The Trump Administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy was remarkable for its candor in identifying China and Russia as America’s chief “strategic competitors.” But unlike earlier, relatively anodyne strategy documents from the Obama Administration, the 2018 strategy didn’t specify the forces required, let alone how much they might cost — at least, not in the unclassified […]
CAPITOL HILL: The Quadrennial Defense Review is dead. Long live a unified combatant command known as Cyber Command. Ok, it doesn’t quite ring like Long Live The Queen, but you get the idea. House Armed Service Committee staffers briefed reporters on some of the more important bits of the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Top […]
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
WASHINGTON As journalists, we often hear chatter in the Pentagon about how much better things would be for the Army, Navy or Air Force if they just had a better story, or told their story better. The Marines don’t need to worry about this, of course, because they tell their own stories better than the […]
WASHINGTON: This afternoon, a congressionally chartered panel of prestigious defense experts denounced sequestration as “self-defeating” and a “serious strategic misstep” that “Congress and the President should repeal…immediately.” But will it preach to anyone not already in the choir? While bipartisan, the National Defense Panel is most heeded by House Republicans. They see it as a valuable […]
WASHINGTON: “Being a global leader does not come cheap.” “At a certain point, we’re going to have to ask ourselves what kind of nation we want to be and what role we want to play,” Christine Wormuth, soon to be the Pentagon’s top policy official, said this afternoon at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. […]
UPDATED: With Congressional Staff Reaction PENTAGON: With an eye on a Congress it hopes will cut it some slack, the Obama Defense Department today released a budget remarkable for its apparent insouciance, trimming the base budget by only $400 million from the 2014 budget passed by Congress. However, there is a catch. The most politically […]
Why edge and endpoint security can’t be an afterthought.
WASHINGTON: “We are going to have to do some series of things that previously were unimaginable, OK? So we’re going to have to re-adjust our imagination. We’ve simply chosen not to,” Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said today. “We need a strategic response in Congress other than just […]
PENTAGON: The world’s biggest office building is about to get a little less busy. Starting today, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is going to shrink by about 200 government personnel and a to-be-determined number of contractors by 2019, Sec. Chuck Hagel announced this afternoon. Reducing OSD’s staff below 2,200 is just the start of […]
PENTAGON: Do we still need a big Army that can wage big wars? Hell yes, the Army generals say. Will the Army get a new Ground Combat Vehicle to replace the 1981-vintage Bradley Fighting Vehicle that currently carries foot troops into battle? Probably not for a long, long time. That’s my assessment based on an exclusive […]
UPDATED: Adds Details, Context From Hagel’s CSIS Speech WASHINGTON: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel grabbed the bull by the horns and warned Congress and the American people against slipping into isolationism as we withdraw from the wars we have fought for the past dozen years, saying “looking inward is just as deadly a trap as hubris.” “More Americans, […]
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
So how hard is the federal shutdown hitting the US military? “Walking around the building, I would say we’re probably at about a third of our staff right now,” said one military officer. (About half the Defense Department’s civil servants have been furloughed, but military personnel are still on duty). Of 26 people in […]
WASHINGTON: The head of the Air Force’s Quadrennial Defense Review office made very clear today that the service will do all it can to protect the F-35 for a pretty compelling reason: “We must be able to project power in contested environments (A2/AD) and the Joint Strike Fighter is that machine.” Kwast told reporters after his public […]
WASHINGTON: Transformation is back! Sort of. The pursuit of transformation, affiliated with the concept known as a Revolution in Military Affairs, became associated with the failed tenure of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and was publicly dropped as a central organizing concept of the military for that reason. The decade-long pursuit of counter-insurgency warfare didn’t […]
UPDATED: It’s Official. Hagel Orders Strategy Review Done By May 31. Will Underpin QDR WASHINGTON: A meeting last Wednesday between the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and his five colleagues from the services and the National Guard, followed by a Thursday meeting between CJCS Gen. Martin Dempsey and the new defense secretary, Chuck Hagel. They […]