The multinational Unmanned Warrior exercise off the coast of Scotland is doing “really groundbreaking” work on naval drones, said one participating US scientist. There’ve been “a number of world firsts” in networking unmanned vehicles of different types and from different nations into a single unit, Marcus Tepaske, science advisor for the Office of Naval Research,… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: War time is a bad time to run out of gas. If there was a crisis with Russia today, and a German unit needed to refuel from a US Army pump, they couldn’t do it. Why? The goddamn nozzle doesn’t fit. It’s just one of the host of seemingly minor shortfalls, from pontoon bridges to… Keep reading →

At the annual Ssang Yong wargames, US Marines and their South Korean counterparts are testing a small gadget that could solve a big problem: incompatible radios. Getting different networks to connect is hard enough between the Marine Corps and the US Navy, the Army and the Air Force, but multi-national operations are chronically plagued by… Keep reading →

RESTON, VA: US command and control networks take too long to link to allies and respond to Russia’s rapid-fire aggression. In Ukraine, “we’ve had at least two, maybe three of these cycles [already, where] they’ll back off, and there’ll be a long kind of quiet period, and then they’ll spike back up,” Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: At a recent wargame in Germany, slow communications between the US and an allied unit meant we would have killed our own allies. We saw “what happens when we don’t get it right”  the Army Vice-Chief of Staff said last week. When an allied unit called for artillery support, Gen. Daniel Allyn said that “by the time that… Keep reading →

ABOARD THE USS ARLINGTON: 17 warships and two submarines. Thousands of personnel from 19 countries. Billions of dollars of high-tech hardware. Months of planning. But sometimes you still have to improvise. When US and Dutch warships and marines united in an international task force for the 2014 Bold Alligator wargames off Virginia, the two countries could… Keep reading →

The pivot to the Pacific started more than a century ago. The United States first became a Pacific power in 1898, the year the US first annexed Hawaii and then gained Guam and the Philippines (as well as Puerto Rico) from Spain after a “short, victorious war.” The United States is at a turning point… Keep reading →

The United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union has taken the unprecedented step of adopting a standard for the Internet that would essentially permit eavesdropping on a global basis. According to a just-published piece on the RT.com web site, ITU members decided to adopt a standard, known as Y.2770, which would permit the inspection of Internet traffic.… Keep reading →

NATIONAL HARBOR: Last year’s Libya campaign revealed painful shortfalls in NATO, including intelligence sharing so molasses-slow that French pilots gave up on waiting for target data from US Predator drones. That’s something the allies are anxious to correct. “In Libya we got away with it. We made do, we had work-arounds, [but] we were not… Keep reading →