By Richard Weitz For the last few years, the Russian government has made the unprecedented decision to purchase expensive Western military equipment. This has been done partly to fill gaps in Russian military capabilities and partly to use the threat of foreign competition to induce its military industrial complex to…
By Richard Weitz North Korea’s ballistic missile program has complicated the negotiations seeking to de-nuclearize the Korean Peninsula and achieve a comprehensive peace treaty for the Peninsula. Despite the recent failure, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is slowly improving the number, range, and capabilities of its missiles. Its…
April 16, 2012 During the visit to 2nd Marine Corps Air Wing in early March 2012, Second Line of Defense had an opportunity to sit down with General Walters to discuss his recent experience in Afghanistan. As commander of air operations for 2nd MAW (Forward), Walters had an opportunity to…
By Richard Weitz “Global Nuclear Security and Preventing Nuclear Terrorism” was the subject of an April 6 expert panel at the National Press Club. The speakers noted some progress in this area but considered the recent Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul inadequately ambitious to meet this problem. Yet, the solution…
By Richard Weitz One of the useful innovations of the Obama administration was to convene meetings of senior national leaders to focus their attention on what both the Bush and Obama administrations have called the number one threat to U.S. security -- the possibility that terrorists will use acquire and…
By. Dr. Harald Malmgren China’s exports of high labor content, low value added manufactures are no longer internationally competitive. A shift in export orientation to lower labor content, higher value added manufactured exports will take time measured in years. A shift in export priority to infrastructure projects in the Third…
The Nike perspective – Just Do It – is the appropriate perspective to re-building the US military after Afghanistan. Make no bones about it, a major cultural shift and re-orientation is required. One can take the approach of debating at 50,000 feet whilst doing nothing practical to rebuild the force,…
by Robbin Laird Recently, the USN-USMC team completed the largest “amphibious” exercise in more than a decade along with core allies. But what did people see? What did they recognize in the exercise and focus upon? Because it is called an amphibious exercise, outsiders who attended the exercise tended to…
