What will the next war look like? Robots, lasers, hypersonic missiles, and stealth aircraft figure prominently, but what matters most isn’t the technology: It’s the concepts of operation that bring them all together — just as the German blitzkrieg combined tanks, aircraft, and the radio, or the Japanese at Pearl Harbor combined aircraft and ships.…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.How DISA’s new Indo-Pacific network meets the Great Power threat
Lumen is not just replacing aged transport pipes for the DoD, it is transitioning and transforming network capabilities for better speed, latency, availability, affordability, and security.
WASHINGTON: Funding for a new space command center will nearly triple if Congress approves the Pentagon’s mid-year reprogramming request. Propelled by personal interest from both Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and his deputy, Bob Work, the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC) began this year with just $16 million in 2016 funding. The reprogramming request…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
PENTAGON: Less than two months after Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited the highly classified Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC), the head of Strategic Command’s space command unit has taken over the war games at Schriever Air Force Base. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told me in an interview that Lt. Gen.David Buck, JFCC-Space, was…
By Colin Clark WASHINGTON: Air Force Space Command has created a blueprint for fighting and winning wars in space, known by the innocuous title of the Space Enterprise Vision. The existence of the plan is not classified but many of its working elements are. The SEV is “an all-encompassing look at all the things we need to do to create…
By Colin Clark
COLORADO SPRINGS: The work being done at the high-profile Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC) includes live experiments with satellites, in addition to the wargaming that all assumed has been taking place, Deputy Defense Bob Work says. “There are satellites up there, as you know, that don’t have a lot of useful life left,” Work replied when I asked what he…
By Colin Clark CAPITOL HILL: The experiments underway by the Air Force, the National Reconnaissance Office and the rest of the space-centric Intelligence Community under the auspices of the Joint Interagency Combined Space Operations Center (JICSPOC) are clearly demonstrating how much space warriors need to change the way they do business. That was the unspoken but logical conclusion of…
By Colin Clark
Take lessons learned from joint exercises and turn them into capabilities
The real advantage comes when legacy, new, next generation and cutting-edge systems can work together in the battlespace.
WASHINGTON: The senior leadership of the US military knows that genetically modified humans — stronger, faster, or better at altitude — and intelligent machines that could kill without remorse and with enormous efficiency, are two of the thorniest policy nettles they must grasp. Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work firmly grasped that nettle today, saying the United…
By Colin Clark
AFA WINTER: The third experiment in how the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon should fight together in space gets underway next week, says Gen. John Hyten, head of Space Command, A fourth will be held in May. After the first two tests — all details of which are classified — one lesson has become absolutely clear, Hyten made…
By Colin Clark
The core task of the men and women who buy America’s weapons is to envision the adversaries and environments of tomorrow and buy forces that are up to the challenge. This involves generating a similar set of assumptions to those used by operational strategists. Today, three assumptions underpin U.S. acquisition strategy that will leave tomorrow’s forces…
By Steve Callicutt and Josh Wiitala