The Marines want new missiles for multiple missions: attacking enemy aircraft, ships at sea, and ground targets. But getting them on a tight budget will require working closely with the Army and Navy.

WASHINGTON: Who is Army Gen. Mark Milley? A lot of the Washington sources we rely on didn’t know him. But the administration’s choice for a new Army Chief of Staff is a “soldier’s soldier” who’s spent more time in Afghanistan than inside the Beltway. Proven warriors don’t always do well in DC: Budget battles require… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Vladimir Putin won’t blitzkrieg the Baltic states any time soon. It’s not his style, said the commander of the soldiers sent to the three small NATO nations last year to reassure them. That’s good news — especially in light of the bad news: The US effort to shore up its eastern allies and Ukraine,… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: “Everybody’s got to change,” Army Gen. David Perkins told me last week. But can the biggest, most bureaucratic, and most fractious service really break a 12-year streak of cancelled multi-billion-dollar programs? It turns out the Army is already taking some important steps. A new doctrine and a long-range planning process instituted two years ago have begun to… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: This afternoon, a congressionally chartered panel of prestigious defense experts denounced sequestration as “self-defeating” and a “serious strategic misstep” that “Congress and the President should repeal…immediately.” But will it preach to anyone not already in the choir? While bipartisan, the National Defense Panel is most heeded by House Republicans. They see it as a valuable… Keep reading →

High-tech warfare at knife-fight ranges: that’s the ugly future of urban combat. If you thought Baghdad was bad, with its roughly six million people, imagine a “megacity” of 10 or 20 million, where the slums have more inhabitants than some countries. Imagine a city of the very near future where suspicious locals post every US… Keep reading →