My colleague Colin Clark and I stumbled across a cool technology — Global Situational Awareness — at the Navy League conference. Offered by DRS Technologies, it’s a geospatial information system that also allows sharing of data from almost any source — UAV videos, schematics, photos, SAR, IR etc. — on a pretty simple touchscreen. The imported data can be overlaid on the geospatial data and used for mission planning and a host of other applications. Anderson Cooper and CNN — eat your hearts out.

The Army has let slip one of the worst-kept secrets in the world — that Israel has the bomb. But a Defense Department study completed last year offers what may be the first time in an official unclassified report that Israel is a nuclear power.

They worked on Droids in Star Wars, so why not an al-Qaeda communications center? “They” are electro-magnetic grenades — not something you’ll find in the typical armory but apparently something that could soon be in the hands of GIs.

The war in Iraq has been a windfall for hired muscle, with private security types able to pull in hundreds of dollars a day — at times doing the same job as a soldier. In some instances, senior managers for a company like Blackwater — the North Carolina-based company whose name is synonymous with armed […]

The new Army doctrine intended as the by-the-book bridge between combat and stability operations is a bold step — even making clear the Army’s role in helping to establish a judiciary once the major shooting stops. But there’s one place that doctrine framers decided not to boldly go with that mission — setting up a […]

If Lt. Gen. Donald Wurster, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, could put his hands on one more dollar to spend he would buy a heavily armed version of the new Joint Cargo Aircraft. In fact, he wants them so badly that after spending that dollar, he’d “go down the table, stab the others in the back and take their dollars” for the program. Or at least that’s what he said during a roundtable of four-star generals at the annual Air Force Association conference.

Advocates of the Joint Cargo Aircraft are working on Capital Hill to convince a House subcommittee that a delay cited by the lawmakers for axing much of the 2009 funding for the plane is not a delay at all. Meanwhile, the head of Air Mobility Command hopes that an anticipated mobility requirements study finally will answer the question of just how many JCAs the Air Force really needs.