Obscured by the attention focused on the Quadrennial Defense Review and various mobility studies is a Defense Acquisition Board review of the future of Global Hawk—the highly praised unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle that was rushed while still in development to the war in Afghanistan. The news is good, according to a decision memo from Kenneth Krieg, DOD’s acquisition point man who also serves as the chairman of the DAB. His memo states, “The board members agreed that this program is critical to providing a persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capability to the warfighter.” Though that fact is completely obvious, it’s still good to hear a DOD official say it outright.
The stand-up of the Space Force, and now its early overhaul and the creation of a new Space Systems Command, are all about resilience: Ensuring that space capabilities, which the whole country relies on, could survive a concerted attack by a near-peer adversary. As part of that drive, a new…