“Now that they’ve completed the initial ground run, the team can finish its work to clear the aircraft for first flight,” said Mike Hirschberg, executive director of the Vertical Flight Society. “Assuming the Defiant team doesn’t find anything noteworthy from its ground testing, it should be up in the air in the next few weeks.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.“Ultimately that is what this is all about, why I get up every morning, that’s why AFC exists: to make sure, not today’s soldier, but our kids and our grandkids have the core concepts, the organizational structures, and the capabilities they need to fight and win on a future battlefield,” Gen. Murray said, “or even better yet not to fight at all, because there is nobody in the world in the future that would ever take on the United States in ground combat, because we have done our job so well.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Three major lines of effort will converge circa 2024, when a new breed of troops will man new kinds of combat units equipped with new technologies: talent & training, concepts & units, and money & modernization.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.“Our new approach is really to prototype as much as we can to help us identify requirements, so our reach doesn’t exceed our grasp,” Secretary Esper said. “A good example is Future Vertical Lift: The prototyping has been exceptional.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.A new Army unit will hack and jam enemy networks and provide targeting data for both long-range missiles and missile defense.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. and Colin Clark“The Army has aligned itself with Secretary Mattis’s National Defense Strategy, which we will not walk away from,” Gen. Milley told an Association of the US Army breakfast. “It’s a solid strategy, it’s written in history, it’s written in the blood of generations past, and we subscribe to it.” And allies are key to the strategy.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.“All the services understand the need to move to Multi-Domain Operations,” Lt. Gen. Wesley said. “Second, we all agree that MDC2 [Multi-Domain Command & Control] is the most important joint problem that we have to solve. After that, the specifics of how you conduct MDO – that’s where the variance is that we’ve got to converge on.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.After years of secrecy and CGI, we’re finally getting to see the Sikorsky-Boeing dream team’s SB>1 Defiant ultra-high-speed helicopter in real life. Now they just have to prove it works.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.“We … are looking at opportunities to do a road trip,” Bell executive Keith Flail told me. “Can we take the V-280 to a handful of key Army and Marine Corps installations to show capabilities to the force?”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.While Bell’s rival V-280 uses tiltrotor technology, proven in widespread service on the V-22 Osprey since 2007, the Defiant uses Sikorsky’s revolutionary compound helicopter technology, which promises superior agility — but which has only actually flown in two experimental aircraft, the X2 and S-97 Raider, both of which are much smaller than Defiant.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.“We’ve done concepts for many years and, frankly, the Army hasn’t changed much,” admitted the three-star chief of the Army’s in-house think tank on future war. But on Friday, when the Army officially put its futurists under the same roof as its scientists, engineers, and program managers, the notoriously hidebound service aimed to break down the barrier between thinking about the future force and building it.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.