The near-term payoff for military AI isn’t replacing human soldiers in the physical world, but empowering them to understand the world of radio waves. That’s an invisible battlefield which Russia’s powerful electronic warfare corps is poised to dominate in a future war, unless the US can catch up.

WASHINGTON: If Chinese and Russian spies have been doing their jobs well, they might well have been able to compromise some of America’s most important satellites, including the missile launch detection birds known as SBIRS. A report out today from the Pentagon’s Inspector General says that Air Force Space Command’s failure to safeguard its supply chain… Keep reading →

The “separate but equal” sixth service (don’t forget the Coast Guard) will be created in stages, because, as Pence finally admitted publicly, it “requires Congressional action.” And, as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Paul Selva, admitted today, if Congress passed the relevant laws in a year that would “unprecedented.”

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.

The Air Force wants more AI, cloud computing, autonomous drone swarms and thousands of tiny satellites. But most of these projects are only now getting off the ground at the Pentagon, making the service’s new “Flight Path” a little cloudy.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is promoting what he says are unbeatable hypersonic weapons, and Capitol Hill is listening closely. The result is hundreds of millions in new funding lines.

With an Executive Order and a new study due soon that promises to take a hard line against Chinese imports, the Trump administration is opening a new front, while protecting the US defense industry.

When China published its description of SJ-17, the folks at AGI who track satellites for a living raised their eyebrows. The Chinese said it was an experimental satellite. But “the way they phrased it piqued our interest,” says Bob Hall, standing a dozen feet from AGI’s infamous ice cream stand here.

SPACE SYMPOSIUM: The Air Force, eager to get inside the decision cycle of China and Russia, is pressing ahead hard and fast to substantially speed space acquisition. In what is something of a test case for the service, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson last night committed to building the next generation of missile warning satellites,… Keep reading →

After years of missed deadlines, cost overruns and underperformance the Air Force has split the requirements for the troubled Joint Mission System program’s Increment 3, dividing them between the Coalition Space Operations Center and the National Space Defense Center. In a separate but apparently related action, the Air Force has also partnered with the nation’s spy satellite builder to create a new Space Situational Awareness satellite.