Today, the Defense Department announced that MALD-X (Miniature Air-Launched Decoy) successfully completed a “a complex free flight demonstration of advanced electronic warfare techniques.”
By Colin ClarkAccurate sensors are critical for armor units under fire
Maneuver formations face multifaceted threats that include kinetic force-on-force and non-kinetic effects such as electronic warfare.
While officials as senior as Chief of Staff Mark Milley have previously talked about Army hypersonics in general terms, today’s statements by both the Army’s Russell and OSD’s Miller were unequivocal: The Army wants a ground-launched hypersonic weapon.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Flying out past the first island chain, China’s air force is undergoing “the most comprehensive restructure in its history to become a force capable of conducting complex joint operations,” according to a new Pentagon report.
By Colin Clark
Manned air and ground forces would work together and protect each other along the front line, while relatively expendable drones and missiles go deep into enemy airspace.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
“Those will be debates we’ll have over the next couple of years, and those are some tough choices,” intelligence official Kevin Sherman told me. “Do we reduce some of those capabilities have been very helpful in the CT (counter-terrorism) fight, that a lot of our combatant commands have relied on, in order to buy more exquisite things?”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: Senate appropriators want to give the Army $75.4 million to kick-start its new scout aircraft, but key authorizers told us they are skeptical. (House appropriators are so far silent). The crucial questions: Can a manned, low-altitude, lightweight aircraft survive against the Russian threat? And can the Army afford the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA)…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
China’s increasingly aggressive rise puts the Pacific theater in play in a way it hasn’t been since 1945. In this essay, Singaporean scholar Ben Ho Wan Beng and retired US Marine Gary Lehmann look at what a critical but overlooked World War II battle has to tell us about the potential strengths — and weaknesses — of the Marine Corps’s new concept for waging the next Pacific war. — the editors
By Ben Ho Wan Beng and Gary Lehmann
Advances in radar are key to countering the modern drone warfare and missile threat
Drones, high-speed cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles attacking together from 360° creates complexity only certain radars can handle.
The initial contract announced today was just $198 million for the first 30 vehicles, to be delivered by next fall, but Marines want to replace approximately 870 existing AAVs with better-protected, more mobile ACVs “as rapidly as we can,” which will take into “the mid to late ’20s.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: The Senate Armed Services Committee has proposed the most sweeping reevaluation of the military in 30 years, with tough questions for all four armed services but especially the Marine Corps. While its provisions cover topics ranging from swarming robots to “construction and maintenance of public works in Cis-Lunar Space,” its overwhelming focus is reorienting…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The Army is modernizing three artillery systems: 155 cannon, the cheapest option, for the close fight against the enemy’s frontline forces; guided rockets for the deep fight against enemy reinforcements and supply lines; and missiles, the most expensive munitions, for very deep or even strategic strikes against targets in the enemy rear and homeland.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
All this technology serves a new concept of operations for defeating dense advanced air defenses of the kind Russia and China are both building for themselves and selling abroad.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
The National Defense Strategy does a service by getting the diagnosis right. But that is only the first step. To get the right prescription—the defense program—we will have to develop the operational concepts that link the ends sought with the means we can procure to achieve them.
By Andrew Krepinevich
SAN DIEGO: Why does the Marine Corps Commandant want the Navy to build more attack boats? “As a naval force, part of a maritime campaign, we need more attack submarines,” Gen. Robert Neller said at the AFCEA-USNI WEST conference. Why? “I want to get where I’m going,” Neller said to laughter from the audience. “A bunch…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: “When I was an ensign, a lieutenant, we knew we could beat the Russians. It was just a question of time because we were better than them,” NATO’s top admiral said. “I’m not sure we could make that assumption now.” The European allies suffer many shortfalls at sea, said Vice Adm. Clive Johnstone, the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
