One year ago I was frantically cobbling together a cluster of stories so a brand new website would have enough reading material to be taken seriously. That first day — June 15, 2011 — we posted 15 articles of various types. And you began to read us.

The next day I boarded a plane for Paris to cover Breaking Defense’s first air show, and, to be honest, our first news event. Since then we’ve wracked up close to 15 MILLION page views and often draw more than one million readers each month.

Our stable of reporters and writers offers you, the reader, some of the best informed and smartest people involved in defense, and you are showing us the love by clicking on us.

We will continue to expand our offerings through the next year, focusing more deeply on cyber warfare and intelligence and continuing our regular deep dives into American and allied strategy, politics and policy from our Board of Contributors. You’ll see more videos — some produced by us and some by the Pentagon and the defense companies — to feed the public interest in seeing the weapons that taxpayers pay for at work and in development.

We hope to get even more comments from you, our readers, to let decision makers know what you think of what they are doing and to let us know how we are doing.

Thank you for building us in one short year into one of the world’s most respected and most read defense news sites.