Cato’s Benjamin H. Friedman and MIT professor emeritus Harvey M. Sapolsky take note of a proposal to trim the number of DoD combatant commands from six to four — and argue that’s four too many: “Other Pentagon offices can accomplish the commands’ few important functions. The commands have become less accountable alternatives to embassies, predictable sources of threat inflation and insatiable consumers of military resources…”
al Qaeda 1.0, 2.0, 3.0? Soufan Group offers this one-pager on AQ’s evolution.
A week after former CAPE director Christine Fox published a much-discussed commentary in Defense News (“Stop Pretending Enforced Cuts Won’t Be Harmful“), Center for American Progress’s Lawrence Korb takes issue: “[H]er conclusion that the cumulative effect of the Budget Control Act will be ‘some combination of a military that is much smaller, much less technologically advanced and much less ready than we have been accustomed to over the last 30 years’ is an exaggeration for six reasons..”
You may have seen Microsoft millionaire/“patent troll” Nathan Myhrvold’s 33-page piece on counterterrorism, or perhaps the Foreign Policy article about it. Here’s a dissection by WMD expert Cheryl Rofer: “…Myhrvold does not understand the definition of a threat: intent + capability. And he gets a lot of things wrong.”
Warlord’s Quote of the Day
“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” — President James Madison
Contributed by Will Grannis, a West Point graduate and former Army captain, is CEO of What’s Next Corporation. From a list compiled by the Warlord Loop, a private email forum for national security experts.
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