Afghanistan Drawdown Update * Winter slows down combat in Afghanistan, and ISAF Commander General Dunford sounds rather optimistic about how the 2013 fighting season unfolded, but he recognizes that "[m]uch work remains to be done in developing the institutions,...
Private Vehicle Storage(click to view larger) When a military family is moved abroad, what happens to their cars? That just one of the private vehicle dilemmas confronting the US military on a regular basis, as approximately 650,000 service members, family members,...
NSA Euro Saga * According to El Mundo [in Spanish], the NSA proceeded in Spain to the same sort of spying denounced by France and Germany last week. * Meanwhile the Süddeutsche Zeitung claims [in German] that not only the French government knew of at least some of the...
Former National Security Council (NSC) non-proliferation staffer and potential Pentagon AT&L advisor Jofi Joseph isn't the first person to be undone by social media, and he won't be the last. The inconvenient truth is that social media security isn't even close to the...
US Budget Negotiations to Restart * Congressional leaders are signaling a more realistic stance as they're about to restart budget negotiations next week. They are shrugging off any sort of ambitious "grand bargain" deal, and may instead be content to tinker at the...
LEMV concept(click to view full) The rise of modern terrorism, sharply increasing costs to recruit and equip professional soldiers, and issues of energy security, are forcing 2 imperatives on modern armies. Modern militaries need to be able to watch wide areas for...
Primes Under Booking Pressure * General Dynamics' Q3 revenue was down by 1.7% to $7.8B. Information systems sales break from the trend with a 4.4% increase, but even combined with healthy aerospace gains, they can't quite compensate for Combat Systems shrinking to...
Ex Lab(click to view full) What do a fresh look at what "logistics" means, the ongoing electronics revolution, new manufacturing techniques, and the social norms and movements arising from these trends, have in common? Within the US Army, the answer is the Rapid...
M-ATVs, hauling out(click to view full) The US Army's Retrograde, Reset, Redeployment, Redistribution, and Disposal (R4D or "Afghan retrograde") is a huge effort, moving an estimated $17 billion of good out of country at a cost of around $6 billion. Some of its...