The services are collaborating as never before, officials said, as they outsource non-combat networks through new “IT as a service” contracts.

The Navy faces huge hurdles in trying to get to 355 ships – but a new shipbuilding plan due in coming weeks could change the whole calculus.

The new commandant says the Corps has to start “unshackling ourselves from previous notions of what war looks like and reimagining how Marines will train, how we will operate, and how we will fight.”

The Naval Strike Missile is one tool that the Navy and Marines are looking to rely on in crafting a response to a new era of long-range threats.

“We have a fairly well-positioned and growing counterintelligence activity across the organizations,” the official said, adding that the shift to DoD has created “what is arguably the single largest security-focused agency in the federal government.”

Originally slated to deploy last year, the Triton drones will give US commanders in the Pacific a powerful new tool to conduct surveillance, and track Chinese moves from afar.

“We’ve got to wrestle with ship mix and their capacity; there’s a balancing act.” 

The Navy is rushing to fix its long-broken ship repair and overhaul pipeline as the service prepares itself for “a generational-level of submarine work.”

Current and near-term defense budgets in the U.S. have created a period of strong growth for the defense industry, particularly in areas such as situational awareness, survivability, secure networks and communications.  While the Navy is building more ships and modernizing its existing fleet, Army modernization efforts are focused on combat networking, ground vehicle survivability, soldier… Keep reading →

In conflicts of the future the Pentagon will need some radically new thinking.