WASHINGTON: There’s still no sign of Donald Trump’s transition team at the Pentagon yet, but they’ll probably come this week, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said this morning. In the meantime, the secretary is walking a tightrope trying to defend his policies on the Islamic State, NATO, and Russia without explicitly disagreeing with a President-elect who… Keep reading →

Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James traveled through Asia, visiting Indonesia, India, Singapore, and the Philippines at the end of the summer. We didn’t hear a great deal about the trip in the US at the time but her meetings with her defense counterparts clearly impressed. In this op-ed, James shares the lessons she learned. China… Keep reading →

Bob Scales has run a lot of war games. I covered him doing them back in the late 1990s. Plus he’s held a lot of the most important jobs in the Army, including at the Army’s home of artillery, Fort Sill. He was around when the battle was on to ban landmines, which bear many similarities… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON:  Airstrikes against the Islamic State have dropped 30 percent since June, because Islamic State retreats and Turkish advances have made it much harder to find targets, three experts told us. The administration’s self-imposed limits and negotiations with Russia — of which the military is very wary — restrict airstrikes as well. The ground war in Iraq… Keep reading →

It seems just like old times: the Turk is back in the Levant, Aleppo is under siege, and the ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood) is dispensing justice. When did it all go wrong?  When the Americans decided the stuttering ophthalmologist wouldn’t play rough like his fighter pilot dad had. As Donald Trump would tweet: Sad! Sadder still is… Keep reading →

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford came of age on the battlefields of America’s post-9/11 wars. As a colonel, he led the 5th Marine Regiment during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, earning his nickname of “Fighting Joe” Dunford. Later, he commanded all U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan as commander of the… Keep reading →

AM General will sell Afghanistan 1,259 M1151 Humvees plus 414 M1152 models. Humvee maker AM General just announced a $356 million contract to build 1,673 Humvees for Afghanistan. (The US is paying). It goes to show that even after losing the biggest military wheeled-vehicle contract of the century, AM General just keeps trucking along. Last… Keep reading →

FORT BRAGG, NC: The US is not practicing traditional counter-insurgency (COIN) warfare in Iraq and Syria. Instead, the US is providing high-tech firepower, cyber power, and other “enablers” to local allies who don’t have them, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said here today. That approach, which ranges from stealth fighters to “cyber bombs,” has a lot in common with… Keep reading →

CORRECTED strikes per day figure WASHINGTON: The air war against the Islamic State is not “anemic,” a Central Command spokesman told Breaking Defense, rebutting a critique of the campaign we published last week. To say the rate of airstrikes in Syria and Iraq is less than against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Serbia and Kosovo in… Keep reading →

America is waging two very different wars at once. New data from the Defense Department shows the air campaign against the Islamic State escalating back to near-record intensity after a four-month (relative) lull. Meanwhile, airstrikes in Afghanistan are down to a tiny fraction of the bombardment in Iraq and Syria, but Afghanistan’s vast and rugged wastelands… Keep reading →