US Strategic Command seeks a new command and control complex and nuclear command, control, and communications node at Offutt AFB, Neb., said Gen. Robert Kehler, STRATCOM’s boss. The new complex would replace Offutt’s “aging and fragile” Curtis E. LeMay building and co-located facilities, said Kehler. The current buildings “lack the capacity to support current mission demands,” and they “occasionally experience serious heating and cooling problems, electrical failures, and other outages,” he told House defense overseers in prepared testimony last week. “The new facility,” he continued, “will ensure an [electromagnetic pulse]-protected, flexible, sustainable, reliable, and collaborative environment,” with a more robust infrastructure. The Air Force will fund the $564 million project, starting with a $150 million increment in Fiscal 2012, followed by $250 million in Fiscal 2013, and the remainder in Fiscal 2014, according to Maj. Gen. Alfred Flowers, USAF’s deputy assistant secretary for budget.
The U.S. military needs to wake up to the fact that global dominance is no longer a viable strategy for national defense, because pursuing that unrealizable goal is making the country less safe, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said April 22. Emerging defense technologies like swarms of…