Street to Fleet: How CNATRA Is Working Naval Aviation Training
The Navy’s training establishment is often treated as background noise to the “real” story of naval…
Read More »Beyond the Pandemic of the Mind: What It Actually Looks Like to Use AI Well
As an undergraduate, I spent two years studying symbolic logic. My mother asked me, reasonably, what…
Read More »Southern Spear and the Coast Guard’s Persistence Problem: Why the Case for a Coast Guard-Led Homeland Seas Just Caught Up With History
Bruce Stubbs published a commentary at the Center for International Maritime Security this month arguing something…
Read More »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 »
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...