UPDATED with McCain praise WASHINGTON: The Navy needs a bigger fleet of smaller ships than envisioned in its official Force Structure Assessment, says a congressionally-chartered study from the Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments. CSBA emphatically agrees with the Navy that the focus needs to shift from day-to-day counter-terrorism and presence operations to deterring (and if need be, […]
CLARIFIED w/ CNO response WASHINGTON: The Navy wants a 355-ship fleet. Can US shipyards build it? Yes, they can, the Navy leaders are insisting. But, the Chief of Naval Operations warned this morning, to keep production swift and steady, we should be careful about replacing existing designs — including the Littoral Combat Ship — with all-new warships […]
ARLINGTON: Military officers and analysts are increasingly worried that if a war breaks out with a major power — meaning China, Russia or both — the conflict would escalate faster, spread more broadly, and drag on longer than anything in recent history. Think World War II on speed, with no front lines or clear demarcations between […]
WASHINGTON: Of the four armed services, the Navy seems set for the smoothest sailing under Donald Trump. The President-Elect’s pro-Russian sentiments cast doubt on the US Army’s main mission, even as he seeks to swell the service’s ranks. His personal intervention in programs like Air Force One and the F-35 has alarmed the Air Force. […]
What will the next war look like? Robots, lasers, hypersonic missiles, and stealth aircraft figure prominently, but what matters most isn’t the technology: It’s the concepts of operation that bring them all together — just as the German blitzkrieg combined tanks, aircraft, and the radio, or the Japanese at Pearl Harbor combined aircraft and ships. […]
How does war change when your weapons can think? Do you trust a computer to decide when and whom to kill? Questions once asked only in science fiction are now becoming matters for policymakers. All four armed services are experimenting with artificial intelligence in every domain: land, sea, air, outer space, cyberspace, and the all-pervasive […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGsdaqpq-5w Robot boats are getting smarter fast. Two years ago, on the James River, the Office of Naval Research dropped jaws with a “swarm” of 13 unmanned craft that could detect threats and react to them without human intervention. This fall, on the Chesapeake Bay, ONR tested ro-boats with dramatically upgraded software. The Navy called […]
UPDATED with Brig. Gen. Turner remarks on the report WASHINGTON: Marines are famously aggressive, but a new battle plan from a leading thinktank makes Iwo Jima look low-risk. The Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments’ proposed concept of operations is imaginative, exciting and more than a little scary: In a future war, rather than stay far […]
WASHINGTON: If you want a glimpse of future war, look back a hundred years to the bloody stalemate of the Somme, the cataclysmic battle of World War I. Instead of machineguns and artillery slaughtering soldiers in no man’s land, imagine smart weapons ravaging the air, land and sea. Instead of biplanes overhead, imagine swarming drones. Instead […]
The 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, […]
DARPA HQ, ARLINGTON, Va.: Reporters must stop asking Will Roper about the Arsenal Plane, because he hasn’t picked which aircraft will be rebuilt as a high-tech truck for long-range missiles and other weapons. Speculation has centered on the Air Force B-52, but the Strategic Capabilities Office director made clear that choice is, well, up in the […]
It’s one small part for an aircraft engine, one giant leap for 3D printing. The Navy has announced a Marine MV-22 made the sea services’ first successful flight with a “flight critical” component built by additive manufacturing. Specifically, in the test at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, the Osprey’s engine nacelle contained a 3D printed titanium link, small […]
William Roper is “buying time” for the rest of the Pentagon, he told us in a rare interview. His Strategic Capabilities Office finds near-term but game-changing upgrades for existing weapons systems, preserving American advantage over rapidly advancing adversaries while DARPA and Defense Department labs develop a new generation of breakthroughs. Yesterday, we wrote about Roper’s […]
WASHINGTON: William Roper’s Strategic Capabilities Office is exploring some of the most innovative concepts in the US military. Imagine a militarized version of Pokémon Go, helping Army soldiers locate real-life threats instead of cartoon monsters. Imagine robot brains in a box — an “autonomy kit” — that Navy sailors can install on a patrol boat […]
A UN tribunal ruling could trigger the next round of brinksmanship in the South China Sea as early as next week. But don’t expect the ruling to end the dispute, especially since the Chinese have already vowed to ignore an adverse ruling. “It’s…not likely to be resolved this year or by one international ruling, no matter how brilliant […]