The Pentagon performed a study or two that found each of its acquisition programs will have to spend about $90 million to comply with the recently passed defense acquisition reform bill, sponsored by Senators Carl Levin and John McCain. I understand several people at the meeting laughed when told this figure, guessing that if this is the official estimate at this early stage then the actual costs will be a heck of lot higher.

Supporters of an escalation in Afghanistan argue that only a troop intensive counterinsurgency there can prevent a spillover of the fighting into neighboring Pakistan, a much more strategically vital country. CSIS’s Rick Nelson warns that an expanded offensive in Afghanistan risks pushing more militants into Pakistan, worsening stability there and ultimately hindering efforts to eliminate Al Qaeda.

Frustration over the Obama administration’s delay in sending more troops to Afghanistan is mounting among the hawkish set inside Washington. At an AEI conference yesterday, some of the same folks who had a hand in promoting the Iraq surge back in 2006 called for an even bigger troop surge in Afghanistan, warning that any delays risks certain defeat.

“I believe that the US at the moment does not have the political will, nor the public understanding and commitment to do what is necessary in Afghanistan.” Those are the words of Muqtedar Khan, director of the University of Delaware’s Islamic studies program, testifying Monday morning before the House Armed Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

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.”

Two Australian military thinkers take a crack at the tough nut that is Hezbollah like hybrid enemies and come up with a manuever concept that seeks to restore striking power to the offensive. They envision swarms of small teams to probe and infiltrate a defender coupled to precision strike and superfast kill chains.

The second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter needs a fancy lug nut redesigned and should be back up on the test stand by the end of the year, a GE spokesman says. The program has been dogged by rumors that it faced a potentially significant redesign of its combustor but the real problem lies with a lug that attaches the diffuser to the cumbustor, GE spokesman Rick Kennedy said Tuesday morning.“The actual combustor will not have to be redesigned,” he said.

Reports indicate that the Obama administration will adopt a “hybrid” strategy in Afghanistan, with the vast majority of troops providing security in urban centers while drone strikes and raids would be used to check the Taliban in remote areas. The danger of such an approach is that once rural villages are ceded to insurgent control, they may never be recaptured as the Taliban expands its shadow government.

Rumors flew last week that GE faced the prospect of having to redesign its cumbustor and that the engine is in such deep doo doo that it would be off the test stand for at least six months. Then Loren Thompson, uber-source for many defense reporters, put out an item this morning summarizing the rumors and now Congress wants answers — right away.

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 that […]

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.”