New Year’s Eve numerals arrive in Times Square on December 20, 2021 in New York City. (Rob Kim/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: Welcome to 2022.
It’s almost bizarre to type that. It’s not the most original thought, but just reading “2022” brings up visions of near-term sci-fi stories. It feels like we should have hovercars and figured out the looming environmental disaster by now.
While I can’t offer you that, I can offer you a roundup of what the Breaking Defense team did over the last few weeks as 2021 wound down. As I read through our collection of Year in Review pieces, I was truly struck by just how much news there was last year. There is so much that happens on a day-to-day basis that stories can simply get lost or forgotten about days after they publish, no matter how impactful they may have been in the moment.
Which is why I found our review effort so helpful this year. It was a good reminder of the really great work the Breaking Defense team published in 2021. In case you missed them, consider this your cheat sheet roundup.
Five Stories of Note:
- The underrated Navy topics you might have missed: 5 Stories From 2021
- Hunting vulns, from cars to drones: 5 Stories From 2021
- Defense aviation stories as Taylor Swift songs: 5 Stories From 2021
- I got to leave my house and have fun with the Army: 5 Stories From 2021
- Space was the place, including for starry-eyed optimism: 5 Stories From 2021
2021 in Review:
- Air Force got a new leader, a new fighter plan and can ditch old planes: 2021 in Review
- The Army fought to balance new capabilities with tight budgets: 2021 In Review
- Hacks raised questions about Pentagon’s role in securing cyber and networks: 2021 In Review
- Letting the subs go by, letting the budget hold me down: 2021 In Review
- For national security space, running to stand still: 2021 In Review
2022 Preview:
- For the Army, looming budgets and multi-domain everything: 2022 Preview
- The Pentagon’s new strategy might already be behind the times: 2022 Preview
- For Space Force, it’s acquisition, acquisition, acquisition: 2022 Preview
- Watching the Navy’s words vs its actions in the Indo-Pacific: 2022 Preview Preview
- It’s ‘delivery time’ on JADC2: 2022 Preview
- Managing China, whether through threats or talk: 2022 Preview
That’s just a taste of the hundreds of reports that Breaking Defense published this year, and just a taste of the major stories that happened. We could easily have done a roundup of service-specific stories just focused on Afghanistan, China or All Domain Operations, among other topics. If you want to check out our top 10 most popular stories, just click on this roundup.
As I wrote over Thanksgiving, this has been a year of astounding change for the Breaking Defense team; if nothing else, the roster looks much bigger than it did on January 3, 2021 (with another personnel announcement coming soon). On behalf of the whole team, I want to thank you for your continued support of the website and the work that we do.
In 2022, expect to see more of the insights, analysis and news-making that have been a hallmark of Breaking Defense since it launched.
