On this episode of the DefAero Report Daily Podcast, sponsored by Bell, Dr Mark Esper, the 27th US defense secretary, and Deborah Lee James, the 23rd Air Force secretary, who are the co-chairs of the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption discuss the group’s interim report that includes 10 recommendations aimed at helping the Pentagon accelerate the adoption of game-changing technologies and capabilities by granting key leaders more authority to make key programmatic decisions more quickly
and allow greater budget flexibility to turn promising ideas into fielded capabilities with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian.

On today’s program, sponsored by HII, Sam Bendett of the Center for Naval Analyses discusses the latest on Russia’s war on Ukraine including today’s unmanned aircraft attack against Moscow, impact of the war on Russian society, and CNA’s new report he co-authored with Jeff Edmonds — Russia’s Use of Uncrewed Systems in Ukraine — and Byron Callan of the independent Washington research firm Capital Alpha Partners discusses the deal to raise America’s borrowing limit and its implications on defense spending, whether focus on accusations of price gouging by defense contractors changes Pentagon spending sentiment and a look at the week ahead with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian.

On this episode of the DefAero Report Daily Podcast, sponsored by Bell, Dr. Bill Greenwalt, one of the nation’s leading thinkers on defense acquisition at the American Enterprise Institute and the co-author, with Tom Corbin, of the new report from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney — “Breaking the Barriers: Reforming US Export Controls to Realise the potential of AUKUS” — discusses what the Australia-US-UK partnership is and isn’t, the biggest impediments that stand in the way of delivering capability at speed and scale, the importance of speed to deter conflict, the imperative to change dated and onerous US export controls that hinder much-needed cooperation and irritate allies, areas where the technological partnership among Five Eyes allies can move more quickly and learn lessons that make more complicated efforts easier like equipping Australia nuclear submarines, how to more closely harmonize nuclear submarine technologies among allies to lower production and operating cost, how to more rapidly adopt commercial innovation to quickly and more economically address military needs, and what America can learn from its allies with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian.

On today’s program, sponsored by HII, Sam Bendett of the Center for Naval Analyses discusses Russia’s claim to have taken Bakhmut and Ukraine’s stance they are still control parts of the devastated city, why Wagner Group mercenary and convict force boss Yevgeny Prigozhin isn’t getting credit, how F-16s for Ukraine might change the next phase of the war, the high cost of Russia’s long-range strikes against Kyiv and Ukraine’s successful defense against those strikes, and an unmanned systems update; and Byron Callan of the independent Washington research firm Capital Alpha Partners discusses the prospects for a deal that averts a US debt default and what that deal might mean for defense spending given what happened in the wake of 2010 debt crisis that resulted in the Budget Control Act of 2011, what analysis of 2011-2016 tells is about what might happen next, and a look at the week ahead with Defense & Aerospace Report Editor Vago Muradian.