Saturday, May 11, 2024
Jason Sherman is a reporter for Inside Defense. For more than two decades -- including stints with Defense News and Armed Forces Journal -- he has covered the Pentagon, defense industry, the military budget, weapon system acquisition and defense policy formulation as well as reporting on technology, business, and global arms trade. Jason has traveled to more than 40 countries, studied medieval history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and lives in Brooklyn.
The Missile Defense Agency is on the cusp of securing a major bureaucratic victory after prevailing on lawmakers to roll back a law mandating weapon system procurement authority be transitioned to the military departments, a policy shift with implications most immediately for the Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense program.
Legislation, poised to become law, would require the Pentagon to craft a strategy to add a new layer of asymmetric countermeasures to the U.S. missile defense system to defeat ultra-fast maneuvering threats -- including hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles.
Congress has settled on three new 2023 policy initiatives related to the Guam air and missile defense project, including the requirement that the Defense Department appoint a senior official to oversee the wrangling of personnel, equipment, budgets and more across military services associated with the effort to begin fielding a new capability as soon as 2024.
Congress is poised to lay a major new requirement on the U.S. military's long-range missile defense enterprise, mandating a comprehensive set of actions to establish persistent cybersecurity operations and testing for ballistic missile defense systems and networks.
The Defense Department would be required to draft a plan to triple the size of the Next Generation Interceptor inventory -- from 20 to 64 guided missiles -- a move that could drive the procurement price tag for the homeland defense interceptor fleet from $2.3 billion to more than $7 billion.
The Army will begin experimenting with prototype big guns in the Arizona desert next week to assess the potential for mounting artillery on wheeled vehicles, conducting live-fire tests of extended-range, soft-recoil technology paired with new tubes, including a Next-Generation Cannon, to possibly replace towed systems now vulnerable to counterbattery fire.
The Pentagon's new status report on China's military power highlights three potential threats to Guam -- advanced air, sea and ground systems -- that could credibly strike U.S. military bases on the Western Pacific U.S. territory and complicate any attempt by Washington to counter a Beijing offensive against Taiwan.
The Army shot down a cruise missile target last week in a paradigm-changing demonstration of a prototype technology that could dramatically increase the defensive range of Patriot interceptors by allowing the guided missiles to use any sensor -- air, ground or sea -- available on the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS).
Japan executed its maiden launch of a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor -- the most advanced Aegis guided missile which it co-developed, and is co-producing, with the United States -- as part of a major ballistic missile defense live-fire event in the Pacific Ocean in concert with the U.S. Navy and Missile Defense Agency.
X-Bow Systems -- a New Mexico-based start-up that claims to bring 21st-century manufacturing technologies and know-how to solid-rocket motor production -- has answered the Pentagon's call for a potential new domestic supplier of boosters needed to power Army and Navy plans to scale production of long-range hypersonic strike weapons.
The Army last month experimented with a potential revolutionary new capability by using a missile defense system to spot a ground threat in a simulated setting and digitally pass the targeting information to a long-range strike system which then executed an attack against the ground target.
The U.S military has demonstrated a new capability crucial to plans to defend Guam beginning in 2024 against advanced Chinese air and missile threats, linking radar on Navy destroyers for the first time with Army and Marine Corps ground sensors as well as Air Force fighter aircraft.
Army testers are readying a final assessment of Integrated Air and Missile Defense operational effectiveness, suitability and survivability after completing a major appraisal, setting the stage for an early 2023 full-rate production decision and a pivot to follow-on development that includes integration with the F-35 fighter and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system.
The Defense Department wants a new over-the-horizon radar to be operational by 2027 to detect and decrease risk from potential Russian and Chinese cruise missile strikes against U.S. critical assets and plans to brief industry in early December on a new homeland defense sensor competition that will launch next summer to support this goal.
The United States is exploring the possibility of teaming with Japan to develop a counter-hypersonic interceptor, a project that could allow the Pentagon to share the cost of developing a new guided missile and build on the 16-year collaboration that produced the newest Aegis weapon: the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA.
Defense Department plans to beef up Guam's air and missile defenses is prompting the Army to contemplate development of an entirely new organization -- likely larger than a Patriot battery -- beginning as soon as fiscal year 2025 as part of the service's contribution to protecting the U.S. territory in the Western Pacific against advanced Chinese threats.
The Defense Department flew two dozen technology experiments in a pair of flight tests over the Atlantic Ocean last week as part of the U.S. military’s project to identify new capabilities to improve long-range hypersonic strike weapons as well as support development of defensive capabilities against such weapons.
The Army has formally approved for operational use on South Korea the software and hardware changes to its upper- and lower-tier missile defense weapon systems launched in 2017 in an effort to expand the coverage umbrella of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 systems.
The Defense Department’s new Missile Defense Review asserts modern air and missile threats pose “an expanding and accelerating risk” to the nation, its deployed forces, allies and partners -- and requires a special focus on sensor technology development to detect low-flying drones and hypersonic maneuvering weapons.
The Army is upending its acquisition strategy for Long Range Hypersonic Weapon ground equipment -- the vehicles and associated support gear needed for a second and third battery -- by looking to move from rapid-acquisition rules to traditional procurement regulations. (UPDATED)