Lawmakers are vowing to approach a long-awaited commission report on military pay and benefits with open minds, but skepticism is already growing that Congress will do much — if anything — to act on the commission’s recommended reforms.
The Russian Navy's submarine force is on a roll. Four different kinds of submarines are under construction and more are coming. The country expects to lay down five new nuclear submarines in 2015.
The prospects for the U.S. being able to project is power and defend its allies in Asia are not good. The U.S. security guarantee – known as “extended deterrence” – was never really tested in Asia the way it was on a daily basis in Europe during the Cold War. Understandable, since Asia was not the global center of strategic gravity. But it is now. Military modernization and expansion by all the players is causing greater friction between the tectonic plates of Japan, China, South Korea, and the United States, testing the limits of U.S. extended deterrence, which currently minimizes the role of nuclear weapons. However, the very foundations of this concept were designed to deal with a land, European theater, not the Asian maritime environment.
The nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran appear stalemated. Meanwhile Iran is on the march in the Middle East with its forces supporting the coup in Yemen, buttressing the Assad war-machine in Syria, mediating between factions in Iraq, and plotting with Hezbollah operatives on the periphery of Israel. Today, the American alliance system stands bruised and battered while our friends in the region perceive Iran and its resistance-front galloping across the region.These two simultaneous developments—the deadlock in nuclear talks and Iran’s aggressive moves in the region—are not coincidental. They are intimately linked, and that should be a lesson for President Obama: The nuclear deadlock cannot be broken unless Washington reengages in the myriad of conflicts and civil wars plaguing the region, particularly now that Yemen is vulnerable and the Saudi royal family is in a state of turmoil following the death of King Abdullah on Thursday.
A new generation of technologies is emerging with the potential to change the nature of undersea warfare, warns one naval analyst, and the US Navy needs to not just develop and employ the new tools, but also needs to change its operational concepts.
Submarines have been America’s invisible advantage since World War II. But the oceans are getting more transparent.
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