China is rapidly modernizing its nuclear forces and aims to flex its growing military clout, according to a new Pentagon report. "It certainly is a dramatically accelerated pace," a senior defense official told reporters in connection with the report's release. "They've got a rapid buildup ...
Three dozen aircraft assembled on the flight line for an “elephant walk” at Kadena Air Base, Japan, in a show of air power. The capabilities demonstration included six different kinds of aircraft, all stationed at Kadena at the moment. The display came on the same day U.S. ...
The Department of Defense's senior policy official laid out the Biden administration’s security strategy for the Middle East. In a speech in Bahrain, Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said the U.S. is still committed to the region despite a shift in its security focus ...
Top U.S. officials aimed to explain why a new Nuclear Posture Review departs from long-held views expressed by President Joe Biden. The Biden administration's nuclear strategy retains the decades-old policy that the U.S. nuclear arsenal could be used to deter or respond to significant attacks ...
The Air Force won’t get larger anytime soon as a result of the new National Defense Strategy, and competition with China and Russia, though gravely serious, doesn’t constitute a new Cold War—mainly because of economic interdependence, said Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall.
A new report suggests that the U.S. military’s “technological edge” could erode—the Defense Department no longer able to fulfill its commitments or to project power in the customary way—if the U.S. doesn’t become a better-informed player in the global “techno-economic competition.” To that end, a ...
The Department of Defense unveiled updated defense, nuclear, and missile defense strategies Oct. 27 that outline a fundamental shift in the world's nuclear weapons threat. DOD states that nuclear weapons underpin U.S. strategic defenses and that America will continue to invest in its nuclear forces.
The new, public version of the National Defense Strategy, unveiled by Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III at the Pentagon, again calls out China as the U.S. military’s “pacing threat” but offers no force-sizing construct nor any specifics about numbers of forces the U.S. needs ...
One of the biggest lessons to emerge from the war in Ukraine is that weapons that are in production constitute a credible threat to adversaries, whereas weapons that are merely experimental—or are not actually being made in numbers—are not, according to William LaPlante, the Pentagon’s ...
The U.S. can longer assume its logistics are safe and must develop a more agile approach to contend with China, the head of U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost, said Oct. 17.
Initial planning has begun for the retirement of the B-1 and B-2 bombers, but the game plan depends largely on progress in fielding the B-21 Raider—and on Congress—the Air Force’s bomber program executive officer said. In an Air Force bomber roadmap from 2018, the service ...
The Biden administration’s long-awaited National Security Strategy predicts that the 2020s will be a “decisive decade,” requiring the U.S. to “outmaneuver” and compete with an aggressive, well-financed China and a “dangerous” Russia by investing in the American people and marshaling U.S. allies to cooperate for ...