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.
The head of Strategic Command must be very happy this evening, having learned that the Air Force is finally buying a new helicopter to guard America's ICBM fields. The Boeing-Leonardo team won the contract to supply 84 helicopters.
NAVAL STATION NORFOLK: The largest ship in British naval history, the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, can move four F-35Bs on her two huge elevators up to her decks in just a few minutes, allowing the ship to put its most potent strike assets into the air in minutes. The entire ship is laced with fiber-optic […]
The GPS network continues to prove its unmatched reliability, and it’s only getting stronger.
So reporters kept pressing Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Chief of Staff David Goldfein for answers to the reasonable question: How will the Air Force afford 74 more squadrons with all the people, planes, satellites, and infrastructure needed to make them useful?
The scope of the Space Force appears to be growing, with a new Air Force memo spelling out all of the offices that will fall under the proposed new command.
It won't be cheap. Todd Harrison, defense budget guru at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tweeted that the larger service could cost an additional $13 billion per year.
WASHINGTON: After a small group of forlorn men huddled in the middle of Afghanistan succeeded in their plan to strike the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, America declared a global war against them. That war has sucked almost $3 trillion dollars from the US, according to a study by the respected Stimson Center […]
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
ABOARD THE USS ABRAHAM LINCOLN: The Navy dragged its feet for years after committing to buy the F-35C for carrier operations. They worried it would be too expensive to maintain. They worried the tailhook problems would persist. They worried it was too heavy. Let’s face it: the Navy leadership was just worried. After all, they […]
There's no timeline, no cost estimate, and no certainty Trump's proposed Space Force will even happen. Even the interim step of creating a Space Command is being dialed down, a significant policy shift.
Today, the Defense Department announced that MALD-X (Miniature Air-Launched Decoy) successfully completed a “a complex free flight demonstration of advanced electronic warfare techniques.”
Flying out past the first island chain, China's air force is undergoing "the most comprehensive restructure in its history to become a force capable of conducting complex joint operations," according to a new Pentagon report.
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
WASHINGTON: If Chinese and Russian spies have been doing their jobs well, they might well have been able to compromise some of America’s most important satellites, including the missile launch detection birds known as SBIRS. A report out today from the Pentagon’s Inspector General says that Air Force Space Command’s failure to safeguard its supply chain […]
A year after running a war game across multiple domains, the defense giant's planners are at it again -- with a new plan, and new tech.
“All of the fundamental research in hypersonic aerodynamics is United States (work)," said Pentagon R&D chief Mike Griffin. "We did not choose to weaponize the results of that research. Our adversaries have chosen to weaponize it. That’s the challenge. We will respond."
The "separate but equal" sixth service (don't forget the Coast Guard) will be created in stages, because, as Pence finally admitted publicly, it "requires Congressional action." And, as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, admitted today, if Congress passed the relevant laws in a year that would "unprecedented."