Category: Expert Analysis

Somewhere in the vicinity of Baghdad, 4 Navy HH-60Hs lift out of a FOB, their cabins packed full of SOF assaulters. As the birds lift, the engines whine, struggling to perform in the hot summer air. The targeted individuals are all members of an al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) cell, and tonight we know where they […]

A recent influx of headlines about the U.S. Army failing to hit its recruiting goals last year and the U.S. Air Force facing a longstanding pilot shortage prompted a resurgence in concerns about how to effectively draw young Americans to the clarion call of service. You’ll find proposed solutions (“give them more money!”) to assigned […]

Editor’s note: Erik Meisner served in Attack Company, 2nd Battalion 75th Ranger Regiment as a rifle team leader with deployments to the Middle East, Central America and Asia. He is also a licensed pilot. When I was a member of 2/75 Ranger, we trained with several forms of close air support. A-10’s, AH-64 Apache’s and […]

It can sometimes be easy to lose perspective when talking about historical events. Once timelines stretch beyond the horizon of our own recollection, they tend to get fuzzy. Most people would be surprised to know, for instance, that Cleopatra’s lifetime was actually closer to ours than it was to the construction of the pyramids, or […]

At this point, it is not news that the President of the United States is a fan of tariffs. He has gone so far as to (sarcastically or not) christen himself “Tariff Man,” in a tweet earlier this month. What is also not new is that President Trump seems to fundamentally misunderstand how international trade […]

In 2013 MSNBC host Rachel Maddow authored a book titled “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power.”  The book explores America’s steady march towards perpetual war, one that has echoes of George Orwell’s famous novel 1984 in which propagandized citizens recite that, “we are war with Eurasia, we have always been at war with Eurasia.”  […]

There’s no denying that technology has changed the way we fight wars, but as we take stock of the various ways in which new gear has made it easier to locate, close with, and destroy the enemy, we often lose sight of the ways technology has hindered the modern war fighter as well. The ever-present […]

With the recent news that Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis will be vacating his position sooner than originally stated in his resignation letter, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan will be stepping into the Acting SECDEF role on January 1, 2019.  President Trump will now be actively engaged in finding a full-time permanent replacement.  […]

New details have begun to emerge about Lockheed Martin’s two-fold attempt at closing the capability gap presented by new Chinese and Russian hypersonic missile platforms. Hypersonic missiles, or missiles that are capable of sustaining speeds in excess of Mach 5, are widely believed to be a disruptive technology to the global warfighting status quo. Their […]

There is no debate that America’s fifth generation fighters, the F-22 and F-35, tend to garner the most publicity, but in terms of operational aircraft, all of the functional Raptors and Joint Strike Fighters employed by the entire U.S. military wouldn’t even add up to a sizeable chunk of the number of F/A-18 Hornets and […]

This is the final installment in a 3 part series. Read parts 1 and 2 here. President Trump’s wall will increase the power of the most dangerous drug cartels, it will contribute to the introduction of more dangerous variants of drugs it makes in short supply, and it is unlikely to pay for itself because […]

America’s bombers have long served as a potent representation of the nation’s economic and engineering prowess. From unleashing massive amounts of ordnance across Europe in B-52s to delivering extremely accurate weapons platforms from stealth bombers the enemy never even knew was there, the ability to blow something up somewhere else in the world has long […]