Colin Clark, the founding editor of Breaking Defense, is now our Indo-Pacific Bureau Chief, based in Sydney, Australia. In addition to his foundational efforts at Breaking Defense, Colin also started DoDBuzz.com, the world’s first all-online defense news website. He’s covered Congress, intelligence and regulatory affairs for Space News; founded and edited the Washington Aerospace Briefing, a newsletter for the space industry; covered national security issues for Congressional Quarterly; and was editor of Defense News. Colin is an avid fisherman, grill genius and wine drinker, all of which are only part of the reason he relishes the opportunity to live in Australia.
cclark@breakingmedia.com
UPDATED: Adds Air Force POM Chart Of Most Major Programs WASHINGTON: It’s simple: the Air Force “simply cannot afford” to buy what it needs to buy over the next decade. The emphasis is the Air Force’s own, published on its budget website ahead of the official budget release. “The Air Force is facing a modernization…
WASHINGTON: Arsenal plane. It’s a great name, no? And the Hyper Velocity Projectile. Whoa. Fast flying swarming micro drones. Neat! There’s much more being developed, but it’s classified. Where is all this coming from? The Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO for short. Defense Secretary Ash Carter talked up the new office in his 2017 budget preview speech…
CAPITOL HILL: Nunn-McCurdy notifications to Congress of gross cost growth in a weapons system’s costs strike fear in the hearts of top Pentagon acquisition officials, and something like them may become law for a new set of costs — operations and support. “They should be the next frontier for acquisition reform,” former DoD Comptroller Bob…
WASHINGTON: Frank Kendall signaled in December that the F-35 was no longer immune from budget cuts and it looks as if he knew what he was talking about. The story out this afternoon is that five Air Force F-35As will be cut from the fiscal 2017 budget request. Mackenzie Eaglen said at a Brookings Institution…
WASHINGTON: None of us knows many details about what’s in the last of the Obama defense budgets, but House Republicans are criticizing the sketchy outlines of the 2017 budget offered by Defense Secretary Ash Carter today. In particular, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry is raising concerns that the Pentagon is not asking Congress…
PENTAGON: After 25 years of war in the Middle East, the Pentagon’s 2017 budget is the first driven by Russia and China. “The program has been shifted to a more acute focus on the two high-end competitors, Russia and China,” a senior defense official told Sydney in an interview ahead of Secretary Ash Carter’s budget speech this…
WASHINGTON: Sen. John McCain continued his crusade to stop the Pentagon from using Russia’s highly reliable and cheap RD-180 rocket engines to launch American military satellites during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today. The Arizona senator and the House Majority Leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, introduced a bill today designed to overturn language in…
It should surprise no one, but the US Marine Corps, the US Air Force and the British will fly F-35s at both the Royal International Air Tattoo and the Farnborough Air Show this summer. “The U.S. Marine Corps is looking forward to demonstrating the capabilities of the F-35B Lightning II in the skies over the…
WASHINGTON: The Pentagon’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation has raised serious concerns about the F-35 program’s ability to safely and effectively build and test the enormous amount of software used by both the F-35 aircraft and the maintenance and logistics system known as ALIS to keep the planes flying. In a previously unreported Dec.…
WASHINGTON: The new Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC) has completed two of its nine scenarios and is helping the US military and its Intelligence Community learn how to monitor and fight using space, the head of Strategic Command, Adm Cecil Haney, said today. “While we still have a ways to go — I repeat, a…
WASHINGTON: The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called today for an international debate about the use of intelligent weapons and of boosted human beings. “Where do we want to cross that line, and who crosses that first?” asked Gen. Paul Selva — considered one of the brainier occupants of an office that…
WASHINGTON: The men who urgently want to be commander in chief of the United States military offered a glum vision of the state of the armed services last night. Jeb Bush: In this administration, every weapon system has been gutted, in this administration, the force levels are going down to a level where we can’t…
WASHINGTON: The most challenging national security problem for the Obama administration may be one of its own creation: the micromanagement of the Pentagon and Intelligence Community by a bloated and lackluster National Security Council. This is one of those stories I’ve talked with dozens of people about for months. Every single person with whom I’ve spoken…
UPDATED: SecDef Says Crew Got Lost WASHINGTON: Iran violated international law by seizing two disabled US Navy vessels adrift in Iranian waters, according to the powerful chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the Iranians provided assurances that the sailors were being afforded “the care [and] the proper courtesy that you’d…
