PENTAGON: Consider 35 pounds of metal moving at Mach 5.8. Ten shots per minute. 1,000 shots before the barrel wears out under the enormous pressures. That’s the devastating firepower the Navy railgun program aims to deliver in the next two years, and they’re well on their way. “We continue to make great technical progress,” said […]
WASHINGTON: Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s decision to curtail the controversial Littoral Combat Ship program may not be the last word, according to several well informed sources. Those sources independently told Breaking Defense that the Office of the Secretary of Defense is divided over the decision cut LCS from 52 ships to 40. So is the Navy, which has had pro- […]
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
[UPDATED with Rep. Forbes & Robert Martinage comments] WASHINGTON: Presence? What’s “presence”?” Once a primary measure of naval power and a driving factor in shipbuilding decisions, the word “presence” appears not once in the new Chief of Naval Operations’ strategic vision, out today. Instead, Adm. John Richardson‘s eight-page “Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority” mentions “war,” […]
CAPITOL HILL: The new Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. John Richardson, previewed a Navy “design for maintaining maritime superiority” this morning. The service will roll it out in January, just before the 2017 budget. While Richardson seems a bit more guarded than his predecessor in his public comments — at least, so far — he did tease […]
Tight budgets have a way of encouraging critical thinking and forcing a willingness to make painful but well-grounded tradeoffs. The Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, and the Army Chief of Staff, General Raymond Odierno, wrote a November letter about the weaknesses of our current missile defense approach to then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. This letter, recently leaked […]
WASHINGTON: The cruiser war continues. With House seapower subcommittee chairman Randy Forbes declaring the Navy has “no credibility” when they promise to modernize aging Ticonderoga-class cruisers, House Republicans and Navy leaders are accelerating towards a public collision. Last week, Forbes rolled out legislation requiring the Navy to modernize the cruisers twice as fast as planned, […]
The GPS network continues to prove its unmatched reliability, and it’s only getting stronger.
CAPITOL HILL: By 38 votes to 24, the House Armed Services Committee shot down a proposal to slow down its cruiser modernization plan. Offered by the top Democrat on the seapower subcommittee, Rep. Joe Courtney, the amendment stemmed from a request by the Chief of Naval Operations. In a letter sent to Congress yesterday, Adm. […]
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD: Amidst unabated budget gloom, Navy and Marine leaders aren’t looking for salvation in big new programs. They’re “repurposing and reusing existing capabilities” to get the maximum out of existing hardware for minimum cost. It’s a vision of the future in which a junior Marine Corps officer might call for fire support from a […]
Phil Coyle knows missile defense. He was director of Operational Test and Evaluation from 1994 through January 2001, during the darkest days of THAAD and when missile defense was a religious issue for both Republicans and Democrats. Thank goodness we had Coyle around to actually bring facts to the roiling debate then. Does Coyle think […]
[UPDATED with comments from Rep. Randy Forbes, Cdr. Bryan Clark, & anonymous admiral] WASHINGTON: We must win the war of electrons in a more dangerous world. That’s the stark imperative behind the bland title of the new maritime strategy released today by the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. “There is an offensive warfighting tone […]
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
PENTAGON: The F-35‘s highly sensitive sensors suffer a basic problem right now: They often aren’t sure what they are detecting. That results in a high rate of false alarms. The key to fixing this lies in building highly complex data files — what we can colloquially call the threat library — and integrating them with the Joint Strike […]
CAPITOL HILL: Pentagon leaders are pushing hard to keep up the momentum of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Many in the Navy, though, still look longingly back at the Boeing-built F-18 Hornet, whose St. Louis production line faces closure in 2017. There are two independent trends that together could save the St. Louis line and the Navy’s favorite plane. The first […]
CAPITOL HILL: The Pentagon has launched a wide-ranging study of electronic warfare, looking across the services at major platforms such as the EA-18G Growler and the F-35’s three versions. “We are doing right now in the Department of Defense a study that looks at all electronic attack[:] what is the situation in electromagnetic warfare across […]
WASHINGTON: What began with a tiny artificial island built by China to stake a concrete claim in the South China Sea is fast on its way to becoming 600 acres of at least seven islands spread across the South China Sea. One of the most impressive is so-called Fiery Cross Island, the permanent structure above complete with […]