"This year has brought unprecedented challenges for our nation, but America’s Army cannot rest," the president of the Association of the US Army writes. "The demands of today and the need to prepare for an increasingly dangerous future loom large."
This internal budget battle in the Army could cede the actual battlefield to high-powered Russian and Chinese jammers, electronic warfare advocates fear, with the same lethal consequences for US troops that Ukrainian forces have suffered since 2014.
With potential adversaries no longer predictable, training must move beyond just live exercises and flight simulators.
Over 17 years of fighting terrorists and insurgents, “our SIGINT forces mastered the art and science of identifying and tracking individual threats with pinpoint precision," Lt. Gen. Berrier said. "We now face a significant challenge on a much larger scale."
"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?"