The U.S. and Pakistan are in talks to establish close cooperation and collaboration by their armed forces to counter insurgents who cross the Afghan-Pakistan border, a senior defense official said Wednesday. The official, speaking on background, cited those discussions as additional signs of the improvements in the chronically troubled relations with Pakistan, part of a… Keep reading →

LAS VEGAS: As the Army institutionalizes robotic systems that began as ad hoc expedients for Iraq and Afghanistan, the Chief of Staff wants drones in every combat aviation brigade and every division — even at the price of spreading them thinner across the force. The Army’s first company of Grey Eagle UAVs, a variant of… Keep reading →

LAS VEGAS: As military spending shrinks, makers of unmanned aircraft are looking to civilian customers to pick up the slack — but getting ready to fly drones in civilian airspace is a big technological and regulatory challenge. On Tuesday, acting Federal Aviation Administrator Michael Huerta became the first FAA chief to address the annual conference… Keep reading →

LAS VEGAS: The US military depends on drones. But amidst the justifiable excitement over the rise of the robots, it’s easy to overlook that today’s unmanned systems are not truly autonomous but rather require a lot of human guidance by remote control — and bad design often makes the human’s job needlessly awkward, to the… Keep reading →

In the Army, David Fastabend urged his fellow soldiers to “Adapt or Die,” as he entitled his essay on the need for innovation — but the principle also applies to the field he now works in, civilian cybersecurity. With the defeat of the Senate cybersecurity bill last week, one of the crucial unresolved questions is… Keep reading →

Anyone who has served in the military knows there is plenty of fat to be cut in the Pentagon budget. But rather than take a “meat ax” to the budget — as Defense Secretary Panetta famously described sequestration — there are more targeted ways to reduce and reform defense spending. Whether it’s procedural inefficiencies, duplicative… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The defense spending bill passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee today keeps Block 30 Global Hawk drones flying, instead of letting them be warehoused as the Air Force had planned, a congressional source confirmed to Breaking Defense. That is arguably the final flourish on Congress’s utter rejection of the Air Force’s proposed cuts in… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter is the biggest conventional weapons program in history and Vice Adm. David Venlet has run it to much acclaim and quite a bit of backbiting, depending on who you talk with. This afternoon the Pentagon very quietly sent out notice that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had nominated Venlet’s… Keep reading →

MANASSAS, Va: Buzzing a runway in 200-knot low-level passes and steep, nose-up climbs, Eurocopter’s silver X3 hybrid helicopter looked like something out of a James Bond movie as it performed for the media in late July. The X3 (pronounced “X-cubed”) stopped off at Manassas Regional Airport as part of a U.S. tour that ended last… Keep reading →

CAPITOL HILL [updated 12:40 with Feinstein, Inouye remarks and results of amendment vote]: Sequestration drama roiled an otherwise pro forma mark-up of the Senate’s defense appropriations bill this morning, with a precious flicker of bipartisanship over the need to avert the sequester soon overtaken by disagreement over the legalities of layoff notices. If the automatic… Keep reading →