WASHINGTON: The military can’t buy enough unmanned aerial systems to suit imagery-hungry combat commanders. Procurement programs are harder than ever to start in these days of ever-tightening defense budgets. And using a 20th Century defense acquisition system to buy 21st Century technologies often means getting too little too late too expensively anyway. What to do?… Keep reading →

The Army is in the throes of a modernization effort that will transform the way it develops, buys and fields new technology. Leading that effort, and overseeing the Army’s $10 billion information technology budget, is LTG Susan Lawrence. It’s a much different world from the one she knew growing up Ida Grove, Iowa, before enlisting… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Despite the tremendous impact unmanned systems are having on the battlefield, military leaders still struggle to get intelligence gathered from these systems into the hands of those who need it. The systems designed to stream raw data collected by the diverse fleet of unmanned systems in the field continued to hamstring combatant commanders and… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: The decision to sideline the Global Hawk Block 30 aircraft was made because its sensors aren’t as good as those of the U-2 and the UAV costs more to operate, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz told reporters today. The Global Hawks sensors are “not as capable” as are those of the… Keep reading →

UPDATED WASHINGTON: The Global Hawk is dead. Long live the Global Hawk. Pentagon and service leaders are rumored to be considering reducing or canceling the current version of the venerable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drone. The Block 30 Global Hawk variant will be replaced with the Cold War-era U-2 spy planes. The decision to cut… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Iran’s growing military arsenal is about to get a little bigger in the coming months, the country’s defense chief said this week. A new Iranian-built spy plane and satellite are slated to go operational next month, Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi told the official Iranian news agency IRNA yesterday. The new “maritime patrol… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: The United States will police the globe, respond to disasters and shape the international environment much as it has –though our sharpest focus will be on China and the western Pacific — but it will do all that with a significantly smaller land force than it currently has. That was the essential message offered… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: NATO is wasting no time in taking the painful lessons learned from its peacekeeping mission in Libya and folding them into a new strategy for future operations, the NATO general overseeing that effort said today. The resistance from forces loyal to recently deceased Libyan strongman Col. Muammar Gaddafi was a “strategic surprise” to NATO,… Keep reading →

CORRECTED: We Inflated The Value of Digital Globe’s Most Recent Government Contract San Antonio: You can smell the fear and worry here at the annual Geoint conference. The budget cuts that Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper outlined yesterday may be as deep as $40 billion over the next 10 years, sources here say. The… Keep reading →

Washington: Air Force officials are struggling to wipe out a computer virus that has infected the ground control systems that guide Predator unmanned aerial vehicles and their successors. The control systems are based at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The famous Predators used by the CIA to kill terrorists are controlled from a different… Keep reading →