Diligent team co-authored a recent feature article for the Washington Examiner titled Smarter Grid is a Smart Investment.  It is based on a 4-part strategy document we recently completed for the Lexington Institute regarding how to make the U.S. Electrical Grid more resilient, available here: http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/energy.  

Mike Barrett is part of a panel discussing the recent events in Egypt and how the current regime’s actions mean we should delay transfer of 20 F-16 fighter jets.  A link to the clip on YouTube is available by clicking here.

Diligent’s CEO Mike Barrett discusses the realities of the ongoing conflict in Syria and the reported possible use of chemical weapons.  Discussion includes 3 plausible scenarios regarding those reports, as well as putting the death in Syria in perspective in comparison to Mexico, another war torn nation and one that’s on our border and closer [...]

It is perhaps not a surprise that the strategy for conflict management coming from the war-weary US has been trending towards a transfer of responsibility to foreign partners. Indeed, President Obama’s May 2010 National Security Plan outlines four initiatives for ensuring international order: Ensure Strong Allies, Build Cooperation with Other Centers of Influence, Strengthen Institutions, [...]

A Washington Post editorial today (Challenging Egypt’s Generals) describes how one former prisoner and now blogger in Egypt turned out to be right — “In March of last year, just weeks after the revolution, the activist posted an essay on his blog contending that, contrary to the slogan shouted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the [...]

In recent years the label of “Helicopter Parents” has been given to the over-protective and patronizing parents who refuse to let their adult offspring make their own mature choices.  This presenta delimma — no parent wants their child to grow up and enter the world unprepared to face known and unknown challenges, but there is [...]

People are starting to wonder if there is real concern for conflict between Iran and Israel or if this is just political posturing and gamesmanship.  Sadly, it seems likely it is real this time around.  Why, then, is Iran meeting with inspectors? Iran is willing to meet with inspectors simply to play out the clock [...]

  The Navy’s High-Tech $50,000 Kitty-cat Removal System   It is almost too easy to mock the six-agency, 18 month, $3 million effort to clear 59 cats off of a Navy-owned island.  The island of San Nicolas hosts a launch platform for short and medium missile testing, and radar observation facilities for missile testing.  At [...]

Diligent’s J. Michael Barrett had an article entitled, “Cutting defense spending responsibly” in todays Congress Blog over in The Hill newspaper.  A link to it at their site is here: http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/homeland-security/209505-j-michael-barrett-principal-diligent-innovations.

As part of the overall effort to significantly reduce defense spending President Obama will soon ask congress to establish a Base Closure and Realignment (BRAC) Commission.  While some analysts are concerned about losing military infrastructure and the ability to quickly reconstitute our forces should war require it, many other military decision makers have acknowledged this [...]

The basic tenets of the 16-page DoD overview released last week (available here) appear relatively sound on the surface.  The devil is in both the details and in the actually doing, not the saying – but a focus on Asia and the Middle East is reasonable, and hopefully the concepts of rapid forward-deployable ‘lily-pads’ will [...]

On the heels of the new strategy, DoD has now released a white paper on what the programmatic implications are, and a condensed Programmatic Decisions List. The actions are extensive and represent real cuts to force structure and formerly projected acquisitions. However, many decisions with major fiscal implications are deferred, fudged or ignored, for now. [...]

On January 6th, with a good deal of fanfare (a rare visit by the President to the Pentagon), DoD released a strategy (5.4 MB PDF) that supposedly will guide investment and military employment decisions through the next few years. Most observers were disappointed–there was little in the way of explicit prioritization, and no details on implementation. And [...]

Commentary by Diligent’s J. Michael Barrett: Today’s news of the death sentence for a former U.S. Marine, Amir Mirzaei Hekmati, as a “spy” is yet another example of Iran’s clumsy way of sending the message that they are serious about the simmering conflict brewing between Iran and the West.  The 28-year-old former military translator was [...]

As the Defense Department prepares to release a new strategy in January and confronts the harsh realities of a flat or even declining budget, one of the little-mentioned complications is the large and growing cost of active duty military personnel. Baker Spring of the Heritage Foundation has just published a piece on this: “An Unacceptable [...]

Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute has just published a piece lamenting the “$100 billion” wasted on weapons that were never deployed, or else deployed in much smaller numbers than predicted–thus not fully leveraging money spent on research and development. This is a huge issue, to be sure, but he frames it as resulting from [...]

With the news that Congress has averted a government shutdown and passed an omnibus appropriations bill (summary here), some are breathing sighs of relief. Well, it’s enough to get us through the holidays, but once 2012 hits, the real troubles begin. It’s an election year of course, and so point-scoring and posturing will be even [...]