https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOl_JOesU54 The first Marines to hit the beach in future wars may well be robots. Flying, swimming, rolling and swarming, the unmanned advance guard will scout out enemy positions, neutralize mines and send out decoy transmissions to deceive the enemy. Then the humans will start to come ashore. First handfuls of SEALs and Marine Force…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.CAPITOL HILL: The B-21 will be America’s next bomber and the Air Force says it will be “optionally manned.” That’s fine, say some of America’s most experienced B-2 pilots. Just keep the pilots. You’ll want them for those rare moments when everything goes wrong and a human being needs to take the controls and make…
By Colin ClarkWASHINGTON: If you were hoping, after a bitterly contentious presidential campaign, that at least we’d have consensus on national defense spending…tough luck. Instead, teams from five leading thinktanks — spanning the political spectrum but all using the same budget simulator — came up with a more than $2 trillion spread of options. They debated their plans…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.A bevy of new vertical take off and landing (VTOL) aircraft conceived to take the military beyond the speed, range and altitude limits of helicopters are scheduled to fly over the next two years. None looks more like science fiction becoming science fact than a sort of flying candy crane formerly known as “Transformer.” What is now…
By Richard WhittleThe multinational Unmanned Warrior exercise off the coast of Scotland is doing “really groundbreaking” work on naval drones, said one participating US scientist. There’ve been “a number of world firsts” in networking unmanned vehicles of different types and from different nations into a single unit, Marcus Tepaske, science advisor for the Office of Naval Research,…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.The battle for ISR primacy continues between the venerable U-2 and the unmanned Global Hawk, but the Northrop Grumman drone took another step forward Oct. 6 in its quest to do what its manned competition does, and more. The aircraft flew with an Optical Bar Camera broad-area synoptic sensor, a tool that has been a key reason for…
By Colin ClarkThe US Navy needs to get better at hunting sea mines. The Royal Navy needs to get better at robots. So the two fleets are joining forces off Scotland in what the Brits are calling “the largest demonstration of its type, ever,” Unmanned Warrior 2016, with “more than 50 unmanned vehicles from over 40 organizations.”…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.WASHINGTON: War time is a bad time to run out of gas. If there was a crisis with Russia today, and a German unit needed to refuel from a US Army pump, they couldn’t do it. Why? The goddamn nozzle doesn’t fit. It’s just one of the host of seemingly minor shortfalls, from pontoon bridges to…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.NATIONAL HARBOR: This time, General Atomics’ secret weapon isn’t the drone. It’s the mechanical arm that catches it in mid-flight — and then hauls it into the back of a C-130 cargo plane, also in mid-flight. General Atomics, which builds the iconic Predator, has rolled out its offering for DARPA’s Gremlins program, blandly called the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.Bell Helicopter confirmed Thursday what the deputy commandant of the Marine Corps, Lt. Gen. Jon “Dog” Davis, told Breaking Defense a month ago. The company is designing a new tiltrotor drone about the size of the Air Force’s armed MQ-9 Reaper, with similar capabilities, that it hopes the Marines will buy. They call it the V-247…
By Richard WhittlePENTAGON: The 2016 edition of Black Dart, the Defense Department’s formerly classified counter-drone exercise, expands to Eglin Air Force Base this year, in search of more space and more capabilities, including ships. “Eglin will allow us to deliver added uncertainty in the way of providing multiple locations for launching UAS at different distances so we can explore the…
By Richard WhittleNAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER: So easy, a journalist can do it. That could be the slogan for the Navy’s new Magic Carpet software, which simplifies the most stressful task in aviation: landing on deck of an aircraft carrier. I’d never pretend I could fly a real plane. But in a simulator, with Navy engineer Buddy…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.WASHINGTON: Marines, turn off your iPhone and dig yourself a foxhole. That’s the Commandant’s message to young troops, based on embarrassing experiences in recent exercises. As cheap drones and other surveillance technologies spread worldwide, said Gen. Robert Neller, US forces must re-learn how to hide — both physically and electronically — from increasingly tech-savvy adversaries. “We’ve…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.