As the end of the fiscal year approaches at the Department of Defense (DoD), teams at most defense organizations are working hard to spend all the funds in the Pentagon’s day-to-day operating budgets, which are available for use only during the ourrent fiscal year. To do otherwise, they fear, would suggest that not all available funds […]
Those whose lives are bound to the fate of the annual defense policy bill can rest easy for a while, but then must gird their loins for a tough patch right before Christmas, if Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, is right. Smith, a savvy and rational lawmaker, offered no […]
The Sixth Domain is not defined by geography. It’s a new kind of conflict in which autonomy and networked systems allow thousand-dollar consumer electronics to destroy multi-million-dollar conventional weapons systems.
CAPITOL HILL: The Pentagon’s official estimate of $85 billion to replace the Minuteman III ICBM — already 37 percent above the Air Force’s $62 billion figure — is itself a low-end estimate, the head of Cost Assessment & Program Evaluation says. CAPE almost never offers alternative estimates of a program’s cost, said director Jamie Morin, […]
Bell Helicopter confirmed Thursday what the deputy commandant of the Marine Corps, Lt. Gen. Jon “Dog” Davis, told Breaking Defense a month ago. The company is designing a new tiltrotor drone about the size of the Air Force’s armed MQ-9 Reaper, with similar capabilities, that it hopes the Marines will buy. They call it the V-247 […]
NATIONAL HARBOR: The Pentagon’s biggest advocate of artificial intelligence just spoke to the Air Force Association for over an hour — and he didn’t mention drones. When Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work talks about autonomy, he’s much less interested in killer robots than in command and control. The Air Force led the way on […]
NATIONAL HARBOR: The increasingly “adversarial” relationships with Russia and China are forcing the Pentagon to classify its previously public National Military Strategy, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says. Classification will allow bolder and more specific discussions of how to manage those relationships and our responses to them, Gen. Joe Dunford told the annual […]
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
NATIONAL HARBOR: A fix has been identified for the 15 F-35As currently banned from flying and tests on the engineering will begin next week, said Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan. The head of the Joint Program Office told the Air Force Association conference here that the F-35s should have their fuel tank insulation problems fixed by the […]
AFA: The Air Force wants artificial intelligence to track and react to cyber and electronic threats, to update countermeasures against enemy hackers, radars, and missiles faster than human minds can manage. But first you have to fix the basics. Today, the Department Of Defense Information Network (DODIN) is really not a single network, but a […]
AFA: For the foreseeable future, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told me today, when push comes to shove, personnel funding should win and modernization must wait. “If you’re asking me if I have to choose between the two, then I vote for people,” she said. “I’m going to protect people.” Of course, the Air […]
CORRECTED: Attribution of Air Force Buying New Advanced Fighter NATIONAL HARBOR: The Air Force’s new bomber, the B-21 Raider, should come in almost $40 million below the official $550 million a copy official estimate, says Randall Walden, director of the Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office. So, $511 million is the new $550 million. After his […]
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
NATIONAL HARBOR: Russia could hinder US reinforcements headed to Europe in the event of a major war, warned the recently retired Supreme Allied Commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove. It’s well known Russian radars, missiles, and strike planes — “Anti-Access/Area Denial” systems — threaten ships and aircraft across wide swathes of the Black Sea, Eastern Europe, and […]
Critics say the Army could end up wasting billions by developing a better engine for its Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk and Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopters even as the joint Future Vertical Lift (FVL) initiative gets underway to replace those aircraft. The critics are wrong, program officials assure us. But the critics still disagree. A new Army […]
The US Air Force and Norway announced the temporary suspension of flight operations for 15 F-35As today because of “peeling and crumbling insulation in avionics cooling lines inside the fuel tanks.” The problem, caused by a supplier, was discovered during depot modification of an F-35A and affects a total of 57 aircraft, 42 of them still on the […]
WASHINGTON: At least three shipyards that do work for the US Navy have bought and used drydocks from China. This would seem to lower the stakes for Huntington-Ingalls Industries, currently searching for a Chinese drydock of its own with help from homestate Senator Thad Cochran, as reported yesterday in the Washington Post. BAE Systems’ San Diego yard […]