“The Army is looking at this too but probably on a different timeline — the Marine Corps wants to get after this pretty quickly.”

SAIC not a traditional heavy-metal manufacturer and it shouldn’t be judged like one, CEO Tony Moraco and COO Nazzic Keene told me.

Last month, the Army committed to buying an initial brigade’s-worth of the Iron Fist Active Protection System for the M2 Bradley. Meanwhile, with Tuesday morning’s announcement, the US is spending over $200 million to install the rival Trophy APS on not only Army but Marine Corps M1 Abrams tanks.

There are real signs of a renaissance in electronic warfare. Now comes the hard part: translating new strategies and concepts into doctrine, requirements, and systems in the field.

After years of secrecy and CGI, we’re finally getting to see the Sikorsky-Boeing dream team’s SB>1 Defiant ultra-high-speed helicopter in real life. Now they just have to prove it works.

The relationship went through a messy ending. Will the president now try and give Mattis the Rex Tillerson treatment?

“We … are looking at opportunities to do a road trip,” Bell executive Keith Flail told me. “Can we take the V-280 to a handful of key Army and Marine Corps installations to show capabilities to the force?”

CAPITOL HILL: Navy readiness is “heading in the wrong direction,” the Government Accountability Office told the Senate this morning, with only 15 percent of Navy F-35Cs rated “fully mission capable.” At the same hearing, a four-star admiral acknowledged three nuclear-powered attack submarines were still stuck awaiting overhaul, with the USS Boise expected to be out of action… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON The F-35 program office announced today the aircraft had finally reached its initial operational test & evaluation phase, which is expected to wrap up next September. That’s three months behind previous projections for mid-summer — the result of the program’s first crash (fortunately non-fatal) and a subsequent grounding — and 16 months behind the… Keep reading →

DETROIT: The Artificial Intelligence the military needs most is not some kind of killer robot, the Army’s three-star senior futurist told me today. The Army really needs AI to make sense of lots of data, fast, so commanders and quartermasters can send the right forces with the right supplies to the right place on the… Keep reading →