Strike Force Behind The Book: strikeforce.mp3 Writers Roundtable Interview With Dale Brown ATARI ACT OF WAR: DIRECT ACTION LINKS Dale Brown Interview With: Peter Anthony Holder When a former pilot turns his hand to thrillers you can take their authenticity for granted. His writing is exceptional and the dialogue, plots and characters are first-class... far too good to be missed.' --Sunday Mirror ‘Dale Brown is a superb storyteller’ --WASHINGTON POST ‘Dale Brown is the best military adventure writer in the country’ --CLIVE CUSSLER

The Future Of Global Warfare
by Dale Brown, 2008

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, November 21, 2008

I'm attending the Air Force Association's Global Warfare Conference in Los Angeles this week.

The conference has had a consistent message for the incoming Obama administration throughout so far: the future of national defense needs a direction and leadership to give it focus and goals; it needs innovation and daring instead of safety and sameness; and above all it needs a national commitment by industry, military, and government to attract, educate, train, and retain students for math and science.

Industry and military leaders all acknowledge that the United States is in danger of losing our superiority in space, and that our superiority in other military sectors is slipping as well: India has a lunar probe; Chinese astronauts recently performed their first spacewalk, which is an important skill necessary for the ability to live and work in space and the Moon; China has also demonstrated an anti-satellite kill capability.

All industry leaders agreed that when discussing the future of global strike, one key ingredient is absolutely vital: Space. Space should be considered another battleground, just like land and the seas. International laws need to be drawn up to govern sovereignty of space just as exists for land and sea, but until that is done the U.S. leadership should be willing to defend access and control of space just like our own soil.

Like space, the Air Force is looking at cyberspace--computers, networks, the electromagnetic spectrum, and all forms of digital communication--as a battlespace. The question was often raised: at what level is a cyberattack considered an act of war? If the Pentagon fights off a thousand attempts a day from China to penetrate its networks and doesn't bat an eye, when is it too much? Two thousand attacks? Five thousand? Or will it be judged by the amount and nature of what we've lost instead of the numbers of attacks?

Another theme mentioned by several defense industry leaders struck me: industry and government need to drop the fear factor in research and development. A weapon system takes between 5 and 10 years from concept to full-rate production mostly because no one along the way wants to preside over a failure, so they test and test and test instead of letting a system mature by trial and error. Long, drawn-out programs boost costs and lead to systems that are obsolete the day they are fielded, and that process needs to stop.

I enjoyed listening to David Thompson, co-founder and president of Orbital Sciences Corp. Thompson was the guy who first designed and built air-launched satellite boosters, the very ones I've shamelessly ripped off in my novels for over a decade. He dared call the F-22 and the B-2 bomber examples of outdated and inefficient programs, which I'm sure ruffled some feathers at Northrop and Boeing, but he's got the credentials and success to back up his rhetoric.

We Air Force types like to party as much as we like talking about warfare, and so the West Coast Air Force Ball is tonight, a black-tie shindig at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. I'm not usually a black-tie guy, but I bought a tux and Diane and I will be there. Now that I actually own a tux, maybe I'll go to more black tie parties.

Thanks to Air Force Association executive director Michael Dunn and AFA director of development Lois O'Connor for inviting me to Beverly Hills and attending this great event.

The weather has been outstanding down here, unseasonably warm and pleasant.

We chose to take a motorhome to L.A. instead of fly the Aztec. It took us 12 hours, switching drivers every 2 hours and refueling every other stop. It took 4 times as long as flying the Aztec (plus I had the pleasure of driving through Los Angeles rush hour traffic after dark). But since the price of avgas has not decreased as much as diesel or unleaded gasoline, the cost of fuel plus lodging would have been 4 times as much as the motorhome.

If we had more time to break up the trip into 2 days the drive down would have been more enjoyable, but even so it wasn't bad. The RV park here in Newport Beach is very nice. It's not the Beverly Hilton or the Peninsula, but it's still nice. I'm not ready to give up my plane for an RV, but it's been an OK trip.

Welcome to AirBattleForce.Com Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA Cyberspace home of: Dale Brown readermail@dalebrown.info