The House Armed Services Committee rejected the Air Force’s strategy to replace the E-8 JSTARS and questioned its plan for the EC-130H Compass Call, even as it accelerated Navy shipbuilding.

In a world where knowledge increasingly matters more than physical power, US troops can’t quickly access vital information in a labyrinth of often incompatible and inaccessible databases. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure — archly acronymized as JEDI — aims to fix all that.

“It’s very encouraging,” McCarthy said. “It gives you high confidence in some of these investments we’re going to make….We’ve got these decisions coming up here by the middle of the summer for the POM 20” — the five-year budget plan (Program Objective Memorandum) for 2020-25.

“If something kicks off, we’re the first ones to see it,” the sergeants told us. “We’re the first ones to react. And you’re on the line, they’re coming after you.”

“I grew up flying fighters,” says Gen. David Goldfein, the Air Force Chief of Staff, “and I will tell you, when I see the F-35, I don’t see a fighter. I see a computer that happens to fly.”

What mission does the Army really need armed robots for — expendable scouts, perhaps, or supplementary fire support? And does buying robots for that role really offer more tactical value than spending the same money on mundane upgrades to, say, self-propelled artillery?

Today, Brig. Gen. McIntire told me, Army field artillery and air & missile defense are like two boxers, one who can only punch and the other who can only block. “We’ve got to have one boxer that has the ability to strike and block simultaneously,” he said. “That’s the speed that we’re going to need in the future.”

What should the device show the soldier? “Where am I? Where are my buddies? And where is the enemy?” said Gen. Townsend. “Then other stuff could be optional.”

if you can deliver new technology really fast, the US Army is now willing to pay your company much higher profits. And it’s working hard to make sure that new tech actually gets to new weapons.

Unlike the Taliban, Russia and China can shoot down our drones, jam our transmissions, and hack our computers. So to prepare to fight them, we need a very different communications network — one the US Army is now studying how to build.