Monday, May 20, 2024
Key Issues GAO on F-35 SLCM-N program office PrSM funding
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 Army committed an additional $1.6 billion in research and development funding to rectify the Integrated Air and Missile Defense program -- including the IAMD Battle Command Systems (IBCS) -- raising total start-up funding for the project to $5.1 billion, more than three times the original 2009 promise of $1.6 billion.
The estimated price tag for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program pierced the $400 billion mark in a new report to Congress, an upward revision that accounts for related funding previously not tallied in the acquisition cost and a reminder of how far the project has strayed from the original 2002 promise to deliver the stealth fleet for $199 billion.
The Defense Department today marked a major milestone in the race against China and Russia to field hypersonic weapons, furnishing Raytheon with a nearly $1 billion commitment to design, develop and deliver a new class of ultra-fast, maneuvering munition for U.S. fighter aircraft: a hypersonic cruise missile.
A congressional audit of more than $24 billion contracted by the Defense Department using other transaction authorities (OTA) found the Pentagon does not have a systematic approach for tracking which consortia receive awards, limiting the ability of contracting personnel to make informed decisions on how and whether to use consortia-based OTAs.
The Missile Defense Agency has tapped Lockheed Martin to conduct a study that aims to explore whether directed-energy weapons can be integrated into the Missile Defense System, a project that comes as a company leader voiced optimism about the potential for speed-of-light technology to scale up to power levels needed to defeat intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The U.S. military has taken ownership of a prototype 300-kilowatt laser -- the first of three different variants of a high-energy weapon with cruise-missile killing power -- marking a key milestone in the Defense Department program to scale up directed-energy technology.
The United States and Japan advanced a project to field a new ballistic missile defense capability by demonstrating improved software on a special variant of the Aegis system -- one slated for land deployment but now on a ship -- that integrated for the first time the SPY-7 radar, marking completion of a "majority of the development" effort.
The Defense Department, which for 20 years has treated the acquisition objective for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as sacrosanct, is now contemplating curtailing future purchases to offset new fleet modernization initiatives, possibly signaling a new era where program cost growth will be borne by the project instead of budget topline increases.
The Defense Department is aiming to deliver elements of a new Guam air and missile defense system as soon as fiscal year 2024, a schedule that would appear to exceed the 2026 target top brass at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command set to counter advanced Chinese threats from every direction on the western U.S. territory.
An influential Pentagon advisory panel is readying recommendations on uncrewed, intelligent combat aircraft that can fight semi-autonomously alongside piloted weapon systems, specifically technologies and concepts of operation needed for swarming, attritable capabilities to support the Air Force's vision for next-generation air dominance.
The Army is exploring the potential of linking a radar designed to warn friendly forces of incoming indirect fire with sensors built to track aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles -- as part of an effort to provide as comprehensive as possible a picture of air threats to ground forces, according to a senior service official.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Boeing a potential $5 billion contract to support the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, allowing the company -- which fended off two competitors -- to maintain a key role in the GMD program which the Pentagon has broken into smaller parts and which Boeing has been prime contractor for more than a decade.
The Missile Defense Agency has tapped Lockheed Martin to "design, develop and deliver" what is being dubbed the Homeland Defense Radar-Guam, utilizing technology at the core of the Long Range Discrimination Radar, the SPY-7 and a large sensor planned for Hawaii as a central component of a new air and missile defense capability for the western U.S. territory.
The Defense Department is putting the final touches on detailed annual reports for its major weapon system acquisition portfolio, a nearly $2 trillion package of investments, that will provide lawmakers the first high-fidelity insight into long-term modernization plans in nearly two years. (UPDATED)
The Missile Defense Agency has set a summer 2026 target for the inaugural test of the Next Generation Interceptor -- giving the agency and a yet-to-be-identified contractor four years until the first of two planned ground assessments that will set the stage for flight testing the new homeland defense guided missile.
China's surprise demonstration last year of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System prompted the U.S. military this summer to conduct an air defense exercise against a hypothetical threat approaching the U.S. from the south, a significant reorientation from the usual focus on the north, west and east.
For the first time, Australia and Canada participated in a multinational missile defense exercise with the United States, Japan and South Korea, a significant expansion of efforts to build advanced interoperability among five nations that, in theory, could lock arms in response to a Pacific crisis.
The Missile Defense Agency is working to hand over its fledgling domestic counter-cruise missile portfolio to the Air Force in accordance with a recent directive, but also plans -- for now -- to press ahead with a project launched last year that is slated to culminate with a homeland defense demonstration in 2023.
The United States executed a ballistic missile intercept test over the Pacific Ocean during a multinational maritime exercise that included Japan, South Korea and other nations, in an event that overlapped with China's coercive military exercises -- including missile launches -- around Taiwan.
The Pentagon's inspector general is beginning an audit of the U.S. military's marquee hypersonic strike project that will focus on one of the most salient aspects of the program: scheduled plans to begin fielding a new class of ultra-fast weapons by the Army in 2023 and the Navy in 2025.