US approves sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and Netherlands | Reuters

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  18 octobre 2023 | International, Terrestre

  Troops hurt after three drones attack US bases in Iraq

  Two drones targeted a base in Western Iraq used by U.S. forces and one drone targeted a base in Northern Iraq.

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  18 septembre 2019 | International, Aérospatial

  4 questions about innovation with the US Air Force’s vice chief of staff

  By: Valerie Insinna WASHINGTON — Gen. Stephen “Seve” Wilson knows the enemy doesn't sleep. As the U.S. Air Force's vice chief of staff, he's aware of how innovation can be stifled. But that must change as the United States finds itself in an era of great power competition, he argues. Wilson spoke on a panel at the 2019 Defense News Conference on Sept. 4, where he discussed how the government can close the innovation gap, and how the military can improve its relationship with industry. What is the biggest challenge to moving innovative concepts into military operations? What I see arguably as the biggest challenge to innovation and moving it forward is urgency. And today I can't beat that drum hard enough and loud enough about the sense of urgency that the status quo simply isn't acceptable in the world that we live in. The good news is we know how to do this, we've done it before. And I'd go back to a time in our history in the early '60s when President [John F.] Kennedy said: “We're going to go to the moon and back.” In about eight years, we did 36 space launches. We built the biggest rockets ever known. And we did 36 launches in eight years. Today I look at the time frame it takes us to deliver capability, and we're nowhere on that timeline. I think we as a nation need to understand the competition and develop amongst all of us in all of our communities this sense of urgency that we're in this competition, and the status quo is just simply not good enough. So how do you enable that change? I was just at in San Antonio, Texas, visiting the 33rd Network Warfare Squadron. I met a young lieutenant with these bold ideas. He went to his boss and said: “Hey, I think we've got this really hard problem. I think I can solve it. Give me a handful of people in a couple of days and I'll be able to get after [it].” He came back and not once, not twice, but three times he failed. And along the way he asked for more people and time, until he didn't fail, and he solved a really wicked hard problem. There was a courageous lieutenant in this case and a leadership that empowered him to move forward. And then he briefed me — here's the vice chief coming to visit, [and he says]: “Hey vice chief, here's where I failed three times until we didn't.” And he brought the sense of urgency. It was about building a team, a common vision. It's really powerful, and I think it's indicative of what we need to see across all of our forces. We hear how advanced China is in areas of innovation. Just how advanced is it really? I tell people that we're the best in the world and our adversaries know it. But they're catching up. If we don't change, we could lose. We have to do business differently. We're trying. How? We hear government is not always easy to do business with. We're trying to lower those barriers and bring on people quicker and easier. We have some of the most impactful problems for our nation. And if we can get people in the door and expose them to the challenges and let them do what they can do, it's hugely rewarding. We have to make it easy. Can we make it easy where industry could come work with us, maybe even for only a few years, but [long enough] to really make a difference? How can we bring somebody in, let them work and then let them go back to industry? We both benefit from it. We have to find ways because this is about a competition for talent and good ideas. Then what do we do with it? Do we empower them and let them really work at these really hard problems? I think that's what people really want to get after. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/air-force-association/2019/09/15/4-questions-about-innovation-with-the-us-air-forces-vice-chief-of-staff

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  11 juin 2019 | International, Sécurité, Autre défense

  A Report from NATO's Front Lines

  by Michael O'Hanlon All is busy on NATO's eastern front. That was our main conclusion during a recent study delegation to Lithuania sponsored by the Lithuanian Ministry of National Defense and organized by the Atlantic Council. A lot is happening on the defense preparation front, and the overall security situation is improving considerably compared with a few years ago. But problems remain and work still has to be done, if deterrence and stability are to be ensured, and a potentially devastating war with Russia prevented. As many people will recall, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, with a combined population of some six million and combined military strength of some thirty thousand active-duty troops, joined NATO in 2004. All three border Russia, though in the case of Lithuania, that border is in the western part of the country (near Russia's Kaliningrad pocket). Lithuania's eastern frontier is shared with Belarus, a close ally of Moscow, at Vladimir Putin's insistence. Its southern border touches Poland, along the famed “Suwalki gap,” the narrow land corridor through which NATO would likely send most of its tens of thousands of reinforcements during any major crisis or conflict with Russia over the Baltics. All three Baltic states, plus Poland, are now among the seven of NATO's twenty-nine members that meet their obligations to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on their militaries, however imperfect a metric of burden-sharing that formal NATO requirement may be. In Lithuania's case, this represents a tripling of military spending since 2013. Give President Donald Trump and President Barack Obama some of the credit for recent increases if you wish. But give the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles the majority of the credit—with a nod, of course, to Vladimir Putin, who has done more to unify and motivate eastern Europeans' security efforts than anyone else this century. Since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea in Ukraine and stoked a conflict in Ukraine's east that continues to this day, NATO has been gradually fortifying its eastern flank, in the Baltic states and Poland. It now has a multinational battalion-size battlegroup (of about one thousand soldiers) in each of the three Baltic states, plus a larger U.S. brigade-sized presence in Poland (with occasional, but intermittent, American deployments into the Baltic states for exercising and signaling resolve). The battalion in Lithuania is backstopped by Germany, with additional major contributions from the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. These battalions are collectively described as the “enhanced forward presence” or eFP program, following NATO's Operation Atlantic Resolve; the U.S. element is often described as the European deterrence initiative. Adding in those rotational deployments, there are some thirty-five thousand total NATO troops in the Baltics, with only a smattering of Americans on most days. Russia has well over one hundred thousand of its own recently-improved forces just across the border and could probably muster closer to two hundred thousand with little effort under the guise of an exercise, if it wished. The Lithuanians' recent defense efforts need to be put in perspective. The nation is resolute, with 80 percent supporting NATO forces deployed to its territory and all of the recent major presidential candidates—and eventual winner—favoring the ongoing defense buildup. But it does not seem paranoid, or on serious edge, even as the officials we saw were clear about the challenge and legitimately focused on progress. While a military budget at 2 percent of GDP, headed towards 2.5 percent, is an impressive defense effort, it does not reflect the dire sense of urgency of a society expecting imminent war. After all, the United States and Russia each spend more than 3 percent of GDP on their armed forces; in fact, NATO aimed for a 3 percent minimum during the Cold War, when the United States typically spent upwards of 5 percent of GDP on its military. And for all the enhancements to its two main combat brigades, Lithuania has restrained from fortifying the eastern and western flanks of the country with smart minefields or other barriers to invasion. For its part, NATO more generally has stationed the eFP forces but has not tied them into a truly integrated combat force; nor has it deployed many helicopters or air defense systems into the Baltic states. It certainly has not prestationed the seven brigades of capability that a 2016 RAND Corporation simulation estimated as necessary to constitute a viable forward defense position. The current level of effort, vigilant but tempered, strikes us as roughly appropriate to the circumstances at hand. While there are still conflict scenarios that can be imagined, it is hard to think that President Putin believes he could really get away with naked aggression against any NATO member, including those in the Baltic region. Even if NATO does not have an adequate forward defense in place against hypothetical Russian aggression, it does have a rather robust forward tripwire, combined with increasingly credible ways of rapidly reinforcing that tripwire in a crisis. Still, there are three additional lines of effort that Washington and other NATO capitals should pursue in the interest of greater deterrence, stability, and predictability in eastern Europe. First, as a recent Atlantic Council report, “Permanent Deterrence,” underscored, NATO should strengthen key pieces of its modest military presence in Poland and the Baltic states. Much of this can happen in the Polish/American sector, but elements of it should extend to the Baltics as well. It makes good sense to combine greater combat engineering capability for military mobility, so as to better move reinforcements into the east in the face of possible Russian opposition, together with plugging gaps in areas such as combat aviation and air defense, and pre-stocking certain equipment. Moscow may complain, but it cannot credibly view such additions as major NATO additions or provocations, especially because they are modest, and because Russian actions have necessitated them. Second, nonmilitary elements of NATO resoluteness need to be strengthened, too. As discussed in The Senkaku Paradox: Risking Great Power War over Small Stakes, there are various types of very small Russian probing attacks that could leave NATO flummoxed and paralyzed over how to respond. These attacks might not reach the threshold where all alliance members would wish to invoke NATO's Article V mutual-defense clause and send military forces in response, yet they could be too serious to ignore. NATO should conceptualize such scenarios and exercise crisis decisionmaking in advance while honing various economic and diplomatic approaches to complement any military responses. NATO also needs to develop more contingency plans for economic warfare with Russia that would provide alternative energy sources in a crisis. Lithuania's recent development of a liquefied natural gas terminal is exemplary in this regard. Third, while projecting resolve vis-à-vis Moscow, including retention of the EU and U.S. sanctions that have been imposed on Russia in recent years, NATO needs to rethink its broader strategy towards Russia. This strategy should include options for bettering relations in a post–Putin Russia. Various types of security architectures and arrangements should be explored and debated. For now, with a new president in Kiev, a concerted effort to help Ukraine reform its economy and further weed out corruption makes eminent sense. Things are moving in the right direction in eastern Europe, but there is considerable work left to be done. Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the new book, The Senkaku Paradox; Christopher Skaluba is the director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. https://nationalinterest.org/feature/report-natos-front-lines-62067