Long-Term Debt Thought Greatest Threat to US

Morning Coffee is a robust blend of links to news around the internet concerning the Naval Air Station Patuxent River economic community. The opinions expressed here do not reflect opinions of the Leader’s owners or staff.

A bipartisan group of prominent national security figures on Tuesday will call on US leaders to reduce the country’s long-term debt, which they consider the greatest threat to the nation’s security, The Hill reports. The group, Coalition for Fiscal and National Security, is chaired by retired Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and includes former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretaries Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, and former National Security Advisers Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft.

The US Navy on Tuesday sent a guided missile destroyer within 12 miles of a disputed island in the South China Sea where China has built an airstrip. “This operation challenged attempts by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam to restrict navigation rights around the features they claim … contrary to international law,” a Pentagon statement said, CNN reports. This prompted the Chinese military to scramble three fighter jets that monitored the destroyer, along with three Chinese ships, until the American vessel left the area, reports The Washington Post.

US President Barack Obama is considering whether to lift a three-decades-old arms embargo on Vietnam, US officials say, as he weighs calls to forge closer military ties with Hanoi against concerns over its poor human rights record, Reuters reports.

The P-8A Poseidon has started air-to-air refueling testing and is on course to test its multi-static active coherent (MAC) anti-sub search system and High Altitude ASW (antisubmarine warfare) Weapons Concept Mk. 54 torpedo and high-altitude sensor upgrades, Aviation Week reports.

Will outer space become a new front in modern warfare? Defense officials are developing ways to protect exposed satellites floating in orbit and to keep apprised of what an enemy is doing hundreds, if not thousands, of miles above Earth’s surface, reports The Washington Post.

A report released by PwC on May 9 estimates that commercial applications for drones will replace $127 billion worth of services and labor “in the very near future,” NextGov reports.

Northrop Grumman has announced that it had passed a Critical Design Review (CDR) for a new jamming and spoofing system for Navy warships, Block III of the Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program, Breaking Defense reports. It’s this subsystem that causes enemy missiles to go off-target and splash harmlessly into the water instead of slamming unto a US Navy ship at hundreds of miles per hour and then exploding.

The Pentagon’s top 100 contractors raked in $175.1 billion in obligated contracts in 2015, down slightly from 2014’s total of $177.6 billion, according to government figures released this week, Defense News reports. Lockheed Martin was the largest single contractor for the US government in 2015, easily lapping the rest of the field with $36.2 billion. The next closest competitor was Boeing at $16.6 billion.

Developing new air and ground-based weapons that would direct high-energy beams against a range of threats may stall for lack of funding, DefenseTech reports.

A day in the life of an F-35 test pilot: He has to deal with dashboard “idiot lights” just as the rest of us do, Defense News says.