and his analy­sis of the Hezbollah hybrid arche­type is interesting.

Brun defined Hezbollah as a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion with the struc­ture and capa­bil­i­ties of a state-​​like reg­u­lar army and with a guer­rilla mode of oper­a­tion. Hezbollahs strate­gic con­cept was vic­tory through non-​​defeat; which meant Israels tac­ti­cal vic­to­ries were of lit­tle to no impor­tance. Hezbollah began the war with some 10,000 fight­ers equipped with vast quan­ti­ties of anti-​​tank guided mis­siles, anti-​​aircraft mis­siles, a large arse­nal of rock­ets, some 1,000 long range (up to 250 km) and 13,000 shorter range, an air unit equipped with aer­ial drones and a naval unit with anti-​​ship mis­siles. Hezbollahs oper­a­tional con­cept was the con­tin­u­ous launch­ing of rock­ets into Israels cities even in the face of a sig­nif­i­cant IDF ground maneuver.

Hezbollah pur­sued what Brun called a strat­egy of dis­ap­pear­ance: com­mand posts and arms stored in civil­ian build­ings; launch­ing rock­ets from civil­ian sur­round­ings and sen­si­tive sites such as mosques and schools; use of low sig­na­ture weapons includ­ing rock­ets, mor­tars and anti-​​tank mis­siles; and Hezbollah employed exten­sive cam­ou­flage and field for­ti­fi­ca­tions such as tun­nels and bunkers. As mil­i­tary ana­lyst and for­mer gen­eral Bob Scales told me, Hezbollahs abil­ity to fire rock­ets, move fight­ers and resup­ply when the Israeli Air Force had com­plete air dom­i­nance, was one of the big sur­prises of the war.

Read the rest of this story over at DoD Buzz…

– Greg Grant

Some peo­ple are will­ing to for­give the defense estab­lish­ment for its zeal in pur­su­ing high-​​tech solu­tions. Gen. James Mattis, com­man­der of Joint Forces Command, is most def­i­nitely not one. 

In a wide rang­ing cri­tique of defense plan­ning over the past decade, Mattis blasted the wrong­headed think­ing of recent years that led mil­i­tary plan­ners to seek tech­no­log­i­cal solu­tions to solve wars fun­da­men­tal chal­lenges and naively dis­miss wars unchang­ing real­ity. We embraced some wish­ful think­ing, we espoused some untested con­cepts and we ignored his­tory, he said yes­ter­day at CSIS in Washington. 

Mattis didnt men­tion the pre­vi­ous Pentagon lead­er­ship by name. But it was for­mer SecDef Rumsfeld who turned trans­for­ma­tion into the catch-​​all buzz­word sig­nal­ing the mil­i­tarys embrace of a Toefler-​​certified dig­i­tal future. Phrases such as infor­ma­tion dom­i­nance and Effects Based Operations fil­tered into doc­trine man­u­als. In the new American way of war, near-​​perfect intel­li­gence gath­ered from unblink­ing elec­tronic eyes would replace the fog of war that causes con­fu­sion, casu­al­ties and uncer­tain out­comes with pre­dictabil­ity in American mil­i­tary operations. 

Mattis is deter­mined to bury that notion. Defense plan­ners will not be allowed to adopt a sin­gle preclu­sive view of war, he said. War can­not be pre­cisely orches­trated. By its nature it is unpre­dictable. You can­not change the fun­da­men­tal nature of war. 

The mil­i­tary has swung too far in its embrace of high-​​technology, Mattis said, using as an exam­ple what he called over-​​centralized com­mand and con­trol. That over-​​centralization can cre­ate a sin­gle point of fail­ure, he warned. The U.S. mil­i­tary is the sin­gle most vul­ner­a­ble mil­i­tary in the world if we overly rely on tech­ni­cal C2 sys­tems. In future wars, tech­ni­cal sys­tems will be under attack and will go down, he said, so forces must dis­ag­gre­gate author­ity and decision-​​making to much lower lev­els. Were going to have to restore ini­tia­tive among small units and indi­vid­ual leaders. 

Tasked with craft­ing a force for the com­bat­ant com­man­der after next, Mattis is striv­ing to pre­vent the mil­i­tary from repeat­ing past mis­takes such as grab­bing con­cepts that are defined in three let­ters, and then won­der­ing why the enemy dances nim­bly around you. He recently decreed that EBO be dropped from the American mil­i­tary lex­i­con. The rhetor­i­cal bat­tle over EBO was largely between those who see troops on the ground as the linch­pin of future con­flicts, ver­sus air­power enthu­si­asts, who believe just the right amount of pre­ci­sion weaponry applied at just the right point can pro­duce, well, most any desired effect.

(more…)

The first Quadrennial Defense Review I cov­ered also the first QDR there ever was included what I thought was a pro­duc­tive and provoca­tive tool, a panel of out­side defense experts who were charged with cri­tiquing the QDR as it went along and basi­cally grad­ing it when it was done.

At Wednesdays House Armed Services Committee bud­get hear­ing, Rep. Mac Thornberry, one of the most con­sis­tently thought­ful and effec­tive leg­is­la­tors on the House Armed Services Committee, asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates if he thought such an out­side panel would be a good idea. Gates made the clas­sic bureau­crats move of pre­empt­ing the ques­tioner, telling Thornberry he had already ‚made a move in that direc­tion, nam­ing Andy Marshall, head of the elect Office of Net Assessment, and Marine Gen. James Mattis, head of Joint Forces Command, as his red team.

Gates said he wanted to avoid any group­think and so had charged Marshall and Mattis with doing crit­i­cal analy­ses of both the QDRs sce­nar­ios and its out­comes. With the smart folks we have among our read­ers, Id like to get a Buzz debate going about whether this is a good idea to fol­low in this QDR. This is a chance to per­haps help a good idea get cru­cial sup­port it might not oth­er­wise or a chance to kill a flawed idea before it grows too big, depend­ing on where you come down.

Generally speak­ing, I really like the idea of an out­side panel to help drive the QDR teams to great­ness. Heres one rea­son why. While I cant remem­ber a lot of the details, I do remem­ber get­ting my hands on a let­ter the National Defense Panel wrote dur­ing the first QDR in the last quar­ter of the process. That let­ter sparked con­sid­er­able dis­cus­sion about the direc­tion of ele­ments of the QDR and resulted in sub­stan­tial changes being made to the final QDR product.

But another rea­son is that peo­ple whose jobs dont depend on the con­clu­sions they reach are often will­ing to offer solu­tions or analy­ses that those closer to where the rub­ber hits the road may fear to tread. Put a few emi­nence grises such as Paul Kaminski or John Hamre on it to lead, spice it up with a few defense icon­o­clasts like Loren Thompson or Robbin Laird and add a few solid indus­try experts and you could end up with one heck of an inter­est­ing alter­na­tive vision of what the QDR should become.

The kind of red team effort I see work­ing would be one that met this sort of stan­dard. An old spe­cial forces buddy told me years ago about a suc­cess­ful raid his red team made on a nuclear sub base, slip­ping aboard a boat, enter­ing offices and slip­ping away before the secu­rity forces could react. It led to a fair amount of tur­moil at the base but demon­strated gap­ing holes in their secu­rity that were then filled. While Gates is clearly will­ing to make hard deci­sions, I say he can use all the help he can get from a robust red team that is not too closely tied to the building.

What say you, dear readers?

– Colin Clark

At a naval strat­egy con­fer­ence I attended back in 2007, Stephen Carmel, VP of Maersk Shipping, said that while piracy was a prob­lem for regional coast­wise trade, it didnt really reg­is­ter for inter­na­tional ship­ping. There was an unfor­tu­nate ten­dency, he said, to con­flate petty thieves in bum­boats, some­thing we have been deal­ing with for­ever, with the the threat of hijack­ing on the high seas. I make a dis­tinc­tion between a 300,000 ton [super­tanker] loaded with crude and a barge car­ry­ing a cou­ple cups of Crisco. Stowaways, Carmel said, con­cerned him more than pirates. Efforts to get an update from Carmel have so far proven unfruit­ful; Maersk is a bit inun­dated with calls these days.

To be fair to Carmel, Maersk oper­ates a fleet of some 1,000 ships across the entire world. To get a sense of why he tended to down­play piracy, and also why that par­tic­u­lar part of the Indian Ocean that abuts Somalia has become such a happy hunt­ing ground for pirates, go to the U.S. Coast Guards AMVER web site and click Density Plots on the left hand col­umn. The plot shows the ship­ping bot­tle­neck that forms in the Gulf of Aden as ships go to and from the Suez Canal. It also shows the extent of global ship­ping; it is truly global, with ships lit­er­ally cov­er­ing the worlds ocean sur­face. Now take a look at the Live Piracy Map, updated by the International Maritime Bureau. It illus­trates just how local­ized the piracy prob­lem is, most activ­ity is con­cen­trated in the Gulf of Aden.

The real chal­lenge is the vast ungoverned, Hobbesian space called Somalia that pro­vides pirate gangs a con­ve­niently located home port, says Martin Murphy, a mar­itime strate­gist with CSBA. The unique char­ac­ter­is­tic of Somali piracy, he says, is the sanc­tu­ary that allows pirates to hold hostages for ran­som, with­out threat of cap­ture, until ship­ping com­pa­nies reach the pirates mon­e­tary demands. Once ashore in Somalia, the hostage tak­ers are truly in the dri­vers seat, which is one of the rea­sons the Navy was so deter­mined to pre­vent Captain Phillips cap­tors from reach­ing shore.

Lately, the pirates have moved oper­a­tions fur­ther out to sea, adopt­ing their own ver­sion of the U.S. Navys seabas­ing strat­egy intended to pro­vide large off­shore oper­at­ing plat­forms for ships and amphibs. Pirates attack much fur­ther from the Somali coast, well into ship­ping lanes, stag­ing from a mother-​​ship, usu­ally a large fish­ing ves­sel, and then run­ning down slow mov­ing freighters with small, fast Zodiac or Boston whaler type boats. Its a very effec­tive busi­ness model, akin to a whal­ing fleet roam­ing the oceans hunt­ing prey, occa­sion­ally putting in at for­eign ports to resup­ply, but able to remain at sea for long periods.

Since ran­soms run into the mil­lions of dol­lars, there is a huge incen­tive for more par­ties to enter the mar­ket­place. Piracy is becom­ing an estab­lished piece of the under­ground econ­omy. Once such huge mar­ket incen­tives are in place, the prob­lem becomes nearly impos­si­ble to erad­i­cate. Sweeping up pirates wont work either as there is an inex­haustible sup­ply of will­ing free­boot­ers in a coun­try like Somalia where there are so few eco­nomic options. Even if you catch pirates in the act, what do you do with a bunch of teenagers who just tried to hijack a ship? Shooting hostage tak­ers is one thing, shoot­ing cargo hijack­ers is another. The enforce­ment at sea prob­lems become ever more com­plex, Murphy says, and for the worlds navies, its a par­tic­u­larly daunt­ing secu­rity challenge.

There is a real risk that these sorts of pirate whal­ing fleets may begin to spread across the globe, mov­ing up the adap­ta­tion chain, using bet­ter ships and tech­nol­ogy to stay linked to each other and to track ship­ping, con­stantly refin­ing tac­tics. Murphy says the recent spread of piracy along major ship­ping lines likely stems from Somali mother ships motor­ing ever fur­ther from home­port hunt­ing vul­ner­a­ble freighters.

The ini­tia­tive is with the pirates, Murphy says. Theyre evolv­ing their tac­tics and their abil­ity to shift their oper­at­ing area much more quickly than we can respond. The worlds navies sim­ply dont have enough ships to patrol the more than 2 mil­lion square miles of Indian Ocean, let alone the entire global com­mons. Then there is the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion chal­lenge. How do you tell a local fish­ing boat from a pirate boat? How do you tell a dhow from a pirate mother ship? Murphy asks. While some ves­sel con­fig­u­ra­tions may look sus­pi­cious, you have to prove it, which can require board­ing the ship in ques­tion and look­ing under the tar­pau­lin, or catch­ing them in the act. Helicopters and aer­ial drones fly­ing off Navy ships greatly expand the area that can be patrolled. But the eye-​​in-​​the-​​sky hardly solves the pos­i­tive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion chal­lenge as the pirates swim in a sea crowded with fish­ing vessels.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Please read the rest of Greg’s story at DoD Buzz along with SecState’s new pol­icy on coun­ter­ing piracy. Also, keep in mind that yes­ter­day the chair­man of the House Armed Services com­mit­tee Ike Skelton called for “counter piracy oper­a­tions on Somali territory”…

Get ready for more on this as Congress comes back from spring break.

– Greg Grant

Regardless of who won and lost in Gates’ plan, what will really mat­ter now is how Congress reacts. So far, Hill reac­tion to the Gates’ moves is cau­tiously sup­port­ive. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Ike Skelton (D-​​Mo.) called it a good faith effort but point­edly noted that, “the buck stops with Congress which has the crit­i­cal Constitutional respon­si­bil­ity to decide whether to sup­port these proposals.”

Rep. Murtha praised Gates for tak­ing “an impor­tant first step in bal­anc­ing the Departments wants with our nations needs. For far too long, the Defense Department has failed to address these chal­lenges, and I applaud the Secretary for con­duct­ing this com­pre­hen­sive review.” But he echoed Skeltons com­ments that Congress will have the next say in how the nation spends its treasure.

The rank­ing Republican on the HASC, Rep. John McHugh (NY), was much more crit­i­cal. He said that Gates’ deci­sion to move sub­stan­tial amounts of fund­ing that had been in sup­ple­men­tal spend­ing bills into the base­line bud­get “will be tan­ta­mount to an $8 bil­lion cut in defense spend­ing” with­out an increase in the bud­get topline. He noted that the GOP sup­ports build­ing such fund­ing into the reg­u­lar defense bud­get, just not at the expense of over­all spending.

McHugh also ques­tioned Gates on mis­sile defense, say­ing that the defense secretary’s deci­sion to move money to the SM-​​3 and THAAD pro­grams and to effec­tively freeze Ground-​​based Midcourse fund­ing “places unnec­es­sary risk to the home­land. Just a day after North Korea launched a long range bal­lis­tic mis­sile the Secretary missed an oppor­tu­nity to re-​​commit to invest­ment in mis­sile defense capabilities.”

Overall, Gates has made some dra­matic deci­sions. But Winslow Wheeler, a for­mer Congressional bud­get staffer and now an ana­lyst at the Center for Defense Information, won­ders how much will actu­ally change.

“While Washington DC hisses and spits over the secretary’s hard­ware rec­om­men­da­tions, it is prob­a­bly more impor­tant to ask, what has changed, and if any­thing has, where are we now going? It does not appear that the basic DOD bud­get has changed; this set of deci­sions may be bud­get neu­tral, or it may even hold in its future expanded net spend­ing require­ments,” he said. “While many deci­sions were made, the Pentagon ship of state appears to be very much on the same basic course.”

– Colin Clark

President Barack Obama is expected to approve a new con­stel­la­tion of highly clas­si­fied multi-​​billion dol­lar spy satel­lites in the next few days, inject­ing a major new expen­di­ture into the Defense Department bud­get that was not planned when the admin­is­tra­tion began its bud­get deliberations.

The debate between the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and the mil­i­tary over this sys­tem has been par­tic­u­larly sharp. In the words of one Hill source famil­iar with the issue. A deep path has been worn between the Pentagon on this one, the source said.

Gates and Blair signed a clas­si­fied memo approv­ing the pro­gram on March 30, accord­ing to two sources famil­iar with the pro­gram. Details of the pro­gram are highly clas­si­fied. A DNI spokesman had not responded by the time we posted this story but may pro­vide details later.

However, we have obtained a few details in the meantime.

The sys­tem may cost $3.5 bil­lion to get started, if ear­lier esti­mates are accu­rate. It may cost up to $10 bil­lion, over the next five years depend­ing on which tech­ni­cal approach was approved and on how many satel­lites will be built.

The Hill source said that the DNI and Pentagon would have great trou­ble pay­ing for the sys­tem. I dont think they can come up with enough to pay for two-​​plus-​​two, the source said, refus­ing to add any details.

Read the rest of this exclu­sive story at DoD Buzz.

– Colin Clark

The Army has let slip one of the worst-​​kept secrets in the world — that Israel has the bomb.

Officially, the United States has a pol­icy of ambi­gu­ity regard­ing Israels nuclear capa­bil­ity. Essentially, it has played a game by which it nei­ther acknowl­edges nor denies that Israel is a nuclear power.

But a Defense Department study com­pleted last year offers what may be the first time in a unclas­si­fied report that Israel is a nuclear power. On page 37 of the U.S. Joint Forces Command report, the Army includes Israel within “a grow­ing arc of nuclear pow­ers run­ning from Israel in the west through an emerg­ing Iran to Pakistan, India, and on to China, North Korea, and Russia in the east.”

The sin­gle ref­er­ence is far more than the U.S. usu­ally would state pub­licly about Israel, even though the world knew Israel to be a nuclear power years before for­mer nuclear tech­ni­cian Mordechai Vanunu went pub­lic with facts on its weapons pro­gram in 1986.

Several years later inves­tiga­tive reporter Seymour Hersh pub­lished “The Samson Option,” detail­ing Israels strat­egy of mas­sive nuclear retal­i­a­tion against Arab states in the event it felt its very exis­tence was threat­ened. Israels nuclear arse­nal has been esti­mated to range from 200 to 400 warheads.

Yet Israel has refused to con­firm or deny its nuclear capa­bil­i­ties, and the U.S. has gone along with the charade.

As recently as Feb. 9 President Barack Obama ducked the ques­tion when asked point­edly by White House cor­re­spon­dent Helen Thomas whether he knew of any coun­try in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons. Keeping the blind­ers on is nec­es­sary polit­i­cally in order to avoid a pol­icy con­fronta­tion with Israel.

By law, the U.S. would have to cease pro­vid­ing bil­lions of dol­lars in for­eign aid to Israel if it deter­mined the coun­try had a nuclear weapons pro­gram. Thats because the so-​​called Symington Amendment, passed in 1976, bars assis­tance to coun­tries devel­op­ing tech­nol­ogy for nuclear weapons proliferation.

Given the U.S.s long his­tory of selec­tive blind­ness when it comes to Israeli nukes, its unlikely that the Joint Operating Environment 2008 report com­piled by the Army amount to much more than a minor faux pas.

The Israeli news­pa­per Haaretz, in a March 8 arti­cle on the report, observed: “It is vir­tu­ally unheard of for a senior mil­i­tary com­man­der, while in office, to refer to Israels nuclear sta­tus. In December 2006, dur­ing his con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates referred to Israel as one of the pow­ers seen by Iran as sur­round­ing it with nuclear weapons. But once in office, Gates refused to repeat this allu­sion to Israel, not­ing that when he used it he was ‘a pri­vate citizen.’”

– Bryant Jordan

Two great Pentagon busi­ness sto­ries today, one from Defense Tech friend and con­gres­sional defense beat reporter Josh Rogin and another scoop from our boy Colin Clark at DoD Buzz.

As our read­ers know, Pentagon chief Gates put a major clam­p­down on any leaks from the Obama defense bud­get plan­ning. My col­leagues on the bud­get beat have been majorly frus­trated with the lack of string for story-​​hungry edi­tors (myself included).

As the “April” dead­line for specifics on the ’10 bud­get details approaches, cracks are start­ing to form.

First off, Rogin reports at Congressional Quarterly that the Obama admin has decided to delay pur­chase of a new tanker by five years and cut out alto­gether the Next Gen Bomber pro­gram (though he’s quick to point out no final deci­sion has been made).

Both of these are huge mis­takes, in my opin­ion. The KC-​​135 has a few more years left on it for sure, but delay­ing it another five means delay­ing it another 10 in real­ity. It’s one of those unsexy things that aren’t that much fun to buy, but “you’re sure glad you have them when you need them” kind of things that pushed off into the future could mean seri­ous prob­lems for a force as expe­di­tionary as ours.

And the NGB…again, bombers have proven them­selves to be highly adapt­able plat­forms for a wide range of mis­sions and muni­tions. They last a long time and evolve well to the threat. Our cur­rent fleet is either too small (B-​​2) or too old (B-​​52) to meet the long loi­ter, long range, heavy pay­load demands of oper­a­tions, so it seems a big error to shunt this one to the side as well.

Also, Colin has an excel­lent grab from sources on the JSF/​F-​​22 plans com­ing out of DoD. He hears that the F-​​22 line will be kept open, with pro­duc­tion fund­ing for as many as 40 more planes, and that the F-​​35 will be trimmed back from plans in 2010, but ramp back up in 2011 and the POM (though he has no num­bers to attach to Lightning II buys).

This info would seem in line with per­sis­tent rumors that Gates and Co. will salami slice the F-​​22 buy, largely because they know that Congress will fund it, des­per­ate to keep those jobs going. The F-​​35 trim is appar­ently the tac­ti­cal trade-​​off for con­tin­u­ing the F-​​22 pro­duc­tion. The strong out-​​year fund­ing would be proof that the Pentagon remains strongly com­mit­ted to the F-​​35, a sig­nal that allies will peer at as closely as an anthro­pol­o­gist watches a rare cer­e­mony cel­e­brat­ing, say, fertility. 

Couldn’t have said it bet­ter myself…We know how Congress works, don’t we?

– Christian