Tuesday, August 3, 2021
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.
Lawmakers want the Pentagon to draft plans to potentially accelerate upgrades of the Army/Navy Transportable Radar Surveillance (AN/TPY-2) inventory by piggybacking on Saudi Arabia's huge order for missile defense systems, including Terminal High Altitude Area Defense batteries.
House lawmakers are directing the Pentagon to continue exploring the potential for the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA to be used for homeland defense, tasking the Missile Defense Agency to spearhead a new report on options for development and deployment of the new guided missile to protect the continental United States.
The head of U.S. Northern Command will brief Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks tomorrow on a new command and control capability demonstrated in three experiments that promise to give leaders improved situational awareness by using commercial cloud computing capabilities, artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to better understand data the U.S. military already owns.
A House panel is looking to reinstate the Missile Defense Agency's authority to develop lasers -- particularly research and development of a pair of technologies with potential for knocking down ballistic and hypersonic threats -- a move that aims to roll back an internal Pentagon decision two years ago that effectively took such projects away from the agency.
House lawmakers are proposing legislation that would ratchet up demands for information from the Defense Department on a new 360-degree air and missile defense system for Guam.
The Missile Defense Agency, in the "most complex" missile defense flight test to date, is claiming partial success only in an attempted intercept of two short-range ballistic missile targets during the terminal phase -- a simulated last-line-of-defense for an aircraft carrier -- marking a second consecutive qualified result for the Standard Missile-6 Dual II variant since May.
A Senate panel wants better insight into high-level Pentagon missile defense acquisition matters, to block the Missile Defense Agency from long-term ownership of its fledgling Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor project and an independent review of major radars the agency and the Navy are procuring for similar purposes.
In what a senior military official called a "huge step toward joint interoperability," the Missile Defense Agency last week successfully demonstrated a new technology that could be key to a future 360-degree Guam missile defense capability, "bridging" Army and Navy air and missile defense systems along with Air Force fighter aircraft sensors to collaborate in defeating a cruise-missile target.
House lawmakers are recommending $75 million for the Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii program in fiscal year 2022, a key stepping stone in the legislative process to potentially restoring funding for the ballistic missile defense project that the Pentagon two years in a row has attempted to eliminate.
The Army's Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System today successfully completed its sixth and final developmental test -- countering a pair of cruise missile targets today at White Sands Missile Range, NM -- setting the stage for the $7.9 billion program to proceed with initial operational testing this fall.
House appropriators have stripped proposed funding for a layered homeland defense from their mark of the fiscal year 2022 military spending bill, a move that -- if enacted -- would relegate to the backburner plans for utilizing the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems to backstop the Ground-based Midcourse Defense System.
House appropriators declined to fully fund the Defense Department's proposal for a yet-to-be-defined Guam Defense System, gutting the procurement request and trimming development spending for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's No. 1 modernization priority because the Pentagon has not addressed lawmakers' questions about the new capability.
The Missile Defense Agency last month put a pair of nanosatellites -- each about the size of a loaf of bread -- on orbit as part of a prototype demonstration of networked radio communications and tied to a new and advanced technology risk-reduction project linked to the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program.
The Pentagon shop that oversees testing and evaluation of all new major weapon systems is realigning its internal structure in a bid to "better posture" the organization and the Defense Department "to address current and future needs," according to a senior official.
The Defense Department is looking to immediately jump-start a new program to defeat small, unmanned aircraft systems in the wake of a call by Pentagon top brass last fall for a more coordinated U.S. military effort to defeat commercially available systems that pose a "growing" threat to U.S. forces both at home and abroad.
The Pentagon is seeking congressional permission to shift $4.4 billion among budget accounts to launch eight new-start projects, including an immediate down payment on a $2 billion bulk buy of microprocessors -- critical to the Air Force Military GPS User Equipment Program -- before the sole production line shuts down.
The Defense Department is asking Congress to temporarily lift a statutory ban on buying used foreign ships in fiscal year 2022 to jumpstart reserve sealift fleet modernization plans, allowing DOD to execute a four-year, $1.4 billion plan to buy 16 roll-on/roll-off commercial vessels.
The Pentagon is eyeing a next-generation Ballistic Missile Defense System that adds directed-energy weapons to its arsenal, including a potential high-powered airborne laser to defeat long-range adversary rockets during the boost phase of flight, according to a senior military official.
Funding for U.S. missile defense programs is not expected to be raided to finance Israel's $1 billion request to replenish munitions -- including Iron Dome interceptors -- expended during hostilities with Palestinian armed groups in May, according to a senior U.S. military official.
The Missile Defense Agency plans by the end of the summer to select two companies to draw up competing approaches for developing a Glide Phase Interceptor -- a new Aegis-compatible missile -- as part of a Pentagon plan to accelerate fielding within the decade of a capability to defeat adversary hypersonic glide vehicles during the regional phase of flight.