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The U.S. military’s newest combat aircraft, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, is designed as a multirole platform capable of carrying out a range of missions for different services and foreign allies. Its brains are an advanced software programmable avionics package that can be rapidly reconfigured for new operations. The package manages the aircraft’s navigations, communications, electronic warfare, and identification friend or foe functions. Although it was developed for use in fighter aircraft, the electronics package can potentially be installed in a range of airborne and ground-based vehicles.

China has been buying and adapting Russian naval technologies as it introduces new ships to the fleet in fits and starts. Instead of standardizing ship designs and deploying large numbers of similar ships to its emerging blue water fleet, the People’s Liberation Army Navy keeps introducing new types of guided missile destroyers largely in pairs. The answer to the question of why China produced only one or two of four recent new guided missile destroyer designs could be that China is trying to gain the capability of producing a 956-type ship so that no more expensive Russian imports would be needed.

In 1986, the Goldwater-Nichols Act mandated jointness in the Defense Department. This affected training, doctrine, personnel management and assignments, force structure and operations. Joint operations and a joint approach to command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) have become fundamental to the way we fight.

Various mechanisms exist to achieve success, but the power and benefit of 500-day plans have been proven repeatedly. Organizations can use this approach to plan and quantitatively measure the success of transformational activities even during the most dynamic of times.

Despite the collected wisdom of those who know about this stuff (i.e. congressional staffers) that it is unlikely there will be an intelligence authorization bill for the third year in row, I was interested in the language of the authorization bills recently reported out by both the House Permanent Select Committee for Intelligence (HPSCI) and the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence (SSCI). The reason there won't be an FY 2009 Intelligence Authorization Bill is because the executive branch through the IC finds both versions fatally flawed on interrogation techniques the CIA should be allowed to employ.

Michael Yon is an independent journalist writing from Iraq and Afghanistan. Over several years, Yon has been embedded with a number of U.S.

Cyber threats are like rust—they never sleep.