WASHINGTON: The Afghan Air Force is about to get a powerful new weapon in what is shaping up to be a bloody year in the 17-year-old war against the Taliban. On Friday, the U.S. Air Force announced an $86 million deal with an American defense contractor Orbital ATK to supply single-engine, turboprop AC-208 airplanes to… Keep reading →

“All warfare is based on deception,” Sun Tzu wrote 2,500 years ago. It’s a lesson the US military largely forgot after the Cold War, when we got in the habit of building huge, easily targeted bases. Now we must relearn deception as Russia, China, and other adversaries field, not only their own precision weapons, but… Keep reading →

WASHINGTON: The Navy wants the Army’s help win a future Multi-Domain Battle with China, a senior defense official told me last week, but to get it, the two services have to connect through a simple, robust network using small and rapidly-launched satellites. We don’t need massive bandwidth to handle video teleconferences, full motion video from drones,… Keep reading →

Bob Scales has run a lot of war games. I covered him doing them back in the late 1990s. Plus he’s held a lot of the most important jobs in the Army, including at the Army’s home of artillery, Fort Sill. He was around when the battle was on to ban landmines, which bear many similarities… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: I thought I could hear Air Force and allied F-35 pilots around the world smiling when the new Air Force Chief of Staff said today that comparing the F-35 to the Chinese J-20 “is almost an irrelevant comparison.” The F-35, said Gen. David Goldfein, is “about a family of systems and it’s about a network — that’s what… Keep reading →

A new Government Accountability Office report scolds the Department of Defense for failing to figure out which rare earth elements are critical to national security — China controls the world market — and for not developing plans to make sure the United States has enough even though Congress passed a law telling them to five years… Keep reading →