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.
cclark@breakingmedia.com
UPDATED: Through End of Today’s Hearing. CAPITOL HILL: Secretary of State John Kerry, taking the lead in arguing the administration’s case for limited strikes against Syria for killing more than 1,400 civilians with chemical weapons, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Iran and North Korea are watching what we do. Kerry told the committee…
UPDATES WITH OBAMA WHITE HOUSE COMMENTS, HASC REACT TO KERRY REMARKS WASHINGTON: One hour before House Armed Services Committee members were to receive a White House briefing on last week’s Syrian massacre of more than 1,400 civilians, the White House released an unclassified summary of intelligence about the attack concluding with “high confidence” that…
USS WASP: The Marines and Navy have spent most of the last three weeks putting the new F-35B through its paces here, executing more than 90 short takeoffs and vertical landings, including 19 at night. More than 1,200 Marine test pilots, engineers, experts from the Joint Program Office running the program and Navy and…
WASHINGTON: Not much to add to today’s release about the sixth batch of F135 engines powering the Joint Strike Fighter. The deal is worth over $1 billion but we don’t have a precise figure yet or costs per engine. Here’s the nub: “in general, the unit prices for the 32 common configuration engines which are used…
WASHINGTON: In the next few weeks an unlikely government agency known more for weather than regulating satellites, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), may decide the international future of America’s commercial satellite imagery industry, dominated now by DigitalGlobe. NOAA licenses American commercial remote sensing satellites, which includes DigitalGlobe’s five satellites currently in orbit. One…
WASHINGTON: Imagine: tiny sensors built into military combat gear to detect chemical or biological weapons; unseen sensors peppered throughout a submarine to detect radiation leaks or chemical contamination of the crew’s precious air; a cellphone — think Star Trek tricorder, flip it open, open the app and bingo! — able to detect the gas of…
PENTAGON: During the 10 days of testing aboard the USS Wasp, the Marines will fly the F-35B carrying air-to-air and air-to-ground weapons to mimic combat conditions. But they won’t be blowing anything up because they will carry inert warheads. The Marines also will be exploring how they can expand the “vertical envelope” around the ship…
PENTAGON: By combing through the assumptions — some of them deeply questionable — undergirding the Defense Department’s official cost estimates for the F-35B and refining them, the Marines say the plane should cost 16.6 percent less per flight hour than the current estimate. Since the F-35B is the most expensive plane to operate, lowering these…
PENTAGON: The kabuki of high-level international press conferences often successfully softens the sharp divisions that may lurk beneath the surface of the relationship between two countries. When those countries are a burgeoning China and a wary United States it’s almost impossible to hide all the differences and so it was at today’s press conference featuring…
UPDATED: NGA RESPONDS WASHINGTON: It’s not a lot of money in the Pentagon’s scheme of things, but the Defense Department’s Inspector General has found that the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) wasted millions because it did not close a rented building and made improvements to a building when it was supposed to leave the facility.…
AUVSI: Imagine a featherweight aircraft built of composites boasting an enormous 160 foot wing, swathed in solar cells that can take off at 20 mph and remain aloft for five years. Yes, five years. The plane would fly at 65,000 feet, above most air traffic aside from the odd U-2 zooming past. It would, without…
AUVSI: The Navy’s experimental carrier stealth drone, the X-47B, would have made a third landing on the USS George H.W. Bush last month but for the fact the plane knew it was doing a test and decided to waive itself off, Adm. Mathias Winter said here this morning. Think about that. This is a plane…
AUVSI: The Navy has halted work on what had seemed the Pentagon’s most promising system to help drones sense and avoid other aircraft. The system, built by ITT Exelis, is “behind schedule” and the Navy has “made a decision to pause on the capability right now,” Navy Capt. Jim Hoke, program manager for the Triton…
PENTAGON: The F-35’s highly-touted system designed to monitor and predict maintenance needs known as ALIS (pronounced alice) faces “really challenging issues” in the military’s biggest conventional arms program ever. The Autonomic Logistics Information System is not really capable of sharing data from the airplane yet — as is the goal. Also, the hardware required to…
High-performance systems generate tremendous amounts of heat that can compromise missions and make high-tech systems less effective in tactical environments. But there is a solution to this modern-age challenge.
High-performance systems generate tremendous amounts of heat that can compromise missions and make high-tech systems less effective in tactical environments. But there is a solution to this modern-age challenge.
