ARLINGTON: “We have, in my view, exquisite capabilities to kill people,” said Lt. Gen. Charles Cleveland. “We need exquisite capabilities to manipulate them.” Psychological subtlety and the US military don’t always go hand-in-hand. Worldwide, we’ve become better known for drone strikes and Special Operations raids to kill High Value Targets. But that wasn’t enough for the last 13…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.BAE Systems’ LR-PGK: The Superior Anti-Jam Solution
Going the distance to defeat emerging jam threats.
AUSA: A new generation of generals is rising in the Army. It’s a generation forced to get creative by more than a decade of ugly unconventional conflicts. It’s a generation disillusioned by the mistakes of superiors, military and civilian alike. It’s a generation willing to take on the Army’s bureaucratic culture of top-down management, which…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
AUSA HEADQUARTERS: It is time for the tribes to gather. Monday is the opening of the Association of the US Army’s modestly named Annual Meeting. With roughly 30,000 people likely to attend over three days, it is the largest defense conference of the year despite a post-Iraq decline. This mega-event is also a microcosm of…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: “Everybody’s got to change,” Army Gen. David Perkins told me last week. But can the biggest, most bureaucratic, and most fractious service really break a 12-year streak of cancelled multi-billion-dollar programs? It turns out the Army is already taking some important steps. A new doctrine and a long-range planning process instituted two years ago have begun to…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: “Everybody’s got to change.” That’s the message from Army Gen. David Perkins, about everything from concepts to training to weapons programs. “A couple of weeks ago, we had a meeting with the Secretary of the Army and the Chief of Staff,” he said. “They said, ‘look, this is not business as usual.” “Everybody is going to have to…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
High-tech warfare at knife-fight ranges: that’s the ugly future of urban combat. If you thought Baghdad was bad, with its roughly six million people, imagine a “megacity” of 10 or 20 million, where the slums have more inhabitants than some countries. Imagine a city of the very near future where suspicious locals post every US…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Maj. Gen. William Rapp couldn’t have picked a better time get a ticket out of DC. As the Army’s Chief Legislative Liaison, he’s been the embattled service’s point man presenting its 2015 budget on Capitol Hill, where on top of all the usual budget shenanigans, the National Guard Association of the US is raising calculated hell…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
A new approach to speed, scale and efficiency for the industrial base
Radars, EW, EO/IR, space imagery, and microelectronics are brought under one roof for a streamlined approach to common people and factories.
WASHINGTON: In an Army budget outlook that’s otherwise as grim as television tuned to a dead channel, there is one bright spot: cyberspace. “You know, we say that ‘flat is the new growth’ in DoD,” Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld, said at yesterday’s Bloomberg conference. “[Even] special operations forces”…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: There are three things you need to know about the administration’s new budget plan and what it means for the Army. Most importantly, the fact the Army will be its smallest since before World War II is not one of them. In the dystopian mirror universe that is Washington under sequestration, being cut by 40,000…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
[UPDATED 6:30 pm] HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: The ever-beleaguered Army has a reputation — not undeserved — for being bland, conformist, and bureaucratic, an organization where brilliant mavericks are forced to retire at colonel and the guys who make general don’t rock the boat. Just ask any of the long-serving and long-suffering officers convening here in Huntsville, home…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
More robots, fewer people. That’s where the US military is headed in the future. But what kind of robots? Army Gen. Robert Cone, four-star commander of the powerful Training and Doctrine Command (aka TRADOC), said that the service is studying how robots could help replace 25 percent of the soldiers in each of its 4,000-strong combat brigades. That’s because the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: The A-10 Warthog is ugly, tough, lethal, and fairly flexible. Its famous 30mm gun can destroy tanks or other armored vehicles with remarkable efficiency, not to mention enemy troops. Its titanium tub of a cockpit protects the plane’s pilot from most ground fire. Its pilots are trained to fly low and slow and to…
By Colin Clark and Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY: It just might be iPhone time for the world’s most powerful army,. As defense budgets shrink and commercial networks grow, top brass from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno on down are questioning the service’s current plan to keep developing custom-built, military-specific, and extremely expensive communications networks. If groups like al-Qaeda,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
PORTSMOUTH, VA: This is a Navy town, just minutes from the massive Atlantic Fleet base at Norfolk. But when Navy and Marine Corps leaders convened here yesterday for their annual conference on expeditionary warfare, traditionally a Navy-Marine affair, they reached out to the other services in unprecedented ways. Message No. 1: After 12 years of…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
