The Army announced today a June 15 workshop that will convene a wide range of experts to inform a “Ground Combat Vehicle Blue Ribbon Panel,” made up of senior DOD and Army leaders, who will use ideas from the workshop to produce operational concepts and requirements for new vehicles to replace the cancelled FCS vehicles.

The US intelligence community needs more analytic capabilities to figure out what countries such as North Korea are doing and why they are doing it, the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee said in its markup of the 2010 defense authorization bill. “During recent briefings, it was brought to my attention that we have insufficient analytical capabilities and resources to keep pace with these developing systems,” said the panel’s top Republican, Rep. Mike Turner.

It was a bit jarring to hear Boeing’s top military salesman say the Obama administration’s export polices are looking better than they did under the Bush administration. Of course, it would be a bit jarring to hear any defense executive say any administration is looking better on arms export policies. In a decade of covering arms exports I have rarely heard a kind word said by the defense industry about US arms export policies.

Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn may well play the lead role in managing the KC-X tanker competition, his boss indicated. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Appropriatiions defense subcommittee that he would decide within the next week whether the Air Force would lead the competition or the Office of Secretary of Defense would. Gates may have tipped his hand when he told the Senate panel that he was looking for the “best people” to run this program and then added that Lynn would take a “very close interest” in the program.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, a Californian who votes with his party about 95 percent of the time, won the nod from GOP elders to lead the party in one of its most important committees, the House Armed Services Committee. McKeon beat out the thoughtful and creative Mac Thornberry, who also sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland, a scientist and top GOP member on the HASC air and land subcommittee.

Influential former Obama administration advisor on South Asia, Bruce Riedel, told a Washington audience yesterday of the very real possibility that Islamic jihadists could seize control in Pakistan. News of a deadly bomb attack today at a hotel in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, the latest in a series of terrorist bombings, certainly provides deadly confirmation of the risks.

UPDATED: Congressional Aide Says Huge Fight On Between Senate Intel Committee and IC, DoD Over EO System. It May Get Killed. IC Source Rebuts Feinstein.
The chairman of the Senate Permanent Select on Intelligence expressed “extraordinarily serious concern” that the intelligence community and Pentagon may repeat the disaster of the Future Imagery Architecture system and made clear to Gates that there is bipartisan support on her committee for questioning the electro-optical system President Barack Obama recently approved.

“We have extraordinarily serious concerns involving the waste of many, many dollars over a period of years and are rather determined it not happen again,” said Sen. Diane Feinstein.

The Congressional Research Service possesses some of the most acute and reliable defense analysts in town. CRS has laid out four options for their lawmaker leaders to consider as they try to figure out what the heck to do with those VH-71 birds just itching to fly President Obama around. The options range from restructuring the current program and building 23 VH-71s to retrofitting the current fleet. The folks at AvWeek got their hands on the primer and their story appears below.

If you comb through the press releases, special displays and briefings at the 100th year of the Paris Air Show, unmanned aerial vehicles loom larger than anything else. Virtually every major company is offering briefings on their standard bearers: Lockheed is looking at delivering on the promise of the F-35. Boeing and Northrop are doing updates on airborne tankers. And EADS will be talking a lot about their troubled A400M transport aircraft and why the C-130J is the wrong plane for France to buy. But it is the UAV briefings from the Israelis, Northrop, Boeing and others that offer the best promise of news and of new products.

In 2007, U.S. historians questioned Iraqi former Lt. Gen. Ra’ad Hamdani on a range of issues from his experience as a young officer fighting the Israelis on the Golan Heights in 1973, as a Republican Guard commander during the long war against Iran and then against the Americans in 1991 and again in 2003. A recent release in the National Defense University McNair Paper series, Saddam’s War: An Iraqi Military perspective of the Iran-Iraq War, contains the fruits of those interviews. Hamdani’s insights on Iran are particularly valuable as that country emerges as perhaps the region’s dominant power.

Cyber security, as part of the so-called global commons, looms large in the analyses of Michele Flournoy, head of OSD policy and point person for the QDR, and many other senior OSD leaders. Kevin Coleman, a consultant for Strategic Command who writes for Defense Tech, looks at whether the European Union is doing its part to protect this global asset. This is one area where allied cooperation is absolutely crucial and the EU’s incredibly byzantine and creaky structures apparently are not making this any easier.

Israeli Brig. Gen. Itai Brun called Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah a “wake-up call” to the threat of non state actors armed with advanced weaponry. Hezbollah has emerged as the “hybrid threat” archetype, and in a briefing we obtained Brun analysed some of the key lessons learned from that war.

The French Embassy hosted a fine lunch Thursday for five veterans of D-Day, as they gathered before leaving for France where they will all receive the Legion d’Honneur, that country’s highest honor. All these men fought with distinction and several had been honored by the US for their service. Watch them tell their stories and read of a hero I knew.

This week, Joint Forces Command is running high-level war games to test whether forces can operate when they lose radio communications and digital connectivity, said Rear Admiral Dan Davenport, concept director at JFCOM. In such environments, decentralized operations with small units may be the only way to remain effective.

Rep. Jack Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, said the Navy must find some way to recoup the $3.2 billion spent on the first tranche of the cancelled VH-71 presidential helicopter. He said we have to “take some of that $3.2 billion to build something cheaper.” He admitted he didn’t know how to do it, but the old appropriations bull has support from some of his fellow subcommittee members to do something. “It is just unacceptable that we would waste this much money,” Murtha said.

The V-22, slated to head to Afghanistan in October, is performing at acceptable readiness rates, Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway told reporters Wednesday. “They are where we expected them to be at this level in the development of the aircraft,” Conway told me when I asked him about the consistent rumors about sub-par readiness rates. The V-22s are expected to eventually achieve a readiness rate of 90 percent, Conway said. He declined to give the current number, although when one reporter said 80 percent, Conway appeared to agree.

I’ve written a fair number of stories about weapons tests, but they were all based on tests and reports that had usually been completed weeks or months earlier. Boeing and the Army are so eager (or desperate) to build support for what remains of the Future Combat System that they invited reporters to watch last week as they put the elements of the spin-out technologies through a series of field tests designed to develop a data baseline for the upcoming Limited User Test.

The likely commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that allies “could do more” to help in Afghanistan and noted several “shortfalls” that “hamper” execution of the counterinsurgency mission. Allies could provide civilian advisors, police trainers and “governance mentors” if they are “unable to contribute additional military resources,” McChrystal said in answers to written questions from the committee.

Gen. James Mattis, Commander of Joint Forces Command, has blasted the “wrongheaded thinking” of recent years that led military planners to think technological solutions could solve war’s fundamental challenges and naively dismiss war’s unchanging reality. “We embraced some wishful thinking, we espoused some untested concepts and we ignored history,” he said.