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 budget battles have begun, with Republicans and Democrats already sparring over Rep. Mac Thornberry’s call to slash DoD civilians by 20 percent.

We can expect an important announcement in a few weeks that “a significant acceleration is doable” of the Air Force’s hypersonic efforts. Roper said he’d completed a review of all the service’s work on hypersonic, one of the Pentagon’s top priorities.

The Pentagon wants its new AI center up and running in six months, but is taking a different track on directed energy and hypersonics, Deputy Defense Secretary Shanahan says.

The Pentagon is moving out quickly amid worries that China has outpaced U.S. capabilities in hypersonic weapons development.

Pentagon brass are taking a look at what chaff can be cut in order to push along weapons systems like lasers and hypersonics. And they have some powerful Capitol Hill allies.

The Army is modernizing three artillery systems: 155 cannon, the cheapest option, for the close fight against the enemy’s frontline forces; guided rockets for the deep fight against enemy reinforcements and supply lines; and missiles, the most expensive munitions, for very deep or even strategic strikes against targets in the enemy rear and homeland.

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 →

Faced with an improving Russian threat, the United States should deploy a serious space sensor layer to provide persistent birth-to-death tracking of missiles, including against the kind that rip through the air at low altitudes 20 times the speed of sound (hypersonics).

The new head of Pentagon R&D delivered a scathing critique of how the military develops and buys equipment. “I did not take this job to reach parity with adversaries,” Griffin said. “I want to make them worry about catching up with us again.”