Thursday, June 19, 2025
Key Issues Defense innovation review Dark Eagle funding Guam JIBM
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The Army's effort to rebuild its air and missile defense enterprise is faltering due to reliance on outdated development practices and underuse of digital engineering tools, according to a new audit by congressional investigators.
The Pentagon is seeking prototypes for a new command-and-control system that would serve as the digital core of Guam's air and missile defense -- a Joint Integrated Battle Manager (JIBM) that can fuse data from multiple military systems into a single, coordinated engagement picture to counter advanced Chinese threats.
The Pentagon's marquee missile defense initiative, rebranded just months ago as the "Golden Dome" after a trademark conflict scuttled its original name, is now facing another branding setback -- this time from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
House appropriators are demanding the Pentagon produce a separate budget volume and regular classified updates for the Golden Dome missile defense initiative, pressing for transparency on a program the Trump administration launched with lofty promises but few details.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded a contract worth up to $429 million to Integration Innovation Inc. (i3) to evaluate potential next-generation missile defense capabilities -- just weeks after unveiling a sweeping new initiative to harness disruptive technologies across the missile defense enterprise.
In an unprecedented stealth rollout, the Trump administration has submitted its fiscal year 2026 defense budget request to Congress without public release or fanfare -- laying out two starkly different investment paths for new weapons depending on the fate of a partisan budget reconciliation package.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded a $35 million contract modification to the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) in an effort to advance work on a breakthrough speed-of-light weapon and draft a Pulsed Laser Roadmap, pushing the total value of the research effort to just under $50 million.
The Pentagon has quietly canceled a long-anticipated industry engagement on space-based missile interceptors, dealing another setback to the Trump administration's push to rapidly launch the most ambitious element of its new national missile defense initiative, Golden Dome.
The Defense Department abruptly canceled -- again -- a high-profile industry summit for the Golden Dome for America missile defense initiative, marking a sputtering start for the Trump administration's marquee military modernization project -- an estimated $175 billion project launched with fanfare at the White House two weeks ago.
The future of a promising new undersea surveillance platform -- designed to blanket the ocean with small, unmanned acoustic nodes -- could hinge on the Navy's fiscal year 2026 budget request.
The Biden administration's Pentagon leadership directed significant changes to the architecture of the multibillion-dollar missile defense system for Guam in the final days of its term, according to a newly released Government Accountability Office report.
The Pentagon's ambitious plan to ring Guam with a state-of-the-art missile defense system is running into fundamental obstacles that could delay or disrupt the project's completion, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.
The Missile Defense Agency has unveiled plans for a contract vehicle that could reshape the future of U.S. missile defense, outlining a $151 billion procurement framework to field next-generation capabilities across nearly every dimension of the enterprise.
The Pentagon has awarded Raytheon Technologies a $1 billion contract to produce up to 55 Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptors, a move that comes as defense leaders reconsider the future of the combat-tested interceptor -- slated for a production sunset -- amid growing demands from the emerging Golden Dome domestic missile defense architecture.
The Navy deployed a commercially developed cruise missile aboard an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer in the Red Sea as part of a broader exploration into countering drone threats, an experiment defense officials say could help lay the groundwork for expanding the Navy's capacity to defeat complex missile raids.
A House proposal to add $400 million to the Pentagon's Joint Fires Network marks a sharp escalation in support for a system the Defense Department views as central to future high-end warfare.
The U.S. military's top official overseeing missile defense for Guam told Congress the cost of developing a 360-degree integrated air and missile defense architecture for the Western Pacific island is approximately $8 billion, offering the first public accounting of a system Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth views as a model for Golden Dome for America.
The Pentagon has rescheduled a high-profile summit intended to draw nontraditional companies into its next-generation missile defense initiative, pushing the event from its original April 29 date to June 11.
A new U.S. intelligence assessment forecasts a sweeping expansion of adversary missile arsenals over the next decade, with China projected to make the most dramatic quantitative gains -- far outpacing Russia, North Korea and Iran -- in long-range and precision strike capabilities.
The Pentagon is opening the gates to an aspirational new era in missile defense development, publishing a wide-ranging, five-year solicitation that seeks paradigm-shifting approaches to delivering interceptors, battle management, electronic warfare, space systems, artificial intelligence and more.