The U.S. Minuteman III intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) force faces an uncertain future, writes Mark Schneider in his recent post on DefenseNews.com. A set of Minuteman failures in the recent years is as concerning as the exponential loss of design and engineering expertise within the Air Force itself. As Schneider …
At the 2011 Space and Missile Defense Conference in Huntsville, Alabama, one could sense increasing concerns from engineers and scientists who support and contribute to the U.S. defense industrial base. The U.S. defense industrial base put a man on the moon, allowed the country to win the Cold War, and …
The recent statements by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Rogozin, the Russian President’s Special Representative for Missile Defense Cooperation with NATO, raised hackles in Washington. Putin called the U.S. a “parasite” on the body of global economy, while Rogozin claimed that U.S. Senators told him U.S. missile defense is aimed at …
The Obama Administration traded 25 percent of the U.S. operationally deployed strategic nuclear missiles for a Russian nuclear buildup in New START, a bilateral arms control treaty with the Russian Federation, writes Mark Schneider in his latest op-ed. This became clear after the U.S. State Department released a factsheet making …
While members of Congress, former cabinet members, long-time aides and assorted VIPs were celebrating Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday at the Reagan Presidential Library in sun-baked Simi Valley, California, I was nearly 6,000 miles away in snow-bound Tallinn, Estonia, a small Baltic country bordering on the former Soviet Union. As a …
Since 1948, Cold War legislation has been tying the hands of practitioners of U.S. public diplomacy and international broadcasting. The law in question is the Smith-Mundt Act, which was intended to allow the State Department to counter Soviet propaganda in foreign media, while at the same time forbidding it from …
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) announced on January 31, 2010, that a test of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system for countering long-range missiles that took place over the Pacific Ocean that day failed to destroy the target missile. The initial review suggests that the failure occurred because a new …
