“The last few years have been quite good for the association’s annual meeting and for the Army,” the AUSA president told us, but “I’m very, very worried” about the 2020 budget.

The experimental turret will use the technology — and the safeguards — from the Army’s ATLAS project, originally misrepresented in the media as building “killer robots.”

“You want to kill a swarm of things — whatever that thing is — lasers are not really a swarm-killing tool. They can kill things fast, but they can’t kill a swarm of things fast enough.”

The Army’s got lots of really old IT on its bases which may not hold up in a real war.

That’s $6 billion more than previously announced — but it all comes at the cost of almost 200 cut, cancelled, or slowed-down programs, each with backers in Congress.

“The Army has aligned itself with Secretary Mattis’s National Defense Strategy, which we will not walk away from,” Gen. Milley told an Association of the US Army breakfast. “It’s a solid strategy, it’s written in history, it’s written in the blood of generations past, and we subscribe to it.” And allies are key to the strategy.

The Army plans to move at least $25 billion over the next five years from low-priority programs to preparing for major war. That includes developing a wide variety of new weapons, from high-speed aircraft, to partially-robotic armored vehicles, to a long-ranged 6.8 millimeter rifle to replace the venerable M16/M4 family and its controversial 5.56 mm round.

These special squadrons would probably be the first units to get the revolutionary Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) the service wants flying by the mid-2020s to replace conventional helicopters.

It’s all part of a wider effort to rebuild the Army’s command, control, and communications (C3) networks for war against a high-tech great power.

AUSA: The Army is giving its electronic warfare force more troops, more training, and a more prominent role in combat headquarters, senior officers said here Thursday, pushing back on criticisms that the service neglects EW even as Russia and China pull ahead. The number of EW troops has increased from 813 (both officers and enlisted)… Keep reading →