Jim Jones, president Obama’s national security advisor, didn’t break any big news today at the Center for Strategic and International Study. But he did highlight that this year will be tough and he offered some of the reasons why, like Iran. His comments on Iran came closest to news, when he said that Iran, facing increased pressure from the international community over its apparent pursuit of nuclear weapons might well strike out at Israel as a result. His reasoning was simple: a “pressured country often lashes out through its surrogates,” he said.

Much will be made of a few reluctant acknowledgements of reality. The Navy won’t plan on, for now, a new cruiser it can’t afford even under the wildest budget growth assumptions. The Army will continue redesigning the vehicles for its “system of system” target hunting technologies that we now know can’t find even primitive enemies. The Air Force will have to wait, but just a bit, for a new bomber to try, yet again, to attack what it called decades ago “critical nodes.” The Marine Corps will declare a return to its amphibious warfare heritage: to fight its way onto hostile shores — something it has not done since 1945.

The chief of the Army’s aviation branch recently said that Afghanistan is America’s third helicopter war; Vietnam and Iraq being the first two. That explains why DOD is requesting $9.6 billion for new rotary wing aircraft in the 2011 budget, according to a draft review making the rounds in Washington. It also urges the services to boost their pilot training so they can get more helicopters to Afghanistan.

The Army chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, said the Army, stretched by eight years of war in two distant theaters, would find it difficult to cope with another conflict such as Korea. Casey said in remarks at the Brookings Institution today that the Army would have to “freeze” forces in Iraq should fighting break out in another theater and could manage an “80 percent solution” to such a threat. He said that would rise to about 90 percent “when Iraq draws down.”

It is official. The two major theater war strategy — blueprint for American power for almost a quarter century — is no more. In the long run, that is likely to be the most significant change outlined by the Quadrennial Defense Review. This QDR acknowledges the need for a robust force capable of protecting U.S. interests against a multiplicity of threats. But it is “no longer appropriate to speak of major regional conflicts as the sole or even the primary template for sizing, shaping and evaluating US forces.”

UPDATED: With congressional comment
Testing of the second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter restarted Friday and GE claims that the several months of delay resulted in “minimal” cost increases. “Delay costs were minimal — there has been no re-programming of the F136, and we’re on cost,” said GE spokesman Rick Kennedy. “We are eager to accumulate test hours in 2010, and we plan to make that up with several engines running this year.”

If you were hoping that shear thickening fluids, carbon nanotubes and lightweight flexible armor was just around the corner, you’ll need to put those hopes on hold and keep reading your sci-​​fi books. Despite the US and allied militaries’ best efforts to lighten one of the biggest culprits of a trooper’s heavy load, armor manufacturers are having a hard time making quantum leaps in increased protection and weight savings.

He’s affable, writes well, is sharp as a tack and he’s unemployed. He’s also Norm Augustine, about as close as you get these days to the giants of the aerospace business like Curtiss, Hughes, Tripp and the guys who used their initials to start a cool company called TRW. When this former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and recent head of the Augustine Commission charged with reviewing America’s manned space flight plans, says a treaty on space debris is a good idea and that we have a “window” in which he thinks one can be cobbled together, it’s worth listening.

The Pentagon has “dodged the bullet” in the fiscal 2011 budget but will almost certainly face demands for cuts next year. That was the fundamental assessment of strategy and budget experts at the respected Center for Strategy and Budgetary Assessments, a thinktank and consulting shop on which senior military leaders often rely. “I can tell you there is no way the defense budget will be immune to budget reduction efforts,” Stan Collender, one of Washington’s most respected budget wallahs, said at CSBA’s annual budget briefing.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, coping with two wars and terrorism, has sent analysts to Haiti to help SouthCom and the State Department plan and deploy trrops and aid. We got an email from NGA spokeswoman Sue Meisner telling us of the deployment. Given the enormous strains on the intelligence community’s analysts, pouring through huge quantities of pictures, human intelligence, multi-spectral imagery and signals intelligence data, this deployment sends a clear signal of the depth of the Obama administration’s commitment to Haitian relief.

You spot an IED from a Predator or the guy on point spots it. An armored vehicle rolls up and zaps it with a laser, blowing the sucker up. No one has to don a suit or get out of a vehicle. Neat, huh? Boeing has tested just such a laser system and it looks like the sort of system that could really make a difference to troops in the field today. If it’s far enough along to actually rumble over broken terrain, fire and be maintained in the middle of nowhere, this is the sort of weapon that might help change the balance between IED makers and us.

Capitol Republicans have been banging heads over the last few weeks, trying to figure out how to counter the expected results of the soon-to-be-released Quadrennial Defense Review. The greatest challenge for the Republicans is simple: Robert Gates, who has drawn the mantle of this QDR tight about his shoulders, stands behind the decisions arrived at during the QDR and he was appointed by a Republican. His national security credentials are impeccable and no one can accuse him of being weak on national defense or a misguided Democrat.

In a fabulous concurrence of conflicting signals, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said he doesn’t expect the Joint Strike Fighter program to incur cost overruns large enough for it to breach the Nunn-McCurdy threshold, which could have meant disastrous publicity for the plane. Schwartz also said the Pentagon has a plan to aggressively reduce program risk, increasing testing and slowing the move to production. But the director of Operational Test and Evaluation paints a very different picture, saying the program faces “substantial risk” over the next two years.

Editor’s note: After speaking with an Air Force official, I’ve changed the headline on this story to better reflect Gen. Schwartz’s focus on finding alternatives to GPS to be used when operating in denied environments.

The proposed new charter for the nation’s spy satellite builder, the National Reconnaissance Office, is stuck in the Department of Defense’s general counsel’s office. The lawyers are apparently worried that the new charter may expand the agency’s powers into areas governed by the military services.

In the 1971 war with Pakistan, the Indian navy turned the tide in India’s favor when it bombed the Karachi oil refineries and proved the strategic importance of maintaining a dominant water force. While the Air Force and Army complain about procurement procedures, the Indian navy has, in the face of the same obstacles, managed to keep building more warships, most of them in India. It is working towards becoming a modern, networked-force with capabilities to protect its interests in the entire Indian Ocean.

The Marines are sending the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit, along with three large amphibious assault ships loaded with heavy lift helicopters, trucks and earth movers to support relief efforts in Haiti. The Bataan, one of the largest amphibious ships in the world, left its berth at Norfolk, Va., yesterday, accompanied by the landing ship dock vessels Carter Hall and Fort McHenry, and will pass by Camp Lajeune on the way to Haiti and take on around 2,000 Marines along with their helicopters and equipment.

The Pentagon will probably send the U-2 to Haiti so its unique multi-spectral imagery capabilities can be put to use spotting breaks in water and gas lines, chemical spills and similar problems. “My expectation is that we hope to get that deployed soon,” Col. Bradley Butz, vice commander of the Air Force’s 480th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing at Langley Air Force Base, Va., told reporters this morning. The U-2 contains unique multi-spectral imagery equipment (the seven-band SYERS 2) that Global Hawk and Predator don’t possess.

Early reports of the demise of Lockheed Martin’s MULE program were exaggerated. The company put out a statement clarifying that the Pentagon killed only the countermine and transport versions of the Multifunctional Utility/Logistics and Equipment (MULE) unmanned ground vehicle program, as it is fondly known. “The termination order does not affect, and work continues on, the Armed Robotic Vehicle (ARV) variant of the MULE, which accounts for approximately 90 percent of total anticipated MULE production program,” according to a Lockheed Martin spokesman.