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: Army planners are thrashing out how many electronic warfare specialists the service needs, not just to rebuild radio-jamming and spoofing capability in combat units, but to create a training cadre that can sustain the EW corps for the long-term. Whether this plan for robust growth — certainly hundreds of soldiers, possibly over a thousand […]
"NATO is clear that we will not perform offensive cyberspace operations," said Maj. Gen. Wolfgang Renner. "However, we will integrate sovereign cyberspace effects from the allies who are willing to volunteer."
Do more with less: streamline workflows, reduce duplication, invest upfront to save long-term.
Until cyber operators can both train realistically and see the their digital battlespace as clearly as traditional commanders see physical battlespace, they'll be hard-pressed to defend everyone else's systems.
An adversary who has access to the dataset your AI trained on can figure out what its likely blind spots are, said Brian Sadler, a senior scientist at the Army Research Laboratory: "If I know your data, I can create ways to fake out your system."
“Long-range precision fires… would provide us the capability (to) either, for example, support the Air Force by suppressing enemy air defenses at hundreds upon hundreds of miles or support the Navy by engaging enemy surface ships at great distances as well,” said Army Secretary Mark Esper. But those examples are two distinctly different missions, each most relevant to a different theater of war.
The defense budget may be caught between doves on the left and budget hawks on the right, but so far Army Secretary Mark Esper isn't ceding any ground.
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.
INF proponents emphasize the risk of nuclear weapons. But, despite its name, the treaty bans a wide range of conventional weapons as well -- and it's non-nuclear, precision-guided missiles that have changed how war is actually waged.
After a generation of guerrilla warfare, the Army is issuing new, lighter body armor that can be tailored for a wider range of missions, from plainclothes advisor roles to high-intensity combat. It’s part of a new push to improve infantry equipment, from rifle calibers to targeting optics to augmented reality training, coming from the Secretary […]
The goal is to give the 6,200-strong Cyber Mission Force a common, compatible set of tools so they can act in cyberspace as a coordinated military unit.
“We haven’t deployed anyone, just to be clear,” Edwin Wilson said. “We’ll have a traditional prepare-to-deploy order, (and) the members and teams are on recall ready to go within hours.”
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
"We also had a non-pilot with all of 45 minutes of training take the aircraft up and operate for almost an hour," said Sikorsky's autonomy director, Igor Cherepinsky.
"One of the things that we did early in my tenure was we changed (it to) Polar Security Cutter as we were trying to get the funds from the Congress, from our own department, the administration," Coast Guard Commandant Karl Schultz told Breaking Defense.
ARLINGTON: To cut $33 billion from the 2020 budget – as President Trump has ordered – and still compete against Russia and China, the Pentagon’s political and joint leadership must take a firmer hand with the four armed services, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs said this afternoon. [Read how a Tea Party congressman turned […]
This kind of effort to get fighter-jock technology to ordinary grunts -- who do most of the fighting and dying -- has enjoyed some high-profile attention in the last 12 months. The efforts cover everything from developing a new, more powerful longer-range rifle to buying off-the-shelf quadcopters, from adding VR training simulations to eliminating tedious safety lectures.