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Undersea Cables and the Future of Submarine Competition
Today, nearly all voice and Internet traffic, including essential military and financial transmissions, travels through undersea fiber-optic cables. Even temporary damage to these lines of communications can have serious consequences, which is why their future security depends on how well nations understand and exploit the next wave of submarine technology.
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China Now Has a Flying Propaganda Machine
If China ever attacked Taiwan, psyops—and, more specifically, the Gaoxin-7 planes—would probably play a major role in the fighting. The PLA “would likely seek to broadcast disinformation and propaganda across Taiwanese military networks, spreading confusion and encouraging Taiwanese troops to desert or surrender,” Jim Thomas, John Stillion, and Iskander Rehman wrote in a 2014 report for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
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Analysts: It’s Time for a Reexamination of Nuclear Weapons Requirements
Defense analyst Evan Montgomery, of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the world is now in the midst of a “second nuclear age,” one that is arguably more complex and potentially more volatile than the bipolar U.S.–Soviet struggle of the Cold War.
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Does Donald Trump Have a Point About NATO Being ‘Obsolete’?
Katherine Blakeley, a research fellow with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, has crunched the numbers, and says the U.S. now accounts for 73 percent of all NATO defense spending. But part of that, Blakely says, has to do with America's superpower status and its unmatched military might. "The United States also has a very broad set of core global national interests that many of the European NATO countries don't necessarily share."
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Air Force F-16s, MQ-1 Predators Likely to Step up Airstrikes in Afghanistan
While U.S. and NATO forces were free to launch attacks on al-Qaida, Islamic State and several other terrorist groups, they could only attack Taliban forces if they were directly attacking coalition forces, especially Afghan army troops, or could be directly tied to previous attacks on friendly forces. These stringent rules of engagement were meant to avoid "unintentional casualties and unwanted damage," said Mark Gunzinger, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Such attacks could "frankly, hurt your overall objective," he added, meaning to maintain open channels of communication with the Afghan government and push for diplomatic resolutions. "This is not a major air campaign," Gunzinger, a former advisor to the Air Force, told Air Force Times in late May. "It is an air support operation."..
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China Plans Oceanic ‘Space Station’ In South China Sea
The ministry presentation didn’t give any estimated price tag but Bryan Clark, who formerly served as special assistant to the chief of U.S. naval operations, said the cost could be daunting and its vulnerability to detection would make it less attractive militarily than using a submarine or an unmanned vehicle.