Persistent rumors from the allied community in Washington had the Obama administration dropping a key concept from this QDR — building partnership capacity. So I checked with the policy folks at the Pentagon and was told essentially that the Obama administration views this as a central principle to US strategy and it will guide all policy analysis during the Quadrennial Defense Review — and not stand separately as a goal. That means building partnership capability will be a fundamental part of this QDR for analytic purposes and will guide related policy.

In what could become a landmark study in the episodic battle over the International Traffic in Arms Regulation and the State Department that enforces it, the House Intelligence Committee’s 2010 report “requires the DNI” totell it, its Senate counterpart and the foreign affairs committees about “the threat to national security posed by foreign government attempts to acquire sensitive technology and the effectiveness of ITAR in mitigating that threat.”

Now that cyber command has been approved and it’s grown increasingly clear that the US will deploy offensive capabilities, I thought it was time to revisit recent comments by Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz who said the US can kill advanced surface to air missiles without F-22s, F-35s or any other kinetic capability. In fact, Schwartz may have let some of the cat out of the bag when he told a Brookings Institution audience that the US possesses “the nascent capability” of taking down surface to air missile sites using offensive cyber methods.

A left-leaning British thinktank is urging the Labour Party government to consider pulling out of the F-35 as that country combs through all its defense acquisition programs. The inimitable Doug Barrie at AvWeek broke the story about the report, authored by several respected British defense experts. While the Brits have shown few signs of anything but complete commitment to the F-35, this is a story to watch over the next few months as the government stares deep into its dwindling purse. Doug’s story follows:

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.