Theresa Hitchens is the Senior reporter, Space at Breaking Defense. The former Defense News editor was a senior research associate at the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM). Before that, she spent six years in Geneva, Switzerland as director of the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).
A sci-fi geek, voracious reader, enthusiastic cook, dabbler in poetry, Theresa is also the proud mom of a wonderful young man by the name of Nicholas.
Brig. Gen. John Olson said that for JADC2 to work, "artificial intelligence and machine learning are absolutely essential enablers to make us able to react, and respond, and again, make sense of the information, then act upon it."
"Calling it 'breaking the laws of physics' does not lead to rational scrutiny," Secure World's Victoria Samson said of the recent Chinese hypersonic test.
Cyber resilience has become a frontline mission for the US military. Breaking Defense’s new eBook rounds up key reporting from the 2025 Alamo ACE conference with the latest developments in cyber offense and defense.
Under the agreement with ICEYE, the Army will look especially hard at the ability to significantly cut the time it takes to relay ISR data from a satellite to shooters on the ground.
The GPI is being developed to knock down hypersonic missiles as they glide through the Earth's upper atmosphere at about 70 kilometers in altitude at speeds greater than Mach 5.
"The key to success is frank and open discussion ... tearing down those information sharing barriers, to be sure that we're truly interoperable," said Australian Air Commodore Nicholas Hogan.
Despite investments of nearly $200 billion in commercial space since 2012, the US will lose what the authors paint as a vital race with China without more strategic vision, study sponsored by DoD's Defense Innovation Unit says.
Onshoring and investment in military-specific semiconductors anchor a cornerstone of the defense industrial base.
You can imagine a reusable system that can fly around and drop payloads and come back, or a hypersonic system that can carry other hypersonic systems," said Gillian Bussey, head of DoD's Joint Hypersonics Transition Office.
While Russia's Defense Minister has claimed that debris from the ASAT test doesn't endanger the US and Russian crew on the ISS, the laws of physics beg to differ.
Consensus is forming that the most likely cause of the breakup was a strike by a A-235 / PL-19 Nudol ASAT system
It remains to be seen if the creation of a new Joint Force Space Component Command will help or hurt the chain of command for military space.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
What happens after the HBTSS prototype demonstrations, however, is yet to be determined, according to MDA and industry officials.
"Air and missile defense, long-range precision fires, assured position navigation and timing — all of these rely on space-enabled capabilities and access to space," said Tom Webber, director of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command Technical Center.
Optical intersatellite links, or OISLs, use lasers to zip data between satellites on orbit — a technology that is both the central node and the biggest challenge in SDA's effort to build a multi-layered National Defense Space Architecture.
"Viasat has been undergoing an existential crisis as it competes with SpaceX for the satcom market," one industry source said.