“We’re looking at airframes of the future that will have common cockpits, advanced propulsion systems, (and) signature management,” Miller said. The goal “really is understanding (how) to modify or build an airplane that allows us to operate through that threat environment.”

It’s all part of a wider effort to rebuild the Army’s command, control, and communications (C3) networks for war against a high-tech great power.

Flying out past the first island chain, China’s air force is undergoing “the most comprehensive restructure in its history to become a force capable of conducting complex joint operations,” according to a new Pentagon report.

“There’s a real capability that can be deployed as soon as the government says it can be,” Northrop Grumman’s Rob Jassey told me, possibly even in “months.”

A year after running a war game across multiple domains, the defense giant’s planners are at it again — with a new plan, and new tech.

AUSA: The Army is giving its electronic warfare force more troops, more training, and a more prominent role in combat headquarters, senior officers said here Thursday, pushing back on criticisms that the service neglects EW even as Russia and China pull ahead. The number of EW troops has increased from 813 (both officers and enlisted)… Keep reading →

It was hard enough keeping the data flowing to the far mountains of Afghanistan, but at least the Taliban didn’t have the technology to attack the network. Russia and China, however, are investing heavily in capabilities to eavesdrop on or jam the radio transmissions and to blind or outright shoot down the satellites.

This internal budget battle in the Army could cede the actual battlefield to high-powered Russian and Chinese jammers, electronic warfare advocates fear, with the same lethal consequences for US troops that Ukrainian forces have suffered since 2014.

Over 17 years of fighting terrorists and insurgents, “our SIGINT forces mastered the art and science of identifying and tracking individual threats with pinpoint precision,” Lt. Gen. Berrier said. “We now face a significant challenge on a much larger scale.”

A new command and control system Lockheed is selling to an unnamed international customer includes automated “enemy intent analysis.” So, the Diamond Shield system takes the enormous amount of data gathered by the system, uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze it and tells commanders what it thinks the enemy will do.