WASHINGTON: The Army is creating an experimental combat unit to develop new tactics for lethally fast-paced future battlefields. The Multi-Domain Task Force will be “a relatively small organization…1,500 or so troops,” the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told the Future of Warfare conference here this morning. While small, it will have capabilities not found in […]
ARLINGTON: As Russia and other adversaries stock up on drones, rockets, and missiles, the US Army is building up defenses to shoot them down. But that Short-Range Air Defense force has been devastated by a decade of cuts. The service’s plan to revive SHORAD involves Adding these assets would allow frontline units to maneuver independently […]
Do more with less: streamline workflows, reduce duplication, invest upfront to save long-term.
President-Elect Trump’s recent announcement that he is considering acquiring the F/A-18 Super Hornet in place of the F-35 Lightning II does not add up for a leader who seeks “to make America great again.” Too much is at stake for the United States to rely on a fighter aircraft design whose roots extend back to […]
WASHINGTON: The Air Force’s F-35A will probably make its first operational deployment abroad “in the not too distant future… perhaps next summer,” heading to Europe to help NATO allies deter Russian aggression, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said yesterday. In her endorsement of the F-35 and NATO, and her wariness of Vladimir Putin, Obama’s […]
UPDATE: China agrees to return drone WASHINGTON: The same day the US Navy made its case for a much larger fleet of 355 ships, the Chinese navy seized an American underwater drone 50 nautical miles off the Philippines. Just two days earlier, the independent Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative reported China had fortified the artificial islands it […]
WASHINGTON: The Army’s new Rapid Capabilities Office is focused like a laser on Russian threats to Army networks: both cyber attack (hacking) and electronic warfare (jamming), in particular against the GPS signal on which US forces rely. I’ve written before that a $100 million boost to electronic warfare might be an early priority for the […]
Breaking Defense Europe will launch May 4 with Tim Martin and Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo as co-editors.
UPDATED with Brig. Gen. Turner remarks on the report WASHINGTON: Marines are famously aggressive, but a new battle plan from a leading thinktank makes Iwo Jima look low-risk. The Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments’ proposed concept of operations is imaginative, exciting and more than a little scary: In a future war, rather than stay far […]
ARLINGTON: The US Army isn’t counting on airpower in the next war. Without that cover, there won’t be supply drops, recon drones or medevac helicopters picking up your casualties — and you will have casualties. “Land-based forces now are going to have to penetrate denied areas to facilitate air and naval forces. This is the exact […]
UPDATED with William Roper comments WASHINGTON: The Army’s long-range artillery rocket, ATACMS, will get upgraded to strike moving targets on land and at sea, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced today. After at least two years of pressure from Congress and vague promises from Pentagon leaders, and for the first time since the Coastal Artillery Corps was […]
The first Marines to hit the beach in future wars may well be robots. Flying, swimming, rolling and swarming, the unmanned advance guard will scout out enemy positions, neutralize mines and send out decoy transmissions to deceive the enemy. Then the humans will start to come ashore. First handfuls of SEALs and Marine Force Recon […]
Government can’t stop to update systems, so modernization has to happen without interruptions.
WASHINGTON: If you want a glimpse of future war, look back a hundred years to the bloody stalemate of the Somme, the cataclysmic battle of World War I. Instead of machineguns and artillery slaughtering soldiers in no man’s land, imagine smart weapons ravaging the air, land and sea. Instead of biplanes overhead, imagine swarming drones. Instead […]
“Outranged and outgunned” by Russian and Chinese missiles, the US Army wants a new long-range artillery rocket of its own. The nascent Long-Range Precision Fires program could do much more than replace the 25-year-old ATACMS missile, however. LRPF could become a linchpin of what the Army is calling Multi-Domain Battle, extending ground-based artillery’s reach not […]
Recently, Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson drove home the point that using the term Anti-Access Area Denial (A2AD), was too vague as to be useful to define the effort of US and allied forces to deal with peer competitors. “The term ‘denial,’ as in anti-access/area denial is too often taken as a fait accompli,” […]
WASHINGTON: “On the future battlefield, if you stay in one place longer than two or three hours, you will be dead,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley says. “That obviously places demands on human endurance.” With units in constant motion far from friendly forces, “being surrounded will become the norm,” continues Milley. There will no […]