By David Axe, The National Interest: “The Russian navy’s transformation into a small-ship fleet has been accelerating."
By Rebecca Hersman & Bernadette Stadler, War on the Rocks: "For most of the nuclear age, enhanced strategic situational awareness — the ability to characterize the operating environment, detect nuclear and conventional strategic attacks, and discern real attacks from false alarms — has been viewed as beneficial to crisis stability."
By Bruce M. Sugden, Texas National Security Review: " ... while identifying the challenges of nuclear competition — between the United States and Russia on the one hand, and the United States and China on the other — is a crucial first step for making strategic assessments, these strategy documents provide little in the way of guidance for analyzing nuclear competition."
Upgrades to Russia's active radar-guided medium-range missiles reflect a renewed emphasis on air-to-air weaponry on the part of the Russian defence ministry, write Piotr Butowski and Douglas Barrie after the Armiya 2019 defence exhibition.
By Loren Thompson, Forbes: "Aside from their high velocity—five times the speed of sound or greater—they operate almost entirely within the atmosphere, at elevations below which existing early-warning sensors are optimized to monitor."
By Billy Carter, Small Wars Journal: "It is our position that in order to achieve strategic influence goals we require a unified national structure with systems and methods, policy and doctrine appropriate for its charter. Prior to the Church-Pike Hearings such a structure existed in the Operations Coordination Board as part of the NSC."
By Diana Lee & Paulina Perlin, Lawfare: “Intelligence agency procedures have varied both within and across agencies in the intelligence community—making it difficult for Congress, the public and even the agencies themselves to determine the scope of intelligence gathering."
“It would be illogical to continue to concentrate our forces on a few large ships,” the new USMC Commandant writes in his new guidance, setting decades of planning on its head. So what’s next?
By Connie Lee, National Defense Magazine: “The Pentagon is developing a strategy to ensure the defense industrial base has sufficient capacity to produce hypersonic weapons, according to a department official."