Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. has written for Breaking Defense since 2011 and served as deputy editor for the site's first decade, covering technology, strategy, and policy with a particular focus on the US Army. He’s now a contributing editor focused on cyber, robotics, AI, and other critical technologies and policies that will shape the future of warfare. Sydney began covering defense at National Journal magazine in 1997 and holds degrees from Harvard, Cambridge, and Georgetown.
For Maj. Gen. Cedric Wins, when the organization he’s led for 31 months changed its name, its mission, and the four-star headquarters it works for, it finally found the answer to a question it – and the entire Army – have been struggling with for at least 16 years.
“Autonomy may look like an Achilles’ heel, and in a lot of ways it is” – but for both sides, DTRA's Nick Wager said. “I think that’s as much opportunity as that is vulnerability. We are good at this… and we can be better than the threat.”
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.
“You’re not looking at my mission needs,” Brig. Gen. Crall told an audience of contractors. “If ‘there’s an app for that,’ does the app work when you’re disconnected?” Crall asked. “Does the app work when you haven’t had food for three days and you’ve been cut off?”
Every Breaking Defense reader has a good idea how huge the US military’s modernization backlog is. But it sometimes takes a deep dive to show how big the problem is. In a new study by the Center for Strategic & International Studies — embedded below — scholars Gabriel Coll, Andrew Hunter, and Robert Karlen look […]
Having wasted tens of billions and almost 30 years since the end of the Cold War, the Army is out of time. But after decades of incremental improvements, its existing weapons — including the UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter that GE’s new engine will upgrade – are overweight, underpowered, and running out of room to grow. Meanwhile, the Army’s attempts at a high-tech great leap forward kept getting cancelled as unaffordable, unfeasible, or both.
The Pentagon has almost completed a study of how to shoot down hypersonic missiles. It's also developing new offensive weapons -- conventional, not nuclear -- whose deployment will become legal with the end of the INF Treaty.
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
“Now that they've completed the initial ground run, the team can finish its work to clear the aircraft for first flight,” said Mike Hirschberg, executive director of the Vertical Flight Society. “Assuming the Defiant team doesn't find anything noteworthy from its ground testing, it should be up in the air in the next few weeks.”
"Ultimately that is what this is all about, why I get up every morning, that’s why AFC exists: to make sure, not today’s soldier, but our kids and our grandkids have the core concepts, the organizational structures, and the capabilities they need to fight and win on a future battlefield," Gen. Murray said, "or even better yet not to fight at all, because there is nobody in the world in the future that would ever take on the United States in ground combat, because we have done our job so well."
This year promises to be a year of big changes in how the Defense Department does Cyber -- and leaders are warning staffers that it's not going to be business as usual.
Shanahan spent much of his first formal (albeit off-camera) Pentagon pressroom briefing as SecDef emphasizing continuity with his ousted predecessor, Gen. Jim Mattis. He made a point of praising Mattis’s National Defense Strategy, America’s allies, and even the press – not exactly favorites of President Donald Trump.
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
Three major lines of effort will converge circa 2024, when a new breed of troops will man new kinds of combat units equipped with new technologies: talent & training, concepts & units, and money & modernization.
"Our new approach is really to prototype as much as we can to help us identify requirements, so our reach doesn’t exceed our grasp," Secretary Esper said. “A good example is Future Vertical Lift: The prototyping has been exceptional."
A new Army unit will hack and jam enemy networks and provide targeting data for both long-range missiles and missile defense.
Building physical things is not SAIC’s, well, thing. But physically building stuff has become less important and less profitable than integrating all the complex high-tech components and making sure they work together.