Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
Public Domain
The need to increase America’s defense budget, especially to modernize the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force, is made clear in this July 16 Forbes article [https://www.forbes.com/sites/davedeptula/2025/07/16/why-president-donald-trump-might-increase-americas-defense-budget/]. Here, retired Lt Gen. David Deptula hits home runs on several key points:
— Air and Space forces are the indispensable military forces upon which all U.S. joint force operations depend.
Base commanders will have more authority to approve the drones troops train with, giving them access to a variety of small drones, under recent policy changes.
The changes come after a memo issued by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth last week, which focuses on expanding the number and role of small drones across the services. The move seems to be particularly focused on the procurement process, ramping up domestic supply chains, and the rules that cover when and how the military can fly drones, unmanned aerial systems, or UASs.
For decades, the U.S. military’s M240 medium machine gun has proven its worth, but now the Army is looking for something new.
The Army’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget includes a project dubbed the Future Military Machine Gun, or FMMG, which is meant to eventually replace M240s for soldiers in the close combat force. The Army uses that umbrella term as the general label for infantry, cavalry scouts, combat medics, forward observers, combat engineers, and special operations forces.
The world of the wasteland as presented in the 2015 movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” is brutal, unforgiving, and, most importantly, reliant on the shaky relations provided by the suppliers of critical logistics nodes.
It has been ten years now since the release of George Miller’s penultimate (so far!) and masterful addition to the “Mad Max” saga. As a military logistics professional and a former logistics advisor to the Afghan National Security Forces, the core concept of the film, one that the entire existence of life in the wasteland hinges on, was both immediate and striking to me.
The Defense Information Systems Agency is exploring new partnerships with small businesses that can supply “a wide range of information technology” services to support its Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program office as it continues to mature, according to a federal contracting notice published Thursday.
“JWCC requires highly skilled services to support office operations, and the delivery of modern enterprise cloud services and related technologies.
The UK CAS, ACM Richard Knighton, proposed a future operational level Nato exercise to test command and control in unrestricted airspace.
The Army has solved its drone problem. What you do is: you shoot them with a tank.
Problem solved, right?
Not quite, but that describes some of the reaction after the service released its latest update to its “Tank Platoon” manual, known as ATP 3-20.15, late last week, and a set of diagrams deep in the appendix caught the eye of many online. It’s not hard to see why.
Taken by themselves, the diagrams do come across as a bit… optimistic.
The UK MoD has awarded an exclusive two-year contract to Cubic Defence UK for the provision of the ILT-A Weapons Effects System.
Anduril Industries conducted a series of flight tests of its Barracuda-100M AAV as part of the HSMM programme for the US Army AvMC.
The easy answer is often the best answer
Commander Salamander Substack
On Monday, the Congressional Research Service came out with its latest, Navy DDG(X) Next-Generation Destroyer Program: Background and Issues for Congress.
This is worth your time, as we need to get this right.
We have to get this right because we have yet to cut steel on a successfully designed surface warship since Ronaldus Magnus was CINC.