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.
WASHINGTON: Seeking to stop Russian-made anti-tank missiles, the US Army will buy Israel’s Iron Fist Active Protection System for a brigade of its M2 Bradley armored vehicles, Breaking Defense has learned. The decision comes after weeks of confusing statements by Army officials and months of delays fitting the high-tech active protection on a Cold War-vintage […]
“It’s not going to be just about , ’how do we get a lot of data?’" deputy undersecretary Lisa Porter told the House subcommittee. "It’s going to be about, how do we develop algorithms that don’t need as much data? How do we develop algorithms that we trust?"
Do more with less: streamline workflows, reduce duplication, invest upfront to save long-term.
WASHINGTON: The presumptive House Armed Services chairman, Adam Smith outlined his agenda for reporters this morning in a wide-ranging discussion laced with his trademark tactical snark. While many of his stances were unsurprising — he wants equal treatment for transgender troops, less spending on new nuclear ICBMs, and zero border-wall funding carved out of the […]
While Bell's rival V-280 uses tiltrotor technology, proven in widespread service on the V-22 Osprey since 2007, the Defiant uses Sikorsky's revolutionary compound helicopter technology, which promises superior agility -- but which has only actually flown in two experimental aircraft, the X2 and S-97 Raider, both of which are much smaller than Defiant.
“We’ve done concepts for many years and, frankly, the Army hasn’t changed much,” admitted the three-star chief of the Army’s in-house think tank on future war. But on Friday, when the Army officially put its futurists under the same roof as its scientists, engineers, and program managers, the notoriously hidebound service aimed to break down the barrier between thinking about the future force and building it.
Trump certainly fell in and out of love fast with the last outspoken warrior-intellectual he hired, short-lived National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster.
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
Smart missiles to strike hard targets hundreds of miles away. Wireless links to pull data from stealth fighters and foot soldiers alike. Command posts agile enough to coordinate it all — not only in open war, but in the ambiguous “grey zone” of hacking, proxy warfare, and Twitter trolls. That’s just a few of the […]
There are times and places in the history of war in which improvements in firepower force anyone in range to take cover instead of advancing, as machineguns and howitzers did a century ago on the infamous Western Front. The fundamental difference today is the width of the killing zone would be measured, not in hundreds or thousands of yards, but in hundreds or thousands of miles.
Don't think about the Terminator or Iron Man: Think about Sigourney Weaver's power loader lifting crates in Aliens.
Army soldiers are testing goggles with an image-recognition system that can automatically spot threats like tanks and warn the rest of the squad -- or transmit the target data to a distant missile battery so they can take it out.
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.
DETROIT: The Artificial Intelligence the military needs most is not some kind of killer robot, the Army’s three-star senior futurist told me today. The Army really needs AI to make sense of lots of data, fast, so commanders and quartermasters can send the right forces with the right supplies to the right place on the […]
With Murray's own HQ, Army Futures Command, stood up this August in Austin, the notoriously hidebound Army is making a concerted effort to reach out beyond its comfort zone and embed its officers, scientists, and civil servants in a wider world of civilian innovation, where hoodies are more in vogue than uniforms.
“We have not achieved $2.3 billion in budget growth,” Pentagon EW acquisitions director Bill Conley told me. "We are continuing to add investment (and) we are addressing the most pressing gaps."
The JSDR database won't just keep American communications officers from mistakenly scrambling each others' signals, either. By providing a comprehensive baseline of what friendly transmissions look like, the mega-database will make it easier for Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Electronic Warfare (EW) troops to hone in on enemy transmissions.