By Nathan Jennings, Military Review: "The U.S. Army is currently grappling with a critical gap in its capability to win expeditionary wars against near-peer adversaries"
Our elite close combat forces are outnumbered. As a national priority we must increase the numbers of those capable of doing these hazardous jobs by transferring the skills of JSOC warriors to Army and Marine conventional infantrymen.
By Jack McKechnie, CIMSEC: "The U.S. Navy has perhaps the toughest problem among the U.S. armed services for planning long-term force structure. Navy ships and submarines are much more expensive and require far longer times to procure compared to the military equipment of the other services."
Hypersonic Weapons: Tactical Uses and Strategic Goals
By Alan Cummings, War on the Rocks: "Hypersonic flight is not new. The V-2 rocket and the vast majority of the ballistic missiles that it inspired achieved hypersonic speeds (i.e., speeds faster than the speed of sound or Mach 5+) as they fell from the sky, as did crewed aircraft like the rocket-powered X-15."
U.S. Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Weapons Dangerously Entangled
By James M. Acton & Nick Blanchette, Foreign Policy: "In October 1973, an unreliable radiation detector could have caused the end of the world."
The armed services agree they need to work together better — they just don’t agree on how. Now the Joint Staff is taking a hand.
This very fact must transform the way national security forces think about deterrence, power projection, nation-building, and defense. ID is at the core of the entire govern-mental and social structure, and therefore determines the stability of currencies and economies. It can be used to build national cohesion, and erode it in opposing nations.
ID warfare has its own set of technological capabilities, firmly rooted in all uses of the electronic spectrum. This has only been possible as a result of scientific advances over the past century.
So now, for the first time in a century or more, defense procurement and acquisition strategies must account for threats and operational responsibilities which extend be-yond the conventional, kinetic defense spectrum.
At the same time, because of sociological and population changes, alliance structures which have been in place for decades are now under extreme pressure, and in many areas may have lost their utility. When great sociological and historical upheavals occur, the threat of change creates uncertainty among populations, and this automatically trig-gers a turn away from globalist thinking toward nationalism. This has been the case throughout history. It is the case now, as we enter a period of great upheaval in the bal-ance of power.
This means, as we enter a period of greater emphasis on state sovereignty (national-ism), that self-reliance in national security will become of primary importance. It does not, however, afford us the luxury of abandoning entirely old alliances, nor even of abandoning entirely the doctrine, force structures, and technological patterns on which we have relied. But we will now need to look at new frameworks which accommodate hybrid and proxy conflict in both the military and social spectra.
The Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System is growing from an alternative to JSTARS to a multi-domain mega-network to connect all four services in future wars. Is this a revolution or overreach?
The Israeli Air Force just wrapped up a “Blue Flag” wargame with the US & European allies and a real war with Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
By Patrick Tucker, Defense One: "Experiment by experiment, the company is weaving aircraft, ground vehicles, satellites, and the rest into a network that will someday give commanders unprecedented decision-support options."
Soldiers Conduct Call-for-Fire with Robots
By Kris Osborn, Warrior Maven: "“We had four robot vehicles conduct a tactical mission while humans were safe in defilade. We built four robots that are refurbished M113 tracked vehicles and we’ve taken two Bradleys -- gutted them -- and turned them into two control vehicles with all kinds of sensors on them.”"