CAPITOL HILL: The nation does not need a new armed service specializing in space, the leaders of the Air Force said today in rejecting a House Armed Services Committee plan. In fact, they said, carving a “Space Corps” out of the Air Force — which handles most space missions today — would only make it […]
WASHINGTON: “To counter our near-peer adversaries” — read Russia and China — US Pacific Command wants $530 million of unfunded priorities that didn’t fit in the 2018 budget request, from better bases to more torpedoes. The top item: $49 million more for “multi-domain battle exercises,” wargames testing a new Army-led concept for future warfare against […]
Thinking about robots and war often brings to mind HAL, the apparently well-meaning but ultimately destructive computer in 2001, or the metallic creatures of death in the Terminator series. Today, however, the Pentagon wants to push the concept in a different direction. With advanced adversaries like Russia and China copying the smart weapons, stealth fighters, and […]
ARMY & NAVY CLUB: To win the fast-paced and brutal battles of the future, Army generals must let their subordinates off the leash, the Chief of Staff said here yesterday. “What we do, in practice, is we micromanage and overly specify everything the subordinate has to do, all the time,”Gen. Mark Milley told an Atlantic […]
A grim vision of future battlefields has the Army urgently exploring every option to streamline its logistics, everything from cargo drones to “compact fusion reactors.” Moving iron mountains of supplies has been a signature strength of the US military since the Civil War. But against an adversary with precision weapons, those sprawling supply dumps, the […]
ARMY WAR COLLEGE: The brutal ground war in Iraq holds vital lessons for sophisticated future operations in the Pacific, Australian Maj. Gen. Roger Noble said today. Military pundits often draw a sharp distinction between what they consider low-tech warfare against irregular forces, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and high-tech war against states like China […]
Increasingly anxious about Russian drones and helicopters, the US Army is inviting contractors to demonstrate Short-Range Air Defense systems at a “SHORAD shoot-off” this September. The closest thing to an incumbent in this race is Boeing, which developed the Army’s current Avenger, an old-school unarmored Humvee carrying Stinger missile pods. Now Boeing has upgraded the […]
NATIONAL HARBOR: Just like the individual ICBMs, bombers, and submarines it oversees, the nation’s nuclear command-and-control architecture is aging Cold War tech that needs replacement. But if we just build newer versions of today’s command posts, communications networks, satellites, and so on, we’ll miss a major opportunity. Instead, the deputy chief of Strategic Command said […]
WASHINGTON: Aerospace titan Lockheed Martin is watching with intense interest as the Air Force births Multi Domain Command and Control. MDC2 is an infant initiative meant to develop a new global data system to share information from all sources, analyze it and offer commanders predictive information. Some 52 companies came to the Air Force last month to offer […]
History never repeats, but it often rhymes, and a wise man listens to the echoes. Today, the Army is exploring a new concept of future combat called Multi Domain Battle, which calls for small, agile units designed to overwhelm the enemy with coordinated actions not only on the land, but in the air, on the sea, […]
WASHINGTON: The Army is creating an experimental combat unit to develop new tactics for lethally fast-paced future battlefields. The Multi-Domain Task Force will be “a relatively small organization…1,500 or so troops,” the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, told the Future of Warfare conference here this morning. While small, it will have capabilities not found in […]
HUNTSVILLE, ALA.: Less than six months after its official rollout, the Army’s new concept of future warfare has gotten traction with all four armed services. In brief, Multi-Domain Battle envisions the military — everything from submarines to satellites, tanks to jets, destroyers to drones, grunts to hackers — working together to overwhelm the enemy with […]
ORLANDO: Want to defeat an enemy? Get inside his decision cycle. Hammer away at his forces, confuse his command, steal his intelligence. Sun Tzu said most of it ages ago, but it remains true today. The key to such success is, first, understanding what you and the enemy are doing and, second, communicating that understanding to […]
SAN DIEGO: The Army and Navy must link their missile defense systems into a single network so Navy weapons can hit targets spotted by Army radars and vice versa, the chief of Pacific Command said today. That’s a daunting technical task but, if surmounted, it could dramatically improve defense against North Korean, Chinese, or Russian […]
WASHINGTON: With one eye on China and another on North Korea, US Army Pacific is injecting cyber warfare and new joint tactics into every wargame it can. At least 30 forthcoming exercises — culminating in the massive RIMPAC 2018 — will train troops on aspects of Multi-Domain Battle, the land Army’s effort to extend its reach […]