CBO: Drones for Homeland Security Wasteful

• The Congressional Budget Office deemed Homeland Security’s drone program a big waste of time and money, seeing as it has been expensive, and applied only in a narrow patch of border. For its part, Homeland Security would like to spend $443 million for some more airframes to add to the 8-year program.

Europe

• According to reports month after the Minsk agreement between Ukraine and Russian-sponsored rebels, attacks continue against Ukraine held-territory, but at a slower pace. A detailed, but rather partisan, account can be found here. Of interest is a photo allegedly of a BPM-97 in Luhansk. The Russian-made armored personnel carrier is not widely used outside of the Russian border patrol, and the Ukranian military had no inventory of the vehicles.

Middle East

• The Institute for the Study of War updated its Syria sit rep.

United States

• Heat is on for the F-35 program to attract foreign sales to lower its per-unit costs to the (increasingly unlikely) $85 million per unit.

Missile Defense

• Missile Defense advocates in the U.S. are beating congressional bushes during this SecDef transition time. A Hudson Institute commentator summed up the main argument in a piece warning of the “unimaginable costs of recovering from a nuclear ballistic missile strike.”

• Today we have two videos, showing very different aspects of missile defense. The first comes from Israel, showing high frame rate interceptor launches of the new Barak 8.

The second shows a time lapse sequence of the inflation of a JLENS cruise missile early warning defense system…