The report, co-chaired by former Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, encourages reforms in other parts of the government to speed up defense acquisition.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.What’s the future outlook for anti-submarine warfare in the Pacific?
Distributed anti-submarine warfare leverages autonomy and advanced comms and networked sensors that already exist.
“If everybody we talk to is the enemy, and there’s a boogeyman behind every question and every opportunity, we’re not going to go anywhere,” retired Marine Corps Gen. Hoss Cartwright says. “We’re frozen.”
By Theresa Hitchens
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…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
PENTAGON: Deborah Lee James came to the Pentagon and faced a trial by fire. Within a month of her confirmation, a major scandal involving cheating by nuclear missile troops threatened to further tarnish the Air Force’s image and to raise fundamental questions among America’s allies about our ability to provide the nuclear umbrella they all depend on. The…
By Colin Clark
WASHINGTON: Whoever is elected the next president of the United States must stand ready for crisis to strike “at 12:01 on January 20th,” the Secretary of the Navy warned today, lest America’s adversaries see a window of opportunity. What Ray Mabus and his fellow service secretaries didn’t say, at least out loud, speaks volumes. With Russia meddling in…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: There was little doubt that the hack- and jam-proof GPS ground stations known as OCX would be resurrected after incurring a Nunn-McCurdy breach. Even though it was the most screwed up program in the Air Force, was behind schedule and had gone grossly over budget, OCX is a crucial program at an important time. America needs…
By Colin Clark
Opportunities abound for DoD and industry when the cyber workforce is trained to a peak level
Cybersecurity skills must evolve in near-real time as Zero Day threats continue and AI provides new challenges.
AFA: For the foreseeable future, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James told me today, when push comes to shove, personnel funding should win and modernization must wait. “If you’re asking me if I have to choose between the two, then I vote for people,” she said. “I’m going to protect people.” Of course, the Air…
By Colin Clark
BALTIMORE: Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley owned the room here at the annual conference of the National Guard Association of the US, a powerful group once bitterly at odds with his predecessor, Ray Odierno. Two years after an Army plan to disband Guard Apache gunship battalions started a Guard revolt, one year after the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
UPDATED: Adds Excellent CSIS Study On International Support For Chinese Claims WASHINGTON: What are China’s intentions in the South China Sea? It’s a question intelligence analysts, diplomats and the senior leadership of the United States and its Pacific allies are all asking in the wake of a range of increasingly belligerent and threatening comments and…
By Colin Clark
It’s no news to Breaking Defense readers that the U.S. military faces a readiness crisis. But retired Gen. David Petraeus apparently disagrees. Yes, the military’s budget has been cut by 25 percent in real terms since 2011—much of it coming from accounts used to maintain and build combat readiness. Yes, leaders from the Army, Navy,…
By Justin Johnson
WASHINGTON: After more than a decade of missteps by the Pentagon, the Air Force and Boeing, the airborne tanker program today took a major step forward as the KC-46 passed Milestone C. “The KC-46 is ready to take the next step,” Gen. Dave Goldfein, Air Force Chief of Staff, says in a statement announcing the approval…
By Colin Clark
PENTAGON: I thought I could hear Air Force and allied F-35 pilots around the world smiling when the new Air Force Chief of Staff said today that comparing the F-35 to the Chinese J-20 “is almost an irrelevant comparison.” The F-35, said Gen. David Goldfein, is “about a family of systems and it’s about a network — that’s what…
By Colin Clark
WASHINGTON: One thing grew clear as Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James spoke this morning: the service has huge bills now and even bigger ones coming down the track, especially when you include nuclear modernization. If she could, Lee told the audience at the New America think tank, she would “rewrite history” so that the F-35A, which…
By Colin Clark
Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James traveled through Asia, visiting Indonesia, India, Singapore, and the Philippines at the end of the summer. We didn’t hear a great deal about the trip in the US at the time but her meetings with her defense counterparts clearly impressed. In this op-ed, James shares the lessons she learned. China…
By Deborah Lee James