Undersecretary Ryan McCarthy says the service’s new five-year budget plan will be finished within weeks.

WASHINGTON: The Pentagon is studying options for putting lasers, directed energy weapons, and missile defense systems into space to protect against an array of increasingly advanced ballistic and cruise missiles being developed by China, Russia, and North Korea, a senior Trump administration official said Wednesday. President Trump is set to announce the results of a… Keep reading →

So, I asked, could a sufficiently high-powered neutron beam not just detect a nuclear warhead from a distance, but actually disable it? Dent, who worked on the Safeguard missile defense system as a young Army officer and later on Reagan’s Star Wars initiative for SAIC, pondered a moment. Then he said: “Could it fry the electronics ? Yes, it could.”

The White House and Pentagon have been talking up the return of Great Power Competition with the rise of China and Russia, but the Senate Armed Services Committee is frustrated that the 2019 defense budget doesn’t put money where the rhetoric is.

The American way of war — using overpowering industrial might, crushing firepower, and owning the sea and skies — may have come to an end, a top Pentagon official says. For the past two decades, “the Chinese and the Russians have been working to undermine that model,” said Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: We knew space was congested, contested and all that. But the folks at CSIS have recast that to good effect in a report actually worth reading in detail. The Second Space Age (yes, they’ve come up with a catchy rubric!) is, they say, more diverse, disruptive, disordered, and dangerous than the first space age.” How… Keep reading →

AFA: Two decades after the Marines predicted most warfare would be in urban areas, the Air Force is coming to the same conclusions. Simply put, the great majority of humans live in cities these days, and Air Force Chief of Staff David Goldfein has added urban warfare to his list of top focus areas. Part… Keep reading →

Recently, Chief of Naval Operations John Richardson drove home the point that using the term Anti-Access Area Denial (A2AD), was too vague as to be useful to define the effort of US and allied forces to deal with peer competitors. “The term ‘denial,’ as in anti-access/area denial is too often taken as a fait accompli,”… Keep reading →

  Gen. Hawk Carlisle has been at the center of global allied operations for several years, first at Pacific Air Forces and now at Air Combat Command. Recently, we interviewed him at Langley AFB, home of Air Combat Command. During his watch, several new combat assets have come to play in Middle East operations. “Each of the… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: Star Wars fans, calm down. The US Air Force wants to fire a 100-plus-kilowatt laser from a small plane. And not just any airplane, Air Force Research Laboratory officials. The last laser on an airplane — the megawatt Airborne Laser, which filled a converted 747 and cancelled in 2011 — the 2022 demonstration will be… Keep reading →