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…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.A major overhaul is coming in software for missile warning
Space Systems Command’s FORGE program is the first, major missile-warning software modernization effort in 20 years.
U.S. Army Set to Ban Certain Tattoos In a culture where even soccer moms now sport tattoos and soccer-themed “tramp stamps” (click the links for some examples), the Army’s recent decision to ban all visible tattoos has prompted a “WTF?” heard round the world. Just watch the video above. But there’s method to the Army’s madness. This…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
ARMY WAR COLLEGE: A massive wargame held here this week to explore the “Deep Future” of warfare in the 2030s demonstrated a stark truth — one that Clausewitz enumerated in his famous work, On War — there’s no substitute for sheer numbers, no matter how much high technology the Army buys. That’s an unsettling answer at a…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
[UPDATED] ARMY WAR COLLEGE: When the Army invited NATO officers here to discuss the “deep future” of warfare in the 2030s, the organizers ran up against a present-day problem. Current regulations forbade them from showing certain information to their allies. It was just the latest case of a chronic problem which has hindered coalition operations…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
FORT BELVOIR: The intellectual ice is beginning to break. You could see it at the Fort Belvoir Officers’ Club on Tuesday afternoon, where the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) hosted a three-day, tri-service conference on “Strategic Landpower.” The US Army is wrestling with how to stay relevant once large-scale counterinsurgency in Afghanistan comes to…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.ARMY WAR COLLEGE: For the last decade, the Army has emphasized “boots on the ground.” Large numbers of foot troops slogged through valley and village, field and town, to safeguard civilians and hunt insurgents. Now, as the largest service looks beyond Afghanistan, a classified wargame about a hypothetical Korean conflict shined a spotlight on high-speed,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.ARMY WAR COLLEGE: Hours before Pyongyang conducted its latest nuclear test, military officers here at the Army War College began waging a wargame whose classified scenario is transparently concerned with North Korea. That is not happenstance. [Click here for more coverage of the Army’s “Winter Wargame”] After a decade of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Future inevitability of quantum computers is a security problem today
‘Store Now, Decrypt Later’ attacks must be thwarted now with Zero Trust cybersecurity.
In the end, it was a near-run thing. The US-led coalition broke through to the refugee camps and began delivering aid. But their supply lines were stretched thin across land and sea, with an entire Army brigade embarked on rented cruise ships at one point. Ashore, the troops took heavy losses from local Islamic militants…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.US ARMY WAR COLLEGE: While fictional wars set in the world of 2020 rage on the floors below, up on the third floor of the War College, Army generals wrestled with the budget battles of today. Topic number one: how to beat – or join – the bandwagon that is AirSea Battle. “You’re a couple…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.US ARMY WAR COLLEGE: It’s a week into the war, and things are getting ugly. Fifty American and allied troops are dead, four hundred are wounded — some in city fighting against Islamic militants, some when the surprisingly sophisticated foe shot down their aircraft with shoulder-fired missiles and anti-helicopter mines. Now the US-led task force…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.All this week, at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Army is conducting the latest iteration of its annual wargame. In the fictional future of the game, set in 2020, 120 players will wage a two-front war in the two regions that have come to dominate US strategy, with one scenario set in…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.More missions, less money: That’s the dilemma the U.S. Army faces as it looks beyond Afghanistan. The service is certainly grateful that the all-consuming commitments of the last decade are finally winding down, but it’s still struggling to shift gears on a shrinking budget. After ten years of optimizing itself for protracted counterinsurgency – a…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Critics continue to advocate slamming the doors on at least some of the country’s professional military education institutions, the war colleges. But no one can realistically advocate for a less educated modern military. Instead, what we need is a more effectively educated military. The civil-military gap between faculty members, including the lack of diversity among…
By Joan Johnson-Freese
