The massive Army Materiel Command needs to get a lot lighter on its feet for future conflicts, its four-star chief says.

CAPITOL HILL: The military’s new cyberspace force is working to overcome recruiting and retention shortfalls, training bottlenecks, and its dependence on the National Security Agency, officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday. These devils in the details are an inevitable part of standing up a new kind of force for a new kind of… Keep reading →

COLORADO SPRINGS: One topic dominates just about every conversation here at the AFCEA cyber symposium: where to find promising cyber warriors and how to hire them and keep them. Deloitte, which is building a substantial cyber warfare portfolio, put on a Capture the Flag game where five teams of college hackers had to find code… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: The Army is ahead of schedule building cyber teams — but its equally essential electronic warfare branch is lagging badly. Like a fiddler crab, one arm is much more developed than the other. While effective in the current fight against Daesh (aka ISIL), this unbalanced force would be at a severe disadvantage in future Multi-Domain Battles… Keep reading →

UPDATE with Hill reaction WASHINGTON: Defense Secretary Ashton Carter today asked Congress to help the Pentagon’s quest for talent in specialized areas such as cyber warfare. Among many other reforms, this latest iteration of Carter’s “Force of the Future” initiative requests changes to existing law to: Let cyber and other technical experts join the military at higher… Keep reading →

Never have so many been so thankful to so few for so long. America has been at war now for 14 years, two months, and 14 days. Nor is there any end in sight to soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines eating their Thanksgiving dinners in dusty outposts far from home. We are thankful for their… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL: The Navy and Marines are deploying at a pace they can’t sustain, says a report released today.And no feasible defense budget can build a big enough force to solve the problem, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says. Even the Navy’s famously optimistic 30-year shipbuilding plan — denounced by House seapower chairman Randy… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The House and Senate Armed Services Committees have found the $5 billion in cuts required under the budget deal. As HASC chairman Mac Thornberry promised, some of them are painful. The committees released the detailed list Tuesday after close of business, formatted into categories only a legislative aide could love, such as “Increases to… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Army has another 40,000 troops to cut, but how many of the civilians who support them will have to go? The answer to that is actually getting more uncertain. In July, the service reported to Congress that “total Army-wide civilian reductions through FY19 are expected to be ~17,000.” The more the service wrestles… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Congress hates base closures, known as BRAC. But it turns out you don’t need a Base Realignment And Closure round to hurt homestate economies. If you cut the Army by 120,000 (from a wartime peak of 570,000 to 450,000), and prohibit the Pentagon from closing bases, what you get — instead of wholesale shutdowns… Keep reading →