During the days of the Cold War, intelligence analysts tracked Soviet missile deployments and launches, as well as mass maneuvers, using the technological wonders of change detection, the arcane art of looking at satellite and U-2 photos to see what had moved where and how fast they were moving. Now Northrop Grumman is developing a fast, broad-area radar that may give analysts better tools to work with.

A number of experts now say the U.S. should abandon its “top down” strategy of building an Afghan national army. Better is a “bottom up” approach that arms and pays local tribes to fight the Taliban alongside U.S. special forces.

As President Obama stood on the verge of deciding how many troops to send to Afghanistan and what broad strategy to pursue, three top Democrats declared themselves opposed to sending large numbers of combat troops. Sen. Carl Levin took the middle road and proposed following the “British model” in Afghanistan, which includes intensified training, mentoring and partnering with Afghan security forces, with a modest commitment of additional troops, more helicopters, drones and mine resistant vehicles.

In what could mark a major improvement to the nation’s ability to defend itself against cyber threats, the Department of Homeland Security will announce Friday that the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team will merge with the National Coordinating Center for Telecommunications. The two groups — now separated by two floors — will now be co-located and will operate jointly.

In a world where the barriers to nuclear weapons proliferation are breaking down, military planners must prepare to fight on the battlefield one day after a nuclear explosion in a radioactive environment facing the prospect of second nuclear strike. This scenario is so complex and so costly that it renders obsolete many basic tenets of U.S. military power projection, says CSBA in a new report.

A senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Jack Reed, wants to take money from the Defense Department and use it to bulk up the anemic US Agency for International Development. Reed, chairman of the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee and a member of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, told reporters Tuesday morning […]

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama notes “with alarm” in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates that the draft tanker RFP “omits an assessment of risk associated with either schedule, past performance, or price…” Shelby supports the Northrop Grumman tanker. Rep. Norm Dicks of Washington, a Boeing tanker supporter, cites four “serious concerns” about the RFP which he believes “demonstrate a clear bias for the EADS/NG tanker proposal” in his letter to Shay Assad, director of defense procurement at the Pentagon.

The governors of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi completed a move we first reported several months ago, setting up a non-profit group to bolster their chances of getting jobs from award of the KC-45 tanker contract. Governors Bob Riley (R-Ala), Haley Barbour (R-Miss.), and Bobby Jindal (R– La.) launched The Aerospace Alliance, intended to “establish the Gulf Coast and surrounding region as a world class aerospace, space and aviation corridor.” But job one is winning the tanker contract.

Sen. John Kerry told a Washington audience today that Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s call for an expanded counterinsurgency campaign reaches “too far, too fast.” Instead, Kerry called for a more “narrowly focused” counterinsurgency strategy that would dial down U.S. war aims, put US troops into fewer areas and pour money into Taliban fighters who might switch sides.

In a rare public appearance, Gen. Xu Caihou, vice chairman of China’s Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, came to Washington and told an audience that his country remains a “developing country and would not, could not threaten developed countries.” In fact, the PRC seeks “accommodation, not confrontation.”

Two prominent retired generals, David Barno and Barry McCaffrey, told lawmakers that the Obama administration was smart to take its time debating the decision on whether or not to escalate in Afghanistan given the importance of the issues being debated. If the administration decides to escalate, both former commanders said the U.S. faces a 10– to 20-year project to shore up Afghanistan.

A preliminary Pentagon cost estimate that the F-35 could cost as much as $17.1 billion more than currently planned is prompting calls from congressional sources for the program to be reassessed and restructured. The congressional sources also wryly noted this new estimate seemed to raise questions about the wisdom of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ recent trip to the F-35 plant in Fort Worth to show his support for the program. One aide scoffed that the new cost estimates were “no surprise to anyone who hasn’t drunk the JSF Kool-Aid.”

There are enough soldiers and Marines to maintain planned force levels in Iraq and provide enough troops for any potential “surge” of forces to Afghanistan, “whatever the president decides,” said VADM James Winnefeld, director for strategic plans and policy on the Joint Staff. While the long term health of the ground forces could be impacted by the need to simultaneously boost troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are still plenty of troops to pull it off.

In his first public appearance, the director of the National Reconnaissance Office pledged to deliver the nation’s spy satellites on time and on budget after almost a decade of botched programs such as the Future Imagery Architecture.

Troops in Afghanistan are “screaming” for the 120mm round, according to Maj. Jeffrey Hilt, from PEO Mortars. Frequent skirmishes with Taliban fighters, along with restrictive rules of engagement, put a primacy on immediate, accurate fire support and Afghanistan’s notoriously bad weather means the Air Force often can’t get close air support exactly where it’s needed. We spoke to him about Army efforts to speed a 120mm GPS mortar round to Afghanistan.

For decades America’s spies cultivated the idea that they knew things no one else did and got the information from sources no one else knew about. Then came 911 and the rules got rewritten as the veil got torn from the intelligence community’s shoulders. Open source information — stuff anyone with a brain and a healthy interest in finding something out — is now a key tool for our spies. And its use is rocketing upwards.

The Pentagon created a team one month ago and sent it to Iraq and Afghanistan to figure out how to achieve the Holy Grail of intelligence sharing, one network architecture that shares intelligence from every satellite, UAV and plane and gets it to everyone on the ground and in the air who needs it.

The United States has much to gain and lilttle to lose in sharing much more intelligence with our allies, said the Pentagon’s head of intelligence. “There is very little risk in being more open with sharing,” said Jim Clapper, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, at the annual Geoint conference.