I Was Curious”: A Chemist, a Mussel, and the Navy’s Next Repair Problem
The Michelson Memorial Lecture Series at the U.S. Naval Academy is an annual scientific lecture series…
Read More »Rivets or welds? Today’s defense industrial base must relearn the hard-earned lessons of speed over quality
In November of 1943, the Liberty Ship SS John P. Gaines broke in two and sank,…
Read More »From Industrial Base to Industrial Network: Rethinking European Strategic Autonomy
Robbin Laird’s account of how Ukraine and Asia’s engagement are rewiring European defense industry identifies something…
Read More »Undersea Power, Not Submarine Politics: What John Blaxland Gets Right About Australia’s Deepest Strategic Problem
Five years into AUKUS, the Australian debate remains stubbornly fixated on a single question: will the…
Read More »The Drone Wars and the Impact Force: What Michael O’Hanlon’s Ukraine-Iran Lessons Mean for Force Design
A recent Defense & Aerospace Report Land Warfare podcast, in which Vago Muradian sat down with…
Read More »Two Wars, One Industrial Base: How Ukraine and Asia’s Engagement Are Rewiring European Defense
Europe’s defense industry is being remade by a war that is no longer purely European. What…
Read More »
The U.S. Air Force carries a large inventory of transports, tankers, and support aircraft that were never built with today's networked, sensor-fused Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) architecture in mind. The conventional fix, deep structural and avionics modification, airframe by airframe, is slow and expensive at precisely the moment the threat environment is outrunning the acquisition cycle. Obsidian Shield, a new offering from Newport News-based Integrity Defense Solutions, Inc. (IDS), is pitched as a way to close that gap now rather than waiting on a full recapitalization program that may take years to materialize. The Design Logic: Open, Modular, Bolt-On IDS describes Obsidian Shield as resting on a "truly modular, open-systems approach" paired with an "affordable, scalable production path." The intent is an architecture that can be...