the rot resulting from Obama’s executive order and the firings of senior military officers has wrought extensive damage to military good order, discipline, readiness, and training – and ultimately to the nation’s national defense capabilities. The political corruption in the military needs to be reversed and the hyper-partisans purged from the ranks. Start at the top, Mr. President!

I'd never met a president before Donald Trump. His empathy and thoughtfulness on one of the worst days of my life won my gratitude.

Orbiting the earth every 11 hours and 58 minutes, GPS satellites are the atomic clocks that synchronize the ...

A collection of monographs was recently published in a book titled “Growing Challenges for America’s Nuclear Deterrence” by the Center for Security Policy that is available from Amazon. The work goes over the state of the US arsenal and challenges to our existing inventory of weapons and delivery systems. The work looks further at how foreign nuclear powers have changed since the end of the Cold War with particular emphasis of the nuclear postures of Russia and China. It discusses legacy arms control and national security positions. This is followed by a look at the emerging challenges involving low yield nuclear weapons and the threat of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack.

I will be reviewing the book and publishing my own analysis of each of these policy elements to construct my own net assessment of US nuclear posture. The objective of this series of articles will be to see to what extent it might be possible to identify innovative opportunities to create solutions to the issue of making the world safer from the nuclear threat. I will focus on constructive comments that might have the potential to be additive to the Trump Nuclear Posture Review

Trust me, this is not how you build trust and cohesion //

The message that this kind of training clearly sends to non-BIPOC (to use the noxious abbreviation) Army personnel, military and civilian, is that you are a white supremacist. Period. Full stop. That message is not going to be well received. What it will cause, just as surely as the race relations classes I witnessed in Germany, is division and distrust.

For the Pan Am flight attendants, there were no parades after the war, nor much movement to celebrate their role or their place as accidental pioneers in military history. //

In the winter of 1968, a Boeing 707, heavy with American troops and body bags, took rounds of antiaircraft fire immediately upon takeoff from Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. At once, a right engine burst into flames. It was the middle of the Tet Offensive, when coordinated Viet Cong raids pounded American installations in South Vietnam. A GI sitting by the wing spotted the engine fire outside his window and caught the attention of one of the stewardesses, Gayle Larson, then 25 years old, who sped to the front to alert the cockpit crew of three.

The flight engineer raced into the cabin to inspect. As Larson remembers, the planeload of GIs was unimpressed, "paying no attention to the disaster outside the cabin windows." The flight was redirected from its original destination — some holiday spot in the Pacific: maybe Hong Kong, Bangkok or Tokyo, no one remembers now — and instead flew to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. The 707 was a first-generation long-distance jet with four engines, but it could fly on just three. In an all-economy configuration, it could carry 180 GIs. //

For a small and unrecognized group of women, now mostly in their 70s, such high-drama, meet-cute moments are the personal and pedestrian memories of a war that otherwise divided a nation. These Pan Am stewardesses (now an outdated term but common at the time) were volunteers and got no special training for flying into war, though their pilots were mostly World War II or Korean War vets. Their aircraft routinely took ground fire. The pilots, all male, received hazardous-duty pay for flights into the combat zone. The women aboard did not.

For the Pan Am flight attendants, there were no parades after the war, nor much movement to celebrate their role or their place as accidental pioneers in military history. //

During the Vietnam War, Pan Am had an exclusive contract with the Department of Defense to run R&R (rest and recreation) flights for soldiers on leave throughout the Pacific. Rented to the nation for $1, it was effectively a military airline within the airline, starting with a fleet of six DC-6 propeller aircraft and, ultimately, 707 jets, calling daily at three air bases in the theater of combat. "We staff it with our best and most beautiful stewardesses, and the food and service are the finest," said the Pan Am vice president in 1966 to The Associated Press. Over the course of the war, some of the women would fly as many as 200 times into the combat zone.

We have two angles to watch an F-35C claw its way into the air after enduring a minimum power catapult shot.

By John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, and Richard Levine

May 19, 2020

“Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” King Lear enjoined, but this we must do to upend the wrath that has emanated from the most powerful foe America has faced. As terrible as the coronavirus crisis is, we must imagine a world ten or 20 years from now, in which the People’s Republic of China’s nominal gross domestic product is 50 percent larger than that of the United States.

What power would an unconstrained China wield? What force of arms would they muster to intimidate and to control?

If China’s actions in the coronavirus catastrophe offer any window into this communist regime’s machinations, deceitfulness, and debasement of human life, it is that the threat they represent is unlike anything America has faced.

At the inception of World War II, many strategists conjectured that both Germany and Japan were destined to lose the war; their populations and economies were too small, and their access to raw materials too tenuous, to be able to wage a protracted war against the Allies. Later, the Soviet Union posed a great challenge.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, CIA analysts predicted the Soviet economy would surpass America’s. This calculus drove many costly American decisions. Today, America’s GDP is at least 12 times Russia’s. China, however, is seemingly destined to outpace the United States in GDP during the next 20 years. Indeed, China has plausibly already overtaken the United States, if GDP is measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP).

It is ironic that four American actions enabled this ascent: first, American scientific aid to end famine in China; second, President Carter’s diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and his commitment that the U.S. government engage with elements of the PRC; third, President Clinton’s facilitation of the PRC’s ultimate ascension to membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and his expansion of Chinese access to dual-use (civilian/military) technology; fourth, President Obama’s embrace of the PRC as a non-adversarial peer state, which completed the PRC’s envelopment of America’s institutions. //

It is logical to assume that after some initial point, Chinese political, military, and intelligence officials realized this outbreak of a new virus could be used to damage the economies of the West and thus facilitate Chinese hegemony. Given China’s history of pandemics, its political establishment must have had planning documents in place to serve the Communist Party of China’s interests, should such a scenario of a novel pandemic unfold. Manipulating data would be central to any such operational plan.

On May 7, the PRC recorded its dead in Hubei Provence, whose capital is Wuhan, at 4,512, out of 4,637 for the entire country. According to Chinese authorities, 125 fatalities occurred in all other provinces, which comprise 1.38 billion people.

If the virus did experience exponential growth, and doubled every day, in 28 days it should have infected 268 million people. A 1 percent mortality rate would thus result in millions of deaths, not fewer than 5,000. Even if the PRC underreported its losses by a factor of ten or twenty, these figures do not make sense.

Are there scenarios that explain these numbers? One explanation would involve an accidental release from the virology lab at Wuhan that was almost immediately recognized, engendering swift and firm containment procedures within China, but denied to the rest of the world by China’s continuance of international travel from the virus’s point of origin.

The second scenario is related, but crueler. Given China’s research into biological warfare, it is conceivable that entities within China may have sought a naturally occurring virus that would be just transmissible and virulent enough to cause massive disruption in Western countries, but could be limited and mitigated, given the regime’s foreknowledge, within China. Allied intelligence must determine if either scenario took place. //

China appropriates national assets worldwide in loaded energy and development deals. The pandemic will only accelerate this unless countervailing action ensues. In Djibouti, China holds 77 percent of debt. Kenya, Angola, Nigeria, and Zambia were all on the cusp of asset appropriation before the present crisis.

China has lent African nations $124 billion from 2000 through 2016. The largest portion of each loan is not generally provided to the borrower, but spent in China to finance Chinese-made inputs and trained labor. The recipient country, in effect, finances jobs and manufacturing in China. The reward for targeted countries is to have their assets appropriated, due to loan non-performance.

If the West slides into steep recession, developing nations may sell whatever they can in national riches to China for cents on the dollar. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative will thus be realized. This avarice is the PRC’s Achilles’ heel.

America must exploit this weakness by offering African and developing nations an alternative to the BRI. Facilitating opposition to Chinese aims among these nations must be a central component of a new U.S. strategy. America must exploit China’s susceptibility to client-state erosion. We must innovatively marshal hard and soft power to unseat the PRC from its footholds in Africa and elsewhere. //

10 Actions the United States Must Take

The problem is not the Chinese people, nor their proud heritage that stretches back thousands of years. It is communism. We must challenge China:

1. Return all production of our medicines, medical supplies, and equipment to the United States or to countries that are our allies;
2. Enact severe limits on Chinese graduate students in all scientific subjects; shutter all Confucius Institutes at American universities until they be stripped of their propagandistic mission;
3. Entrench principles and restrictions so that China can buy no more of our corporations, universities, or national assets;
4. Help deny, across the world, the ability for China’s Huawei to deploy its 5G networks, systems, phones, and devices, as tools for espionage, industrial and otherwise, could be implanted in these systems;
5. Threaten to extend tariffs substantially if the PRC does not make all virus data and sites available to our scientists, so that we may understand fully the genesis and the spread of the present pandemic; the PRC must also release any COVID-19 whistleblowers and eliminate all wet markets;
6. Put into law criminal penalties for any American company or individual who shares proprietary or sensitive information with China, when such information has application to our defense, high-technology, or energy-related industrial base;
7. Accelerate Freedom of Navigation passages and exercises through waters that China falsely claims, with maximum U.S. naval power expressed; in this, we should include, when possible, ships of the British, the Australian, and the Japanese Navies;
8. Undertake determined efforts to deny China’s Belt and Road Initiative, especially in Africa; extend alternative terms to key nations on the brink of asset appropriation due to China’s predatory lending practices;
9. Announce a new military package to reinforce Taiwan’s defensive capabilities. To this end, we should consider the sale of the F-35 due to the deployment of the advanced Chengdu J-20 fighter by China. This sale would either be as a replacement for the pending transfer of less-advanced F-16Vs to Taiwan or as a supplement to this force;
10. Radically reduce IP theft. Explicate that China’s economic expansion would have been impossible without their theft of American technology; produce and distribute lists of American technologies and products stolen or copied by China; urge other free countries to do the same, so that the world will recognize this danger. //

During the present pandemic, China’s most abhorrent exports may be fear and disinformation. Twice before this crisis, and in the living memory of many Americans, our nation has experienced pandemics. According to the CDC’s website, during the 1957 Asian Flu, “The estimated number of deaths was 1.1 million worldwide and 116,000 in the United States.”

The U.S. population in 1957 was 172 million; thus, adjusted for our present population, the Asian Flu would have killed 222,000 Americans. Of the 1968 Hong Kong Flu, the CDC has written, “The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States.” America’s population in 1968 was 201 million; adjusting for today, the Hong Kong Flu would have killed 164,000 Americans. Neither pandemic altered American economic life. //

The way we have answered this pandemic is not repeatable: our array of actions cannot be mounted if another wave or pandemic strikes. This is our gravest sin: we have shown China, Russia, and Iran, as well as terrorist actors, that our nation may be brought low if faced with a new pathogen.

To establish deterrence so a future malevolent actor sees our capacities both to endure and to respond, America must exact a high price from the People’s Republic of China. In this cause, we must seek the support of all the free nations of the world.

If America had done a tenth of what China has done to the world, even given the most charitable view of their acts, the PRC would do anything to make us pay. If we are not willing to act, and decisively, we are leaving the field to an unhindered, unremorseful, and ravenous state with a degree of relative economic power that we have not faced since the War of 1812.

With a small number of F-22s and problems with America's newer stealth fighter, the F-35, every F-22 is precious. //

A U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor stealth fighter crashed in Florida on Friday. The crash leaves the Air Force with 185 Raptors out of the 195 that Lockheed Martin LMT built starting in the mid-1990s. //

Lockheed built 195 production- and development-standard F-22s for a total cost of $67 billion, a sum that includes development but doesn’t include ongoing upgrades to the jets. The last Raptor rolled out of Lockheed’s Georgia factory in December 2011. //

As recently as the early 2000s, the Air Force anticipated buying more than 400 F-22s in order to replace, on a one-for-one basis, all the F-15C Eagle fighters then in the inventory.

Instead, Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2009 abruptly ended Raptor production. “There is no doubt that the F-22 has unique capabilities that we need—the penetration and defeat of an advanced enemy air-defense and fighter fleet,” Gates explained at the time.

“But, the F-22 is, in effect, a niche, silver-bullet solution required for a limited number of scenarios—to overcome advanced enemy fighters and air-defense systems,” Gates added.

Within a few years, however, it was clear that Gates’ decision was premature. The explosive growth in Chinese military power and the appearance of Chinese and Russian stealth-fighter designs underscored the growing challenge to America’s command of the air. Older American planes such as the A-10 and F-16 could be vulnerable without adequate protection from F-22s.

Meanwhile America’s other stealth fighter, the ground-attack-optimized F-35, proved to be a mediocre dogfighter. Design flaws also have limited the F-35’s ability to fly at supersonic speeds. Desperate to shore up its fighter numbers, the Air Force in its 2020 budget restarted acquisition of the Boeing BA F-15 after a 16-year break.

On August 13, 1981, Jay Reid and I made the first SR-71 landing in Continental Europe. It was virtually unannounced—and not particularly welcomed.

If anything about the SR-71 program can be gleaned, it is that the existence of the SR-72 will likely be unacknowledged for some time after it is operational. For all we know, the SR-72 could already be in the air.

In this article, a retired Soviet MiG-31 pilot, Major Mikhail Myagkiy, recalls techniques used during practice intercept attempts on SR-71 Blackbirds participating in Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance Operations Program (PAROP) missions to the Barents Sea area.

Situational awareness before GPS and computers was a serious challenge.

Can someone expand a bit for the layman with emphasis on Intercept geometry the following image depicting the envelope of a SA-2 missile against a moving Target.

They're useful flight- and pilot-monitoring tools, says the Air Force.

They could supply energy to far-flung bases, power laser weapons and charge electric vehicles //

War zones are dangerous places. Where better, then, for a nuclear reactor? On March 9th America’s government awarded a trio of firms $39.7m to design “microreactors” that can supply a few megawatts of power to remote military bases, and be moved quickly by road, rail, sea and air.

The idea of small reactors is as old as nuclear power itself. In July 1951, five months before a reactor in Idaho became the first in the world to produce usable electricity through fission, America began building uss Nautilus, a nuclear-powered submarine. In the 1960s and 1970s small reactors powered bases in Alaska and Greenland, a radar facility in Wyoming, a research station in Antarctica and—from a cargo ship—the Panama Canal Zone. America still uses nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft-carriers. But land-based mini-reactors proved unreliable and expensive and have fallen out of favour

Inspiration: The Purple Heart Outdoors Tour offers Americans the opportunity to provide a needed breath of fresh air to our Special Operations Warriors. //

Recognizing that there were many programs out there for veterans and wounded Active Duty troops, they formed the Purple Heart Outdoors Tour, an organization that sponsors and runs outdoor hunting expeditions for Active Duty Special Operations Force troops known simply as “Operators.” //

making sure that event proposals are quality from top to bottom: nice accommodations, good food and most importantly, no cost to the participants. The idea is that participants have a good time while forging bonds with other warriors who speak their language and have their shared history and ethos. //

Another interesting aspect of this operation is the donor base which, according to Dan, is growing. These are folks from all walks of life, doctors, lawyers, business owners or executives, all of whom just want to “do something” to help our servicemen. Their support ranges from donating funds, to loaning out facilities and terrain, to providing everything from top to bottom including airfare and catering. //

Remember California? The state that allegedly hates everything American?

Our four Operators noted an event out there in liberal land, where the locals of several different towns were lined up in the streets waving flags as they went by on the way to the event site. That’s important to guys who have multiple deployments under their belt, but when they come home, wonder if the American Public appreciates their efforts. Apparently, most do.

DARPA and Dynetics have successfully tested the X-61A Gremlin Air Vehicle, a new drone that can be launched from a ... //

The goal of the X-61A Gremlin is to show how an existing plane like a C-130 can be used to quickly launch and recover drone aircraft. The company’s next flight test will focus on recovering four drones within 30 minutes. //

“What if we had a plane that could launch other planes?” is an idea with a long history. The British experimented with the idea of slinging Sopwith Camels underneath HM Airship No. 23 in 1917, back when zeppelins were the only way to generate enough lifting capacity to even try this stunt. //

Wikipedia notes that both a manned and unmanned Sopwith Camel launched successfully, which kind of makes you wonder whether that means “We pulled a lever and the plane fell off the way it was supposed to,” given that remote control vehicles hadn’t been invented yet.

Once the Hindenberg convinced world+dog that airships were a bad idea, the idea got shelved until after WW2 and the miracle of atomic power. Lockheed suggested the CL-1201 — an aircraft with a wingspan of 1,120 feet (340m). To put that in perspective, the Scaled Composites Stratolaunch vehicle has a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters). ... have deployed a 1,830MW reactor. One potential envisioned use for the aircraft was as an aircraft carrier, with the ability to loiter on site for 41 days. Unsurprisingly, no one wanted a skyscraper-sized aircraft with a massive nuclear reactor flying around over their heads. //

Assuming the GAV tests continue to pan out, we could see the C-130 deployed to a genuine aircraft carrier role at some point in the future. It turns out flying aircraft carriers might be plausible once you get rid of the pilots.

And some want them to make a final appearance. //

The Second World War marked the end of the Age of Battleships. Aircraft carriers, with their flexible, long range striking power made battlewagons obsolete in a matter of months. American battleships, once expected to fight a decisive battle in the Pacific that would halt the Japanese Empire, were instead relegated to providing artillery support for island-hopping campaigns. //

The U.S. Navy ended World War II with twenty-three battleships of all types. By 1947, the Navy had shrunk to peacetime levels that preserved half of the number of wartime aircraft carriers but cut the number of battleships on active duty to just four. Of the four remaining ships, all were members of the latest—and last—run of battleships, the Iowa class: Iowa, New Jersey, Missouri and Wisconsin. By the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, only one battleship, Missouri, remained on active duty.

A good idea or a fool's errand? //

Before they were displaced by aircraft carriers, battleships were symbols of great-power status. Some of the most iconic were the American Iowa class, the last battleships ever built by the United States. Powerful in appearance, yet with sleek lines filled in with haze gray, the Iowa class served in World War II and were unretired three more times to serve as the U.S. Navy’s big guns. If we brought them back today, what would they look like?