Of DoD’s proposed reforms, the biggest thing not included in the NDAA is the Space Development Agency, which would appear to strike a blow at the heart of DoD space acquisition: the Air Force-run Space and Missile Systems Center. SMC has long been criticized for its slow pace, bureaucratic stovepipes, and opacity, but praised for its technical brilliance.

WASHINGTON: The JEDI cloud computing contract may be one of the most controversial deals the Pentagon hasn’t even awarded. Worth up to $10 billion over a decade, the Pentagon’s attempt to build its first true enterprise-wide cloud has sparked charges that the deal is designed to go straight to Amazon, which already supplies the CIA… Keep reading →

A new command and control system Lockheed is selling to an unnamed international customer includes automated “enemy intent analysis.” So, the Diamond Shield system takes the enormous amount of data gathered by the system, uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze it and tells commanders what it thinks the enemy will do.

CAPITOL HILL: The Senate and House have come together on a $716 billion defense spending report that would prohibit the transfer of F-35 jets to Turkey, expand American aid to Asian allies to counter China and add ships and other technology funding lines above the White House request. The National Defense Authorization Act Report was… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON The Navy says it is running short of critical submarine-detecting sonobuoys, thanks to stepped-up submarine activity by Russia in the Mediterranean and around Europe. As a result, the service has asked Congress to reprogram $20 million to buy more of the detection devices in an Omnibus funding package the Pentagon sent to Congress earlier… Keep reading →

Double the buy rate on F-35A starting in 2020 and plan on a minimum of 200 B-21 bombers built in rapid fashion. That will begin to get to the Air Force that America needs to meets the challenges of the future.

“Those will be debates we’ll have over the next couple of years, and those are some tough choices,” intelligence official Kevin Sherman told me. “Do we reduce some of those capabilities have been very helpful in the CT (counter-terrorism) fight, that a lot of our combatant commands have relied on, in order to buy more exquisite things?”

It would be wrong for Europeans to conclude that President Trump wants to withdraw all US forces from Europe. The President simply wants the US military to be NATO’s security guarantor of last resort, not NATO’s “first responder.”

Will this result in more operations like the Kessel Run Experimentation Lab in Boston, where coders join airmen to build useful software? Perhaps it will mean the service will hire civilian coders or train airmen to write code.

WASHINGTON: No Russians. Few Chinese. The F-35. And the man who has led the charge in America’s trade wars, Peter Navarro, at the head the American delegation, with lots of other senior American officials along eager to boost bilateral sales of US weapons and civilian aircraft. Those are the early outlines of what we’ll see at this… Keep reading →