Trump certainly fell in and out of love fast with the last outspoken warrior-intellectual he hired, short-lived National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Modernizing our supply chain is a national security imperative
Closing supply chain gaps in innovating technology will reposition the industrial base to be a strategic source of value.
Smart missiles to strike hard targets hundreds of miles away. Wireless links to pull data from stealth fighters and foot soldiers alike. Command posts agile enough to coordinate it all — not only in open war, but in the ambiguous “grey zone” of hacking, proxy warfare, and Twitter trolls. That’s just a few of the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
There are times and places in the history of war in which improvements in firepower force anyone in range to take cover instead of advancing, as machineguns and howitzers did a century ago on the infamous Western Front. The fundamental difference today is the width of the killing zone would be measured, not in hundreds or thousands of yards, but in hundreds or thousands of miles.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Don’t think about the Terminator or Iron Man: Think about Sigourney Weaver’s power loader lifting crates in Aliens.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Army soldiers are testing goggles with an image-recognition system that can automatically spot threats like tanks and warn the rest of the squad — or transmit the target data to a distant missile battery so they can take it out.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
DETROIT: The Artificial Intelligence the military needs most is not some kind of killer robot, the Army’s three-star senior futurist told me today. The Army really needs AI to make sense of lots of data, fast, so commanders and quartermasters can send the right forces with the right supplies to the right place on the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
With Murray’s own HQ, Army Futures Command, stood up this August in Austin, the notoriously hidebound Army is making a concerted effort to reach out beyond its comfort zone and embed its officers, scientists, and civil servants in a wider world of civilian innovation, where hoodies are more in vogue than uniforms.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
BAE Systems’ LR-PGK: The Superior Anti-Jam Solution
Going the distance to defeat emerging jam threats.
WASHINGTON: Army planners are thrashing out how many electronic warfare specialists the service needs, not just to rebuild radio-jamming and spoofing capability in combat units, but to create a training cadre that can sustain the EW corps for the long-term. Whether this plan for robust growth — certainly hundreds of soldiers, possibly over a thousand…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
“Long-range precision fires… would provide us the capability (to) either, for example, support the Air Force by suppressing enemy air defenses at hundreds upon hundreds of miles or support the Navy by engaging enemy surface ships at great distances as well,” said Army Secretary Mark Esper. But those examples are two distinctly different missions, each most relevant to a different theater of war.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
TARDEC, soon to be part of the new Army Futures Command, is exploring a wide range of Israeli robots. But IAI is already looking into the next generation: “flocks” or swarms of robotic systems that communicate with each other and collaborate to accomplish their mission.
By Arie Egozi
The defense budget may be caught between doves on the left and budget hawks on the right, but so far Army Secretary Mark Esper isn’t ceding any ground.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
INF proponents emphasize the risk of nuclear weapons. But, despite its name, the treaty bans a wide range of conventional weapons as well — and it’s non-nuclear, precision-guided missiles that have changed how war is actually waged.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
“We also had a non-pilot with all of 45 minutes of training take the aircraft up and operate for almost an hour,” said Sikorsky’s autonomy director, Igor Cherepinsky.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
This kind of effort to get fighter-jock technology to ordinary grunts — who do most of the fighting and dying — has enjoyed some high-profile attention in the last 12 months. The efforts cover everything from developing a new, more powerful longer-range rifle to buying off-the-shelf quadcopters, from adding VR training simulations to eliminating tedious safety lectures.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
