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Shots to the Dome—Why We Can’t Model US Missile Defense on Israel’s “Iron Dome”
Starting an arms race where the costs are stacked against you at a time when debt-to-GDP is approaching an all-time high seems reckless. All in all, the idea behind Golden Dome is still quite undercooked.
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Autonomous Weapon Systems: No Human-in-the-Loop Required, and Other Myths Dispelled
“The United States has a strong policy on autonomy in weapon systems that simultaneously enables their development and deployment and ensures they could be used in an effective manner, meaning the systems work as intended, with the same minimal risk of accidents or errors that all weapon systems have,” Michael Horowitz writes.
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Golden Dome: An Aerospace Engineer Explains the Proposed Nationwide Missile Defense System
Similar to Iron Dome, Golden Dome will consist of sensors and interceptor missiles but will be deployed over a much wider geographical region and for defense against a broader variety of threats in comparison with Iron Dome.
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Golden Dome: What Trump Should Learn from Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ Missile Defense System Plan
Golden Dome is reportedly partly inspired by Israel’s Iron Dome system that protects the country from missile attacks, but critics say that it’s much harder to design a defense system to protect a land mass the size of the United States. This is particularly the case in an era characterized by the threat from hypersonic missiles, as well as attacks from space.
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Why the United States, South Korea, and Japan Must Cooperate on Shipbuilding
The tides of naval power are shifting as China’s shipyards churn out warships at an unprecedented pace, leveraging its massive commercial shipbuilding base, direct government funding, and integrated military-industrial strategy. To counter this, the United States, South Korea, and Japan should form a shipbuilding alliance.
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How to Help the U.S. Navy as It Helps Us: Build a Joint Submarine Facility
There’s a way for Australia to strengthen its case for the US presidential certification it will need for acquiring Virginia-class submarines. It should do so by accelerating construction of a planned shipyard in Western Australia and using it to help get US submarines out of a long maintenance queue.
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Catch Me If You Can? Check.
Sandia supports milestone hypersonic missile defense test, helping defend deployed troops and the nation against hypersonic threats.
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Shipbuilding to Citizenship: Solving the U.S. Skills Shortage with Immigration
Skill-based immigration can help the United States fill its severe shortage of shipbuilding workers, for both naval and civilian construction.
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Five Questions: RAND’s Jim Mitre on Artificial General Intelligence and National Security
A recent RAND paper lays out five hard national security problems that will become very real the moment an artificial general intelligence comes online. The researchers made only one prediction: If we ever get to that point, the consequences will be so profound that the U.S. government needs to take steps now to be ready for them.
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The Battle for Pentagon Acquisition Policy: Tradition Versus New-and-Cheaper
The weapons that get bought in larger or smaller quantities, or are launched or cancelled, will indicate whether US President Donald Trump’s administration will strengthen long-range deterrent forces, order a retreat under his Golden Dome missile-defense system, or spend four years trying to blend incompatible visions of industrial and technological strategy.
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How the U.S. Can Mine Its Own Critical Minerals − without Digging New Holes
Critical materials are the tiny building blocks powering modern life, yet the U.S. depends heavily on imports for most critical materials. Could the U.S. mine and process more critical minerals at home?
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Operation Opera Redux? Iran’s Nuclear Program and the Preventive War Paradox
The 1981 Israeli destruction of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was an operational success, but is regarded by many as a strategic failure. Scholars call this the preventive war paradox: compromising one’s security in the long term through military action that is operationally successful.
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AI-Controlled Fighter Jets May Be Closer Than We Think — and Would Change the Face of Warfare
Could we be on the verge of an era where fighter jets take flight without pilots – and are controlled by artificial intelligence (AI)? US R Adm Michael Donnelly recently said that an upcoming combat jet could be the navy’s last one with a pilot in the cockpit.
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MIT Lincoln Laboratory Is a Workhorse for National Security
The US Air Force and MIT renew contract for operating the federally funded R&D center, a long-standing asset for defense innovation and prototyping.
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Latest Reasoning Models from OpenAI to Be Used for Energy and National Security Applications on Los Alamos’s Venado Supercomputer
Los Alamos National Laboratory has entered a partnership with OpenAI to install its latest o-series models — capable of expert reasoning for a broad span of complex scientific problems — on the Lab’s Venado supercomputer.
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The long view
The Trump Administration’s Cyber Strategy Fundamentally Misunderstands China’s Threat
The adoption of an offense-first strategy is a dangerous miscalculation. It will not diminish Beijing’s campaigns, and it coincides with a significant deterioration of cyber defenses that have kept U.S. networks and Americans safe.
Allfare: China’s Whole-of-Nation Strategy
To analyze how states exert their influence, scholars often compartmentalize actions into rigid analytical frameworks, which obscures the holistic scope of the challenge.
Counter-Drone Technologies Are Evolving – but There’s No Surefire Way to Defend Against Drone Attacks
Together, these three types of counter-drone technologies – radio frequency, directed energy and kinetic – provide a comprehensive tool kit for addressing the diverse threats posed by unauthorized drones. However, there is no single ideal solution to counter these threats.