by Ed Timperlake, Editor, Second Line of Defense Forum I had the opportunity in December to see an advanced preview of the movie “Act of Valor,” an action thriller about US Navy SEALs, and my first impression was that it was sending a very powerful message to the enemies of…
by Richard Weitz The final panel of the Jamestown Conference addressed China’s civil-military relations. Andrew Scobell, Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, spoke about “PLA Professionalization and the Civil-Military Gap.” He argued that “civil-military relations in China” no longer is the same as “party-army” relations. Today, the relationship is…
By Dr. Harald Malmgren Following Standard 7 Poor’s downgrades of a swathe of Euro member governments including France, Moody’s has also joined in the process of downgrading several of the members, with a warning to France. [caption id="attachment_33613" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="There is a core problem of the impact of policy…
China’s Evolving Military: SLD Coverage of Jamestown’s PLA Conference (Part 3) The third panel focused on China’s C4ISR modernization. The first speaker, Kevin Pollpeter, is the China Program Manager of Defense Group, Inc.'s of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. He spoke about “Informationization and Joint Operations.” His key…
From Afghanistan to Libya to Bold Alligator 2012 to ... ? French Forces on Deployment By Murielle Delaporte and Robbin Laird February 20, 2012 - Defense debates rarely picture the folks who get into harm’s way to execute strategies and whose actions determine mission success or failure. The last decade…
by Robbin Laird As BA-12 was unfolding, the Iranian threat to mine the Straits of Hormuz was a real world event which seemed to remind folks of the need for amphibious capabilities and the sea basing approach. The Navy's biggest amphibious exercise in a decade, Bold Alligator, is not specifically…
By Dr. Richard Weitz 02/20/12 - A central agenda item of Vladimir Putin’s reelection campaign is his call for a “Eurasia Union” among the former Soviet republics. Although denying any effort to simply restore the Soviet Union, Putin emphasizes the value of consolidating the former republics into something like the…
SLD Coverage of Jamestown’s PLA Conference (Part 2) by Richard Weitz The conference’s second panel reviewed trends in China’s conventional force modernization. Moderator RADM Michael McDevitt, USN (Ret.), a Senior Fellow at the CNA Corporation and former head of their China program, said that how the PLA had gone about…
