WASHINGTON: The first Future Vertical Lift Aircraft won’t fly until the 2030s but the Army, Navy, and industry are already at work on software standards. Those include a new “model-based” approach to software architectures that will require a culture change among programmers and defense bureaucrats alike. Why take on so much so early? Because FVL will… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The House Armed Services Committee will be led through the shoals of sequestration, military pay, weapons costs and a volatile world by a reform-minded and dynamic legislator. I’ve covered Rep. Mac Thornberry since before the turn of the century (that hurt) and have always found compelling his willingness to delve beneath the surface of what the… Keep reading →

[UPDDATED with Hagel memo & expert comment] REAGAN LIBRARY: After months of build-up, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel formally launched the military’s quest for a combination of new technologies to maintain America’s military supremacy over the next 20 years in the face of Russian and Chinese challenges. In a speech before the second Reagan National Defense Forum here, Hagel divulged… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: When the the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, was delayed by a day-and-a-half on his mission to secure the release of the two American hostages in North Korea because his plane wasn’t ready to fly, it sounded like a pretty good story. Combine it with recent problems with Secretary of State John Kerry’s aircraft and… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: Offset strategy. Doesn’t exactly make your hair stand on end or make you go wow. Does it have to do with international arms deals and tradeoffs companies and countries make to win business? No. In fact, the offset strategy Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel should unveil in the next few days may be one of… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: NATO is now taking cyber threats as seriously as the Russian tanks and nuclear weapons it was created to deter. But the alliance has a long way to go just to shore up its own network defenses, and it explicitly eschews any role on the offense. NATO has not even written a formal policy… Keep reading →

“There’re a lot of chiselers out there,” Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek sighed. Congressional angst over counterfeit parts has understandably focused on ersatz electronics, many of them from much-mistrusted China, but as head of the Defense Logistics Agency, Harnitchek has found fakes in everything from air filters to rubber tubing. “There’re folks that counterfeit those, believe it or… Keep reading →

The clouds, they are a-changin’. The Defense Information Systems Agency may have lost its status — always controversial and contested — as gatekeeper between the rest of the Defense Department and commercial providers of cloud computing. But Pentagon CIO Terry Halvorsen‘s decision to let other defense entities acquire cloud services on their own still leaves… Keep reading →

FALLS CHURCH: “I’m going to frame this discussion around the ‘three nots,’” assistant secretary of Defense Katrina McFarland said this morning. “Technological superiority is not assured, R&D is not a variable cost, and time is not recoverable.” “Sequestration for us is horrendous,” she told TechAmerica’s annual conference here. “Funding for the accounts that exercise our… Keep reading →

Joan Johnson Freese, a member of our Board of Contributors and professor at the Naval War College, is an expert on space, Strategic Command and several other topics dealt with below. She doesn’t think the creation of Cyber Command is a great idea. Read on to find why. The Editor. Analysis of the Peloponnesian War… Keep reading →