In space warfare one man’s refueling or repair capability can look an awful lot like another man’s ability to destroy or cripple your satellite. Now one Chinese satellite has approached another and, apparently, bumped its target and changed the orbit. U.S. analysts of Chinese space efforts seem to agree, so far, that this was not an anti-satellite test.

In an exclusive interview with DoD Buzz, Lockheed Martin CEO Bob Stevens says he hopes Congress looks favorably on the Obama administration’s proposed arms export control reforms because it will make U.S. companies more competitive, help generate U.S. jobs and better protect crucial U.S. technology.

Britain’s Conservative government, faced with enormous deficits, may launch its Queen Elizabeth class carriers without airplanes to put on them as it considers early retirement for its Harrier jump jets. The two 65,000 ton carriers are built into the UK’s defense budget, but new airplanes are not. Scrapping the Harriers early, combined with delays to the Joint Strike Fighter short takeoff version, could leave the UK temporarily dependent on the U.S. for F/A-18s and V-22s. That raises the prospect of one country deploying carriers and then relying on another country to supply the airplanes to fly from them.

Stand on the edge of the Everglades with the August sun beating down on your head, the summer humidity wrapping your skin and the thunderous beat of 43,000 pounds of power causing your chest and the very ground beneath you to thrum. I waggled my jaw a couple of times so the seal on the hearing protection broke and my ears absorbed the awesome roar of the test engine firing about 100 feet away, hung high in the air. That’s what it’s like to experience testing of Pratt & Whitney’s F135 STOVL engine for the Joint Strike Fighter. And there was lots of politics discussed as well.

With the stroke of a pen Air Force Secretary Mike Donley engaged one of the most complex bureaucratic challenges faced by the service: how to buy, build and manage satellites and the rockets that move them into space. In perhaps the biggest change, Donley vested the service’s undersecretary, Erin Conaton, with the responsiblity for guiding all space policy activities overseen by the Air Force. The assistant secretary for acqusiution will now lead all space acquisition, combining traditional fighter, bomber and other service acquisition with space.

The People’s Republic of China has joined an elect group of four countries that have taken men as deep as 3,500 meters below the surface of the ocean. And in keeping with Chinese claims to huge amounts of the ocean surface and its depths, the crew planted a flag on the bottom in the South China Sea, much as Russia recently did in Arctic waters. This should mark substantial improvements in China’s gathering of data for submarine warfare.

When Gen. David Petraeus accepted his nation’s request that he step down in responsibility and take personal leadership of the fight in Afghanistan, many analysts hoped for an Iraq redux. America’s most dynamic and creative commander in many years would take the hard lessons he learned in Iraq, do his school work in Afghanistan and come up with another impressive showing. But there won’t be, according to the head of Marine operations, anything like the Iraqi “Awakening” that brought the Sunnis onto the side of what we think of as the righteous and fundamentally reordered the country’s security situation and politics.

Even if the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle made by General Dynamics is killed, departing Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway says the country will need the same sort of capability and will end up buying it. “It’s my believe if that program was canceled outright we would still go with another weapon systemn like EFV,” he said this morning at what may well be his final Pentagon press conference.

Next to counter-terror operations, perhaps no mission is more crucial to Afghanistan than is building its national police force. NATO brought in Lt. Gen. Bill Caldwell to lead the crucial mission of training the police and the army and this week he’s doing his first round of interviews since taking command. One of his “biggest challenges” can be described simply: recruiting enough people and getting them to stay. Right now, Caldwell said some units have an attrition rate of about 47 percent. That sounds horrific, but for perspective that is down from about 70 percent. Overall, the police’s annual attrition rate is about 14 percent, he said.

The U.S. aid effort to Pakistan, which has been relatively small so far, may well last more than four months and, if indications from the Pentagon are correct, will also grow in scale.

The man managing the Marine’s response, Brig. Gen. David Berger, said he and his team had been operating on the presumption that the operation would last 30 to 60 days. Now, the head of Marine operations told reporters, the planning window looked more likely to be 90 to 120 days. And the Marines may bring the Osprey in to help, he said.

The U.S. military’s annual report on the Chinese military “ignored objective facts,” exagerated the threat China poses to Taiwan and should be abolished. If ever there was need for proof that China will become increasingly assertive as its economy grows and its military capabilities improve, this is it.

When you buy a car, usually one of a family’s most expensive purchases, you get a warranty if it’s new or “certified.”

When the Pentagon buys weapons it rarely gets any kind of warranty. After all, these are complex systems, using advanced technology and they are, well, going to be used in war zones. So when the head of the Missile Defense Agency told reporters that Lockheed will offer a warranty on the THAAD anti-missile system we could barely swallow our applewood bacon.

It was the top story in the Wall Street Journal — China looks set to become the world’s second largest economy. But the New York Times put it on the front page of the business section, seeming to indicate this story was less a milestone and more a technical correction. The need for analysis was obvious so we asked a Chinese expert at the Heritage Foundation to give us a better idea of just how important this fact is and why. Dean Cheng’s conclusion: the PLA must still fight for its share of the pot, but a growing pot will probably drive a demand for greater deference from China to those who share its neighborhood.

Many critics panned the Pentagon’s most recent QDR, saying it failed to make hard strategic choices. So a blue-ribbon QDR Independent Panel was built. As our new commentator, Brian M. Burton, argues in the following piece, instead of “focusing on specific priorities, it recommended doing more of everything.”

As they comb the Hill and pitch the benefits of the second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter, General Electric is pushing one set of ideas particularly hard in the face of skepticism from the Navy and some other Pentagon sources: the F136 will not substantially increase maintenance costs. The company shared some of its Hill talking points.

The United Kingdom began its hunt for military savings the weekend after the Farnborough Air Show and the search has ranged throughout the defense establishment. One of Britain’s most precious capabilities, the one that gave rise to the famed Special Air Services regiment, is its Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols. Most of this capability resides within the 21 Special Air Services regiment known as the Artists. There are rumors that the British may consolidate one of its three squadrons, which happened once before.

UAVs aren’t going to be as useful as they have been in Afghanistan and Iraq because, in the next real war, they are much more likely to face armed opposition from the ground and from the air. The outgoing commander of US air assets in Europe, Gen. Roger Brady, told a recent UAV conference maneuverability and stealth limitations are arguments against UAVs in contested airspace. It turns out the folks at General Atomics have been listening and looking ahead.

Buzz readers will know that we have largely refrained from writing about the efforts by a tiny U.S. company to wiggle its way into the KC-X competition, but our friends at Aviation Week have come up with such a wonderful denouement that we have to write something. As Amy Butler reports, the folks at U.S. Aerospace, teaming with the Russian giant Antonov, missed the deadline for delivery of the bid by 5 minutes. On top of that, the company has filed a protest with the GAO.

One of the glories of attending an air show like Farnborough is that, sometimes, you get a few hours to poke about the great museums that mark the cultural capitals of Europe. During Farnborough this year, I snuck off with my wife for a few hours before the show to stroll through my favorite art musuem, the Tate on the Embankment. There, to my great surprise and delight, I stumbled (well, it’s pretty hard to stumble on things this big) two fighter aircraft displayed as art.

The talk on Capitol Hill is that major interagency reform — a new look at the interagency legislation and executive orders undergirding US national security — may be the hottest and hardest to address of the recommendations of the independent QDR panel led by Bill Perry and Stephen Hadley. The panel called for a substantial revamp of the national security structure, saying it was created during the Cold War and was best suited to that era, not to today.They also called on Congress to fix its own house and reduce the overlapping jurisdictions that slow and complicate everyone’s ability to act.