The Navy’s departing head of expeditionary warfare said today that the Marine’s Expeditionary Fighting vehicle would be tough to kill since the Marines remain committed to hitting the beaches and fighting in something like the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. Will Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ “hard look” at amphibious warfare lead to the end of the Marine’s historic role as door kickers?

In a briefing to reporters last week, CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman lamented the quality of intelligence on the insurgency in Afghanistan. A recent RAND report suggests that the U.S. military may be relying too heavily on overhead surveillance versus human intelligence in its counterinsurgencies.

It could have been the big story of the Quadrennial Defense Review — major increases or decreases in the number of Army soldiers and changes to how the service is organized to fight. But it looks as if the move by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to bring on 22,000 troops over three years may trump any longer-term plans to beef up or rebuild the service, according to a service official familiar with the deliberations. Instead, it looks as if Gates wants to see how things go in Iraq and Afghanistan and provide the Army with a bit of a cushion to get through the next three years.

Raytheon has been pushing the idea of modifying the very successful SM-3 missile so it can be based on land. They managed to get $50 million placed in the 2010 budget, establishing all-important program of record status for the idea. The admiral who oversees the SM-3 program offered cautious support for the effort at an event put on by the Marshall Institute.

The US has long pondered how best to use its cyber capabilities to attack another country and has long shied away from using them, fearful that we might pull down the Internet curtain on ourselves if we tried to wipe out an enemy’s networks. The New York Times ran a piece this weekend about just how daunting is this balancing act. One of the reasons for that concern is that BotNets — networks of infected computers that can be controlled without the owner knowing it — have become what Kevin Coleman says is “a critical problem that must be addressed.” Wiping out one country’s cyber capabilities could easily affect its neighbors and also invite retaliation against the U.S.