Richard Whittle, author of Predator: The Secret Origins of The Drone Revolution and The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey, is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and 2013-14 Alfred V. Verville Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Rick covered the Pentagon and other Washington beats for The Dallas Morning News for 22 years. Earlier in his career, he covered defense and foreign policy for Congressional Quarterly magazine and was an editor at National Public Radio. - See more at: http://richardwhittle.net/#sthash.IKrEdck6.dpuf
VIRGINIA BEACH, VA.: You’re the Army and you really, really want a new, more powerful and efficient engine for most of your helicopter fleet. It’s really urgent. But you’re not going to get those engines for your UH-60 Black Hawk and AH-64 Apache helicopters for at least another 11 years. What’s the reason? Good old […]
VIRGINIA BEACH, VA.: The new presidential helicopter made its first flight in December, the Marine Corps colonel in charge of the program revealed this morning. That was only seven months after contract award, a stark contrast to the multi-year delays that killed the previous program, the VH-71. But don’t get too excited. No miracles are […]
A decorated combat aviator and biotech CEO advocates preparing for novel viral threats before the next crisis.
ROSSLYN, VA: Surprise! The pilots who run the Air Force don’t share Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’s view of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which Mabus two weeks ago said “should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.” “I would disagree […]
BALLSTON, VA: A soufflé is fluffy but a SOFLE – a brand new military acronym that stands for Special Operations Forces Liaison Element — is sinewy and powerful. Just ask Marine Lt. Col. Andrew Christian, who led the first such unit for the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit during a seven month deployment to the Pacific […]
Still in his first year as leader of Air Force Special Operations Command, Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold has lots of plans, but they no longer include replacing AFSOC’s U-28A manned surveillance aircraft with MC-12W Liberty spy planes. “There was discussion about moving to the Liberty birds,” Heithold told an audience at the Air Force Association […]
ARLINGTON: And then there were five. There were already going to be four different aircraft in the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) family, from light to medium to heavy to “ultra.” Now it’s almost certain that the medium FVL will be split into two separate versions: a smaller attack/reconnaissance aircraft and a larger troop-carrying assault craft. […]
Threats have changed the range, seeking and attack capabilities necessary to ensure effectiveness.
ARLINGTON: Across-the-board budget cuts have already forced the Army to “mortgage our near- and mid-term modernization,” the service’s vice chief of staff warned this morning. If the mandatory spending cuts known as sequestration occur in 2016 they could “push our volunteer force to the breaking point” by undermining trust between leaders and led. “We face a very real […]
The drone revolution, it appears, came along just in time for the Army. The service’s leaders have decided they can afford neither a new armed scout helicopter nor even the old ones they already own, but there’s always MUM-T — aka Manned Unmanned Teaming, in which manned aircraft work with unmanned aerial systems (UAS), aka […]
The Navy will buy V-22 Osprey tiltrotors to replace its aging C-2A Greyhound turboprop aircraft in flying carrier on board delivery (COD) missions. Breaking Defense obtained a Jan. 5 memo, signed by Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford. It stipulates that […]
In the 1934 film “It Happened One Night,” fictional slime ball “King” Westley shows off by floating to a landing on the lawn of his fiancée’s daddy’s estate in a newfangled autogiro – an airplane with a rotor to enable short take offs and landings. Today, two Defense Department programs are striving to meet the […]
Architecture that linked sensors, C2, RF effects, and lasers into a distributed c-UAS kill chain.
WASHINGTON: We love being able to say “we told you so,” and today we can. During a 30-minute conference call with reporters Monday, the president of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), Michael Toscano, used the word “drone” four times. Not too long ago, Toscano might have washed his own mouth out with […]
Reports that Israel’s plan to buy a dozen V-22 Osprey tiltrotor troop transports is dead are — as Mark Twain said after reading his own incorrect obituary — greatly exaggerated. A U.S. Letter of Agreement offering a bargain price and early delivery of the first six of 12 Ospreys requested by Israel formally expired on Wednesday amid […]
WASHINGTON: Air Force Tech. Sgt. David Shea sensed no danger as he stood with his .50 caliber machine gun ready at the open ramp of “Rooster 73,” one of three CV-22 Ospreys coming in to land on a small, rutted airstrip in Bor, South Sudan. A crowd of up to 10,000 people milled about a United […]
AUSA: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. and Abraham Karem, inventor of the world-changing Predator drone, should feel praised to the skies. The latest of at least three Predator knockoffs is Turkey’s new Anka, Turkish for phoenix. It’s an unarmed but camera-carrying MALE (Medium Altitude Long Endurance) Unmanned Aerial […]