Attacking the Drydock Problem: Robotics and the Compression of Repair Time
There is a phrase that keeps surfacing in conversations with senior Navy leaders and industry executives…
Read More »The V-22 Osprey and the Impact Force: From Assault Transport to Kill Web Enabler
I have just published Building the Impact Force: Marine Corps Transformation in an Age of Chaos.…
Read More »Matilda 1: A Stern Landing Vessel as a Test Case in USMC–Australian Army Co-Invention
In an earlier article I have argued that the U.S. Marine Corps and the Australian Army…
Read More »Beyond the Battlefield: War as a Phase, Not an Endpoint
A still-common view of war treats it as a parenthesis: first comes competition among states, then…
Read More »Fighting with the Fleet You Have and Building Availability into the Autonomous Systems Age
In 2017, I sat down with then Chief of the Australian Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett,…
Read More »Weak Signals, Hard Decisions: What the Columbia Mishap Teaches the Sea Services About Risk
The Navy and Marine Corps do not lack risk management (RM) processes. Risk, issue and opportunity…
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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...