Sunday, April 28, 2024
Key Issues Optical clocks Prototype funding SPAFORGEN
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 may soon have the option to expand the striking power of its premier surface-to-surface artillery rocket by adding a new communications device that could allow Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System munitions to hit not only pre-programmed stationary locations, as they can today, but also moving targets such as ships or mobile missile launchers.
More than a dozen key Army modernization initiatives -- including new ship-killing missiles, a fleet of more than 1,000 small combat craft, a follow-on to the RQ-7 Shadow uncrewed aircraft and more -- are ensnared by legislation blocking service investment plans in fiscal year 2024 under the current stopgap spending measure.
The key to an affordable price tag for the XM-30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle -- a replacement for the M-2 Bradley that an early Army estimate pegged at $11 million a copy, three times the cost of a Bradley -- will be government-defined and -owned open software standards, said a senior service official.
Lockheed Martin's proposed design for a Next Generation Interceptor has passed muster with the Missile Defense Agency, clearing the way for the company to continue to mature critical technologies slated for the massive guided missile in pursuit of a critical design review slated for the summer of 2025.
The Defense Department is planning its most ambitious counter-drone demonstration to date, pitting a swarm of as many as 50 small uncrewed surrogate enemy aircraft over the New Mexico skies against a yet-to-be-determined group of candidate technologies in a contest where non-kinetic weapons, such as high-powered microwaves, may have an advantage.
The Defense Department is bracing for potential budget cuts of about $90 billion to fiscal year 2024 and 2025 plans -- painful reductions likely to squeeze weapons system modernization accounts -- in the event congressional dysfunction extends into January triggering a statutory sequester provision of the June law enacted to raise the debt ceiling.
The Defense Department is advancing plans for a 300-kilowatt combat laser -- sufficient energy to knock down enemy cruise missiles -- and has commissioned the manufacture of a pair of truck-mounted prototype systems for testing in fiscal year 2025 of a fundamentally new capability that holds the potential to change the way armed forces fight.
The Army is beginning a new Human-Machine Integrated Formations Initiative, an effort to deeply explore how robots will fight alongside soldiers, the top service civilian announced today at the Association of the U.S. Army convention.
The Defense Department has qualified a new large solid-rocket motor domestic supplier -- breaking up an effective duopoly between Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne -- and expanded the industrial base to support the U.S. military's high-priority project to develop and field a long-range hypersonic strike missile.
The Air Force hopes to demonstrate a radical new industrial feat that could signal a major leap forward for the aerospace industry by designing an aircraft and certifying its airworthiness before ever building a physical component as part of a new project launched last month to prototype a fixed-wing drone from concept through Military Flight Release inside a computer.
Lockheed Martin's venture capital arm has teamed with other investors to provide $12.7 million to Vayu Robotics -- a "non-traditional robotics company" that is making its public debut with this development -- to scale development of artificial intelligence-backed autonomy technologies for potential use across a wide range of markets.
A Defense Department study exploring the feasibility of opening up a stretch of the electromagnetic spectrum -- currently the exclusive preserve of the U.S. military -- for use by commercial telecommunications companies for 5G technology is complete and has been forwarded to the Commerce Department.
The Air Force and Navy are beefing up their capability to sink Chinese warships from the air by nearly doubling the planned purchase of Lockheed Martin-built missiles designed to strike heavily defended surface combatants: the Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare Increment 1 -- also called the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM).
The Navy plans to establish a dedicated program to manage procurement of a hypersonic capability -- both defensive and offensive -- in development since 2018 and slated to begin production in fiscal year 2024, breaking the Standard Missile-6 Block IB off from other variants of the SM-6 for cost and schedule reporting.
The Army has tallied a $7.2 billion price tag for its Mobile Protected Firepower program, a project to buy 377 light tanks for infantry brigades that will outfit six battalions but still leave the service shy of more than 30% of the total infantry requirement for a direct-fire capability needed to neutralize hardened enemy positions and armored vehicles.
The Pentagon estimates the total price tag for Boeing's F-15EX fighter aircraft program is $12.5 billion, a sum that allows the Air Force to replace its oldest two-seater fighters with a modernized variant of the 1970s-design combat system and puts a significant six-year squeeze on available funding to buy F-35 aircraft as Lockheed Martin struggles to reach objective manufacturing rates.
The United States and Canada are close to declaring initial operational capability of Cloud-Based C2 -- a new homeland defense battle management, command and control system to replace a tool established after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- that top brass say is needed to defend North America from modern threats and is a likely candidate to be part of a future domestic cruise missile defense system.
The Defense Department is set to begin reviewing Next Generation Interceptor designs, a major mid-point assessment in the $17 billion contest between Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman that will determine whether the respective proposals are sufficiently mature to proceed with developing prototype intercontinental ballistic missile killers.
The Defense Department earlier this month completed a joint tactical integrated fire control demonstration that culminated with simulated missile attack and response in skies over the Washington, DC area that will now inform an ongoing Air Force effort to design a program of record for a domestic cruise missile defense capability.
The telecommunications industry will not receive "carte blanche" to auction off lower portions of the mid-band electromagnetic spectrum that are critical to U.S. military air and missile defense capabilities, the Defense and Commerce departments have determined in a long-anticipated report, according to a lawmaker briefed on not-yet-public findings.