PENTAGON: The services’ draft budgets delivered to the Office of Secretary of Defense early this month are probably being shredded in light of the campaign in Iraq and Syria against the terrorist group known as ISIL. “If you’re asking me, are we going to have budget problems, the answer is yes,” the president’s top military advisor told reporters this… Keep reading →

The Air Force very quietly released a Request for Proposal (RFP) this summer for the new Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B). With a purported fly away cost of $550 million per aircraft — but with estimates up to $810 million — the LRS-B will be one of the largest acquisition programs in history with broad… Keep reading →

As the Air Force Association girds for its annual conference, which starts Monday here in Washington, I was struck by several comments from several experts that the traditional dichotomy between air power and ground forces — often the focus of internecine budget battles between the Army and Air Force — isn’t that relevant any more. Aircraft… Keep reading →

As the NATO alliance’s panjandrums meet in Wales and debate the best ways to destroy ISIL and make Vladimir Putin’s Russia stop doing whatever it wants in Ukraine, we offer this schemata for defeating ISIL. It’s penned by Dave Deptula, the man who ran the air war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan during Operation… Keep reading →

ARLINGTON: “Big data” is big business nowadays. Defense contractor Lockheed Martin, for example, boasts their analytical tools have successfully predicted everything from Arab Spring uprisings to the onset of sepsis in hospital patients. But big data can also go wrong in big ways. If you set a powerful program loose on a large enough data… Keep reading →

  [UPDATED: WorldView-3 launched successfully Wednesday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California at 11:30 am Pacific time, 2:30 pm Eastern] When DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 satellite soars skyward tomorrow – weather permitting – most attention will naturally be on the parts that go up. But the bus-sized imagery collection satellite is just the high-tech tip of an… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: August is the month of decision for UCLASS, the Navy’s controversial program to build armed drones that fly off aircraft carriers. At stake: whether the “Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance & Strike” aircraft will be primarily a scout (surveillance) or a bomber (strike). The new Deputy Secretary of Defense, Bob Work, delayed the Navy’s release of… Keep reading →

There’s an old trope in intelligence circles that defenders have to be right all the time, while the terrorists only need to get lucky once to execute a successful attack. The knowledge that no one is right all the time makes most counterterrorism experts cautiously pessimistic about the likelihood of another successful terrorist attack on… Keep reading →

FARNBOROUGH AIR SHOW: The Navy’s carrier-based drone known as UCLASS continues to face challenges from the Joint Staff, parts of the Navy and, perhaps most importantly, Capitol HIll. While the head of the program, Rear Adm. Mat Winter, told reporters here yesterday that a Request for Proposal will be issued “very soon,” the program’s requirements… Keep reading →

LONDON: Farnborough is an air show, but many of the briefings scheduled by American companies this year focus on electronic warfare and missiles — not airplanes. Raytheon, winner of the Next Generation Jammer competition, and the other four defense giants know that much of the money to be made in the next decade will come… Keep reading →