Kazakhstan’s Nuclear Bank: Achieving Benefits at Acceptable Risk

01/25/2012 – Richard Weitz looks at the possibility of Kazakhstan as a host for nuclear fuel banks. Kazakh ambitions in the international market are extensive. The government and nuclear industry would like to establish a full-fledged “nuclear fuel service center” that, in addition to serving as a uranium fuel bank, could reprocess the spent fuel from nuclear reactors to recycle it as plutonium while storing the residual nuclear waste. The center could also provide nuclear reactors and other nuclear energy technologies.  But Kazakhstan needs to address certain problems before the international community can support establishing a multinational uranium fuel bank on its territory. ...
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New Defense Guidance: Needs Resources To Travel

01/25/2012 – With the end of the wars in Iraq and Libya, and the impending U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, the United States can now adjust its force posture and other resources to better address new geographic (China rather than Iraq) and functional (anti-access rather than transnational terrorism) challenges.

The United States will therefore realign military resources to address these concerns. This shift in geographic focus will also require the U.S. military to strengthen capabilities for missions other than counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, especially global deployment and insertion capabilities.
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ESG-2 Prepares for Bold Alligator 2012

01/23/2012 – In this piece, Colonel Bradley Weisz, Deputy Commander, Expeditionary Strike Group TWO discusses preparation for the Bold Alligator 2012 exercise and the way forward for the sea-basing capabilities of the USN-USMC team.

"The aviation combat element obviously allows the supply ships to be used differently.  We can sustain ourselves, resupply ourselves, and conduct an operation as well as any land based capability, especially when you compare it to what recently took place in Libya, how close the Harriers were to Libya, how effective they were, it’s unbelievable.

We can use the MV-22B to develop that logistic supply chain. In Libya, you had a Big Deck LHD sitting right off the coast.  You had an MV-22B resupplying, sustaining it, and the sortie rate was 3 to 4 times what we would normally expect." ...
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An Update on F-35 Manufacturability

01/23/2012 – "From the very beginning, the F-35 was designed with the intent that we would be able to build one a day, and deliver one a day.....  The aircraft was ready to go put gas in it, load software in it, and fly it, and that is different from with the more handcrafted F-22s that we knew we weren’t going to build, but a few hundreds of those.  That was really designed for performance, and optimized for the performance of the aircraft after it was delivered.  This one obviously has the performance characteristics in there, but we were really leaned towards the manufacturability, and affordability available to put out one a day." ...
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