Smart weapons, once the near monopoly of the U.S. military, are now proliferating to non-state actors. That was the real shock of Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war when Hezbollah roughly handled the Israeli military. That “proliferation of precision” will greatly accelerate in coming years as munitions become more precise, with increased range, easier to use and more widely available to irregular warriors, according to CSBA.
The Senate Intelligence Committee may try to break up the nation’s storied spy satellite agency — the NRO — once a paragon of American technological brilliance and now considered by many a troubled bureaucracy that has had trouble getting the big things right. In parallel, the Director of National Intelligence was briefed June 23 by a panel of distinguished experts about the best path ahead for the National Reconnaissance Office. The panel “considered options to break up NRO or reassign functions but recommended continuation of a single, unified program,” a former senior intelligence official said.
The Defense Department announced Tuesday evening that Oshkosh has won a decision — the initial M-ATV contract — with the potential to reshape the Army and Marines for the next decade. Oshkosh won a deal worth $1 billion to build and support 2,244 M-ATVs, a little more than half of the recently pegged requirement.
UPDATED: With Comments By Respected Analyst Andrew Krepinevich
One of the niftier political and policy battles going on — whether to establish a National Defense Panel to watch over the QDR — took an interesting turn late last week when the Senate Armed Services Committee decided to leave out its draft defense bill language requiring such a panel. But a major supporter of an NDP, Mackenzie Eaglen of the Heritage Foundation, believes Congress is likely to include such language.
In the Army’s quest to develop a new armored combat vehicle in the wake of the fiasco that was the FCS program, Army Chief Gen. George Casey has vowed to start with a “clean sheet of paper.” He even went so far as to say the Army was considering a wheeled vehicle versus tracked as the basis for a future armored fleet. As it designs an FCS follow-on, the Army must decide whether it wants a replacement for the Abrams tank or a lightweight, rapidly deployable vehicle, because the requirements for the two are very different. It never did answer that question with FCS, which proved in part its undoing.
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