Trump’s plan would undercut the more expansive National Defense Strategy for “great power competition” that embattled Defense Secretary Jim Mattis rolled out just nine months ago.

“I get really irritated when I’m in the audience and I hear ‘startup, startup, startup,’” Army Futures Command’s chief innovation officer said this morning at the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA). “Startups are not the only source of ideas.”

As old programs go, the Corps is looking at new cyber capabilities and getting back into the air defense game.

President Trump, clearly feeling some heat after the Treasury Department noted the national debt ballooned 17 percent to $779 billion this year, announced yesterday that the defense budget would drop to about $700 billion in fiscal 2020. Trump told his Cabinet this could happen, “because now that we have our military taken care of, we… Keep reading →

  Gen. Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Staff, spoke last week with a small group of traveling reporters after attending a conference of NATO Military Chiefs in Warsaw, including Breaking Defense contributor James Kitfield. Dunford described Russia’s strategy for pulling NATO apart and reiterated that Moscow poses the single greatest global threat to the UnIted… Keep reading →

Now that President Trump has signed the fiscal 2019 defense appropriations bill — marking the first time in nine years that defense is not bound by a Continuing Resolution — the broad trend was cuts to Operational and Maintenance (O&M) to fund Research, Development, Testing, & Engineering (RDT&E). The top line was consistent with the… Keep reading →

General Dynamics offers a refined version of the upgunned Stryker, hoping to sway the Army’s choice of lethality upgrade for the 8×8 vehicles come January.

Congress and China have emerged as the primary culprits for the weakening the US defense industrial base. Those are the most striking findings of a new White House report that takes a deep-dive into the state of defense manufacturing in the United States, sounding alarm bells over the decline in capability and the rise of China’s industrial might.

Chief of Staff Mark Milley declared air and missile defense the Army’s No. 5 priority — one of the Big Six which the service is pushing to accelerate, if necessary at the expense of everything else in their budget.

The Trump Administration managed to avoid starting wars or crippling NATO in fiscal year 2018, writes CSIS scholar Kathleen Hicks in this op-ed, but as we stagger into 2019, the fates of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, his National Defense Strategy, and the Pentagon budget remain alarmingly uncertain. We continue our partnership with DC’s leading defense… Keep reading →