In what appears to mark a major shift in Chinese military and arms control strategy, the head of the PRC’s air force has said in an official interview that military operations in space are an “historical inevitability.” General Xu Qiliang said that, “As far as the revolution in military affairs is concerned, the competition between military forces is moving towards outer space… this is a historical inevitability and a development that cannot be turned back.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

The Senate wants to build an unproven but technologically attractive reconnaissance spy satellite said to be relatively cheap. The House wants to build a technologically proven but more expensive spy satellite. So far, at least, they can’t agree on which one strikes the best balance between risk, cost and capability. And they may not be able to agree given how divergent their solutions are.

The nation that made it to the Moon in 12 years now struggles to build a satellite in that time and is at risk of losing its preeminence in space. So said one of the top four space intelligence lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, chairman of the House Select technical and tactical intelligence subcommittee.

The debate on the way ahead in Afghanistan continues, with the lines drawn between those who advocate a small footprint counterterrorism straegy versus advocates of the large footprint counterinsurgency approach. Former Afghanistan CIA case officer and counterterrorism adviser Marc Sageman makes a reasoned argument for continuing the counterterror approach and says that even if the Taliban were to regain power in Afghanistan, it is far from certain it would allow al Qaeda free reign there.

With the Senate likely to vote next week on the defense authorization bill, concern is growing that one or more senators may filibuster the bill to make clear their displeasure or unease with hate crimes legislation that was attached to the bill.

Three of Washington’s top experts on the Afghanistan-Pakistan troubles appeared before the House Armed Services Committee and appeared as divided as the rest of the country is on just what to do next.

Iran has reached a “level of progress” where it is “conceivable” that it could build a nuclear device as early as this year and could field a nuclear armed missile force some time between 2011 and 2015, says CSIS’s Anthony Cordesman in a new book. The “cumulative weight of evidence” has grown so large that it’s difficult not to conclude that Iran is building nuclear warheads to put atop long range missiles, he says.

House Republicans mounted a spirited critique of the Obama administration’s new European missile defense plan, saying the intelligence does not support the administration’s claims of a change in the threat. GOP members also claimed the new plan would not sufficiently contain the threat from Iran.

When I did my first story about Israeli capabilities for striking Iran’s nuclear sites it was 2006 and the consensus view was that Israel might well try a strike someday but probably not just yet. Today, the timeline is short. We have Saudi Arabia telling Israel it can overfly on the way to Iran. And the Saudis are trying to buy Russian missile systems to keep them out of Iranian hands.

Expect fireworks from a pair of meetings yesterday and Wednesday about the future of what was one of Americas most closely guarded secret weapons, the National Reconnaissance Office. A tiger team is meeting to discuss what could be an enormous expansion of the NRO’s power, from its current focus on building and operating highly classified imaging and radar satellites to building and operating all US military and intelligence space and ISR assets

In recent months, the rhetoric coming from high level Israeli military and political officials in meetings with U.S. officials has become increasingly hawkish as Israel sees a narrowing window of opportunity to inflict enough damage to slow Iran’s progress in developing a nuclear weapon and at a small enough cost. The Obama administration has been frantically cobbling together a package of incentives to try and convince the Israelis to keep their bombers out of Iranian air space.

Hawker Beechcraft Corp. and Lockheed Martin are pooling resources and technologies to develop a trainer-cum-combat ready aircraft that may also pull duty for close air support or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Officials from the two companies formerly announced the team effort today at the Air Force Association’s Air & Space Symposium in Maryland.