Thread on the beauty of wildlife 🧵

1. When it’s cold enough to see the melody

It’s been a year of firsts in drone warfare: 1) first drone strike to kill US forces in Jordan 2) Iran’s attack on Israel was largest single country-on-country drone attack. I talked abt the new drone& missile age on NPR and Iran’s central role wbur.org/hereandnow/202…

I disagree w/Bridge about much, but this is a very sensible take + shows the pragmatic limits of his own position. We should applaud analysts willing to make clear distinctions within 'hawk' or 'dove' positions to keep the debate from descending into a sterile binary choice

Great article on missile prolif ⁦⁦Andrew Metrick⁩! We need more air def, but i wld double down on sensing (ie OTHR) & intel sharing to get left of launch. Persistent cost-imposing threat requires persistent proactive response warontherocks.com/2024/01/gettin… foreignaffairs.com/north-korea/wo…

Drones delivered cheaply & at scale is an asymmetric advantage:

“The ability to deliver swarming-type unmanned attritable capabilities to deliver a problem set for the adversary they won’t be prepared for & would have a really difficult time countering.

Whether it’s undersea,

When asked about using million dollar missiles to shoot down Houthi drones:

“They are fighting with what they got & we should never ask them to stop or conserve.

What we do have to do is move forward on our directed energy path to be able to get on the right side of this cost

Thank you again to U.S.-China Commission for inviting me to testify yesterday! My testimony on PLA logistics and maintenance lessons learned and approaches relevant for counterintervention is available below: rand.org/pubs/testimoni…

Nellis’s Agressors with their beautiful looking Vipers!! U.S. Air Force 64th Aggressor Squadron Nellis Air Force Base

How to stop drones? Air defense and electric warfare are not the only answers.

“I think there’s a real need to get left of launch on the drone fight,” says Caitlin Lee. “We got really good at hunting down IED networks. Well, drones are flying IEDs.” airandspaceforces.com/combatant-comm…

It was an honor to testify b4 the US-China Econ & Security Review Commission on the need to shore up US military forces in the Indo-Pacific. I brought my daughter so she cld see what mom works on. We talked about deterrence.
rand.org/pubs/testimoni…

Phew, glad we passed funding deal for Palau, Marshall Islands, Micronesia. But delays- a result of dysfunctional defense budgeting & planning process- are bad not just for US defense but also our international standing. Hope Congress acts on PPBE reform. ft.com/content/5e673d…

Scary stuff. Chinese info wars are a thing. We just did a short report on the topic: rand.org/pubs/research_…

Taiwan’s Tough Call on How to Stop China: Bigger Weapons or Lots of Cheap Ones - WSJ wsj.com/world/asia/tai…

Wait til you hear about the space littoral

I’ll be testifying on the panel after Cristina Garafola - talk about a hard act to follow! 😅

This article joins chorus of those over-indexing on UKR as we plan for Indo-Pac, where geography & distance present a very different picture in which long range & big payload r going to be essential to force mix for both US manned & unmanned@WarOnTheRocks warontherocks.com/2024/03/drones…

Why is the U.S. Navy Running Out of Tomahawk Cruise Missiles? | The National Interest nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/why-…

The failure of Congress to appropriate defends funds has real nat sec consequences. If we can’t lock in aid for Palau, Marshall Islands & Micronesia, we risk losing critical Indo-Pacific access & partners. Meanwhile China has already rolled the Solomons. defensenews.com/pentagon/2024/…

'We are in the middle of another epochal change and that is the dawn of the information revolution. Who competes best in this, who adapts better, who is better able to combine data, computing power, AI and who can win the first battle in space, cyber, and the information domain

There’s been talk abt the “democratization of tech” bc of low cost drone warfare in UKR. But state sponsors like Iran r central to global drone proliferation networks & we need to get “left of launch” on these networks, like we did w IEDs and EFPs in Iraq wsj.com/world/irans-ri…