Thursday NatSec Roundup

I feel that I’ve undertaken a heavy responsibility. If I had only been more firm and refused. Now we’ve left home waters and I’m beginning to wonder if the operation will work.

• Turkey is not quite out of the F-35 supply chain game yet. I don’t really think there’s a plausible path to bringing Turkey back in for the long haul, though.
• More about this later; the Navy is beginning to get serious about trying to break the 1/3rd-1/3rd-1/3rd procurement divide between the services at DoD. I think that this is one of the biggest obstacles to serious thinking about defense reform in the United States. A bit more here on how the Navy might make the case.
• Why yes, I think that Nimitz *could* have used his battleships more effectively in the year after Pearl Harbor.
• I have some thoughts at the Diplomat on what Japan’s next fighter project will look like…
• This is a nice, relatively condensed history of Italy’s relationship with the F-35 project.
• Good discussion of how to compare Russian, Chinese, and American defense budgets. PPP does matter, especially for defense industrial bases that are relatively self-reliant.