The folks at the Center for a New American Security, also known as the Obama administration in waiting, announced a wave of potential military leaders today, including the announcement that President Obama’s former campaign advisor Richard Danzig is its new board chairman.

Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz told reporters this morning that he would not “dispute” comments by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs late last year that the service would get an additional 60 F-22s and he appeared to kill any hopes of exporting the fighter.

The debate is in the very early stages but the intelligence community and the Commerce and Defense departments are considering whether to increase the resolution of electro-optical satellite imagery that can be sold commercially, sparking a complex discussion about whether this may provide enemies with substantially improved intelligence or actually boost US control over the best commercial imagery.

The United States should improve the quality and sharing of data about the location of satellites and space debris with other countries, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine Gen. James Cartwright said Thursday. He spoke after news broke about the destruction of a US commercial communications satellite in low earth orbit by a dead Russian satellite.

The full Senate completed installing the first wave of Obama appointments Wednesday night, casting a suprisingly resounding vote of 93–4 to confirm Bill Lynn as deputy defense secretary. Two Republicans, Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Charles Grassley of Iowa, voiced concern about Lynn before the Senate voted. But McCain voted for Lynn in the end.

They worked on Droids in Star Wars, so why not an al-Qaeda communications center? “They” are electro-magnetic grenades — not something you’ll find in the typical armory but apparently something that could soon be in the hands of GIs.

Threats to the United States have outstripped “our intelligence, diplomatic, and investment capability,” and the Pentagon must enact a broad series of institutional changes to cope with these new, often unexpected threats according to a major study by the Defense Science Board. The DSB study calls for the Pentagon to educate Congress about the problem and to create a new office to advise senior military leaders “of high risk potential red capabilities” and how to handle them.

Tony Tether, head of DARPA since 2001, is leaving the agency and there is much speculation that one of the space industry’s most respected thinkers, and greatest innovators, is coming to head the agency. Tether, without a doubt one of the most respected people to lead the Pentagon’s fount of good ideas and nifty new technologies, may be replaced by Pedro “Pete” Rustan but there is no official word yet. Jan Walker, DARPA’s spokeswoman, said this morning there is no official statement yet.

The two words “space program” have almost become synonymous with Nunn-McCurdy, and John Young’s acquisition office wants to change that. So, not for the first time, an effort is underway to do a soup to nuts review of space programs, trying to figure out which capabilities are absolutely required, which might be traded to cover other costs or other requirements and which might have been superseded or are just too hopeless to be much more than technology labs.

Our friend Kevin Coleman has a useful story for those tracking the billions on tap to improve U.S. cyber security over at DefenseTech. Kevin says the government’s top cyber expert will lead a two-month review of the goverment’s beefed up cyber effort.

Before he took the job of overseeing defense matters with OMB, Steven Kosiak wrote a report for his former employer CSBA on reconcling the mismatch between DOD’s weapons wish list and available funds. He laid out the most likely options, all of which entail considerable tradeoffs.

With the Obama administration’s eyes so firmly fixed on how to rebuild the economy, Congress and the defense companies are going to be all too happy to push things their way and see if the administration notices in time.

UPDATED: The full Senate is set to debate and vote Monday on the nomination of Bill Lynn to be deputy defense secretary. While the bill is on the schedule as a unanimous consent measure, the Senate leadership has granted Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and hour to discuss the nomination, with half an hour each going to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s leaders, Sen. Mark Levin (D-Mich.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

As policymakers in Washington desperately search for ways to resuscitate America’s moribund economy a popular meme is taking hold that higher military spending can produce an economic boom. Yes, it can. But the data shows it would take an increase in outlays along the lines of spending during World War II to really boost ecnomic growth.

Members of Congress, especially members of the president’s party, don’t usually shout out advice to the administration on what the defense budget should be before it comes out, but Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Armed Services seapower and expeditionary forces subcommittee, effectively did just that this morning about his portion of the budget. Taylor even offered Gates and the rest of the Obama team his own shipbuilding plan.

It’s not often that the military tells us how many subs are chasing our aircraft carriers but Naval intelligence has released data showing that China’s fleet of more than 50 attack submarines conducted 12 patrols in 2008, twice as many as in 2007, and the highest rate recorded. But does it indicate an increased threat from China?

It all began when then-President Bush learned of a likely gap in America’s crucial electro-optical satellite coverage and pressed the then-Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell to fix it. McConnell issued a Jan. 21 memo ordering that the intelligence community buy two highly complex and very expensive satellites and tried to get $3.5 billion for them inserted into the economic stimulus bill.

Iran, after a decade of trying to develop space capabilities, today joined the small club of countries able to build and launch a satellite into orbit. One reason American military and national security officials are so worried: in at least two earlier ballistic missile launches, the Iranians launched in ways that “appear they were designed to optimize an EMP burst,” according to a Pentagon source with detailed knowledge of the Iranian’s efforts and of space technology.