“It was developed for a very specific threat and it does incredible things…we intend to operate it differently — in support of an Army on the move. It’s not just going to be static.”

The Army may need to delay the rollout of the new technology, scale it down, or both.

The Ripsaw design is so flexible, the company claims, it can scale up and down for different missions.

These are huge strategic challenges — and Ryan McCarthy is emphasizing them more than any of his predecessors in at least a decade.

Industry’s prototype Robotic Combat Vehicles are proving more capable than the Army expected, Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman told me: “It is really exciting.”

The Army wants its Next Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) program to provide a transformational leap in battlefield capability.

But building a global 3D terrain database will require wrangling huge amounts of data, Maj. Gen. Maria Gervais told us.

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

The new office will, director Dan Flynn told me, assess what other intelligence agencies around the world are doing and why, what the most effective technologies will be to cope with those changes, how the world is changing strategically and make recommendations to the Director of National Intelligence.

The Air Force sees the New Mexico training environment as eventually becoming a cyber training range for the entire Defense Department.