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The Obama administration’s defense budget portends strategic decline.

Jun 7, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 36 • By GARY SCHMITT and THOMAS DONNELLY

11:35 AM, Apr 30, 2010 • By MARY KATHARINE HAM

I saw this yesterday. It's a lot of fun, and fit to go viral, so here it is for your enjoyment. My favorite part is the info posted by Aaron Melcher, who uploaded the video: "We have more scenes to cut, and edit, however with guys always on mission it is harder to film than you think." I can imagine it is.

We have today an aging and shrinking Air Force and Navy, an Army that is overstretched, reserve forces that are far too ‘active’ in their rate of deployment, and too few dollars to rebuild and modernize.

May 3, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 31 • By GARY SCHMITT and WILLIAM KRISTOL

Reliable Replacement Warhead Resurfaces in Air Force Budget

But the phrase should be buried deep down in one of the big holes at the Nevada Test Site.

3:48 PM, Mar 19, 2010 • By MICHAEL ANTON

Everything is going according to plan. Well, almost everything.

Buried in Vol. 2 (of 3) of the Air Force’s FY 2011 R&D budget (the entire budget encompasses 33 documents, some of them are more than 1,000 pages long) is an item referring to the “reliable replacement warhead.” This is the controversial Bush administration proposal (once, and perhaps still, supported by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) to design a less complex nuclear warhead that is less prone to decay and dysfunction over time. This is important because every weapon in our current arsenal is at least 20 years old (and some are much older) and many of them are incredibly complex and thus, potentially, don’t work any more—but we don’t know it. Former nuclear weapons designer Thomas Reed analogizes a nuclear weapon to highly complex sports car: You can’t leave a Ferrari in the garage for 20 years, and then decide one day you want to take it for a spin, and count on it starting just like that.

Russian Raptor Killer is a "Game Changer"

The end of air supremacy?

9:32 AM, Feb 17, 2010 • By MICHAEL GOLDFARB

In an open-source assessment of Russia's Sukhoi PAK-FA, aka the Raptor Killer, Air Power Australia concludes, "once the PAK-FA is deployed within a theatre of operations, especially if it is supported robustly by counter-VLO capable ISR systems, the United States will no longer have the capability to rapidly impose air superiority, or possibly even achieve air superiority." Moreover, the Obama administration's decision to kill the F-22 air superiority fighter in favor of the multi-role F-35 Joint Strike Fighter may prove disastrous, as "the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter struggles to survive against the conventional Su-35BM Flanker… Against [a basic-model] PAK-FA, the F-35 falls within the survivability black hole, into which US legacy fighters such as the F-16C/E, F-15C/E and F/A-18A-F have already fallen.”

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The Obama administration’s defense budget portends strategic decline.

We have today an aging and shrinking Air Force and Navy, an Army that is overstretched, reserve forces that are far too ‘active’ in their rate of deployment, and too few dollars to rebuild and modernize.

But the phrase should be buried deep down in one of the big holes at the Nevada Test Site.

The end of air supremacy?

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