One of our primary goals here at Breaking Defense is to try and avoid the madness of the daily news cycle and tell our readers what is really happening, as best as any human can tell at any time. The following explanation by two experienced defense budget experts of what really happened to $28 billion discussed in a […]
Chief of Staff Mark Milley declared air and missile defense the Army's No. 5 priority -- one of the Big Six which the service is pushing to accelerate, if necessary at the expense of everything else in their budget.
Six companies have already signed up for a new flight-test program to mature their autonomy software.
The Trump Administration managed to avoid starting wars or crippling NATO in fiscal year 2018, writes CSIS scholar Kathleen Hicks in this op-ed, but as we stagger into 2019, the fates of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, his National Defense Strategy, and the Pentagon budget remain alarmingly uncertain. We continue our partnership with DC’s leading defense […]
The Navy is moving ahead with its Ohio replacement submarines, and is using a little-noticed budgetary gimmick to pay for some of it.
Pentagon planners aren't only worried about North Korean ICBMs, but Chinese hypersonics and medium-range missiles. That means, according to analysts, that an array of distributed systems are needed to meet a wide range of potential threats.
The Navy is going wobbly on its 355 ship fleet, but Capitol Hill doesn't want to hear it.
The U.S. Army’s MAPS Gen II program of record for assured PNT provides an authoritative and reliable source of truth for combat vehicles in a highly contested battlespace.
Adm. Zukunft says he doesn’t want to return to the old culture of “martyrdom” when the service prided itself on doing more with less even as it ran its equipment and people into the ground.
With the Pentagon and White House increasingly worried about ballistic missile threats from "rogue" states and peer competitors, the Polish site is increasingly critical.
Wait — doesn’t this omnibus fund 14 new ships for the Navy, compared to 13 in the National Defense Authorization Act and just eight in President Trump’s request? Yes, but not all ships are created equal, Wittman said.
Legislators will probably loosen some rules on federal spending to help the Pentagon cope with Congress's failure to pass funding bills until six months into the fiscal year. Budget dysfunction has gotten so bad it's forcing even the famously strict appropriations committees to loosen the reins after years of resistance.
As aircraft shrink, threats expand, and technology accelerates, aircraft engines must iterate along with the threats.
Mark Cancian, a member of the Breaking Defense Board of Contributors, knows budgets. He used to help build the defense budget at the Office of Management and Budget, the largely unheralded center of federal fiscal power. So when he picks apart the budget deal Congress recently approved (or any other one) you should pay attention. He’s doing […]
AFA ORLANDO: Air Force Special Operations Command doesn’t speak much in public, for obvious reasons. The commander pretty much appears once a year here to speak with reporters, and for the last three years, mounting lasers on AC-130 gunships has been a top topic. The former AFSOC commander, Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, first announced the […]
UPDATED: Adds SecArmy Esper Roundtable PENTAGON: The figures aren’t final, but the Army hopes to get about $6.8 billion in additional funding for fiscal year 2018 thanks to the recently concluded budget deal, Army Secretary Mark Esper said this morning. The service’s new plan would start delivering a Next Generation Squad Weapon to the infantry […]
The Air Force placed a $2.4 billion placeholder in the 2019 budget to buy Light Attack Aircraft over the next five years, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters this morning.