The Army doesn’t only want much faster aircraft: It wants them to cost the same to build, operate, and maintain as its current helicopters. Otherwise it can’t fit them into an unchanging aviation budget. That’s an awfully high bar.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.New Army mounted system won’t play favorites when it comes to C5ISR, EW and A-PNT
The CMOSS Mounted Form Factor will facilitate tech insertion for new capabilities while co-existing with the Mounted Family of Computer Systems.
While officials as senior as Chief of Staff Mark Milley have previously talked about Army hypersonics in general terms, today’s statements by both the Army’s Russell and OSD’s Miller were unequivocal: The Army wants a ground-launched hypersonic weapon.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
“Does that mean you can’t talk to us? No,” Assistant Secretary Bruce Jette said. “What it means is, if you have secret sauce, reserve the secret sauce, make sure we understand what you want to talk about. Only when we get down to contract discussions should you bring out the secret sauce.”
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
These single points of failure already limit military modernization and potentially could disrupt operations in a crisis. That’s especially true if production needed to ramp up urgently for a major war, a subject the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, has publicly angsted about.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
“My eyes are watering with what our young people can do right now,” the Assistant Commandant said.
“They’re really smart and they’ve got a lot of really good ideas,” Commandant Neller said. “We would be well served to turn them loose.”
What’s the one technology the Marine Corps Commandant wants more than any other for his riflemen? It wasn’t an amphibious vehicle, more JLTVs, a new rifle or friggin’ lasers. It is “a smart way to recharge batteries,” Gen. Robert Neller told reporters.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY: Like a surgeon planning to separate Siamese twins, Pentagon officials worry how complex the congressional mandated breakup of the acquisition bureaucracy could become. “We understand the challenges (and are) very cognizant” of the risk,” acting deputy assistant secretary for research and engineering Mary Miller told me this morning. “It’s going to be difficult,” Miller…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
BAE Systems’ LR-PGK: The Superior Anti-Jam Solution
Going the distance to defeat emerging jam threats.
CAPITOL HILL: After a decade of improvements to space acquisition after more than a decade of disasters, the most troubled program being built by the US Air Force is again a space program. So said the man who should know: Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves, head of the amazing but often-reluctant-to-speak folks at Air Force Space and…
By Colin Clark
ALEXANDRIA: The executive committee on electronic warfare that Deputy Secretary Bob Work created last year is already reshaping the Pentagon bureaucracy. While the four-star officers and top civilians who make up the “EXCOM” itself have only met three times, executive committee co-chair Frank Kendall, undersecretary of acquisition, technology, and logistics, has created a new EW office and chosen…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON: Jamie Morin, head of the Pentagon’s quiet but powerful Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office, offered an understated and emphatic explanation today of why Congress’s inability to do its basic work and pass spending bills poses dramatic challenges to the US military. Morin and his colleagues at CAPE rarely appear in public and even more rarely…
By Colin Clark
WASHINGTON: One of the Pentagon procurement system’s top officials and one of its harshest critics sounded optimistic today that the military can improve how it buys weapons. The key, both said, is for Congress to repeal old laws that now get in the way before it writes anything new — an idea to which the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
FORT MEADE, MD: “Remember the peace dividend we took in the Clinton years in the ’90s? Welcome back,” said Douglas Packard. “That’s where we’re at.” Some 20 years ago as defense budgets plummeted post-Cold War, the defense industry consolidated, recalled Packard, acting head of procurement at the Defense Information Systems Agency. Contractors better beware once more,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
PORTSMOUTH, VA: Go ahead and cut our budget across the board if you really have to. But please, then give us authority to move money around to save our top priorities — and give it to us soon. That’s the message, in a nutshell, from the Navy’s top officer. [Editorial note: Just to be clear,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
PORTSMOUTH, VA: This is a Navy town, just minutes from the massive Atlantic Fleet base at Norfolk. But when Navy and Marine Corps leaders convened here yesterday for their annual conference on expeditionary warfare, traditionally a Navy-Marine affair, they reached out to the other services in unprecedented ways. Message No. 1: After 12 years of…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
