The Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) must have enough artificial intelligence to fly unmanned at least part of the time, a secure network to control drones, and combination of speed and range that’s impossible for traditional helicopters.

The Air Force can be an “angel investor” for some startups, said Will Roper, the service’s top acquisition official.

Loaded with jet fuel, the drones will vastly extend the ranges of carrier-based aircraft operating in the expanses of the western Pacific. That lets the Navy strike deeper into China’s layered defenses while keeping the big decks out of range of most of China’s anti-ship missiles.

Today, the Defense Department announced that MALD-X (Miniature Air-Launched Decoy) successfully completed a “a complex free flight demonstration of advanced electronic warfare techniques.”

Manned air and ground forces would work together and protect each other along the front line, while relatively expendable drones and missiles go deep into enemy airspace.

Lockheed is as close to an incumbent as you get in the rapidly evolving world of high-energy fiber lasers. Raytheon, by contrast, only recently made a big play for laser weapons, but they can draw on their experience with lower-powered but exquisitely tuned laser sensors.

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.

TEL AVIV: Faced with a growing missile threat, Israel will add $8 billion to improve its active and passive missile defense systems. This in addition to the money already allocated for this by the Israeli government and the U.S administration. Israeli sources said July 24 that the additional funds reflect the “growing threat” based on… Keep reading →

The concepts the Warfighting Lab comes up with aren’t holy writ, but rather a baseline for young Marines to build on, “a point from which to deviate,” said Maj. J.B. Persons, a special projects officer at MCWL. “Give Marines new tools or toys, and they’ll surprise you every time.”

“Those will be debates we’ll have over the next couple of years, and those are some tough choices,” intelligence official Kevin Sherman told me. “Do we reduce some of those capabilities have been very helpful in the CT (counter-terrorism) fight, that a lot of our combatant commands have relied on, in order to buy more exquisite things?”