Monday, June 1, 2020
Key Issues NNSA report Iron Dome to CENTCOM LOGCAP V
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 Pentagon today formally launched a competition for a Next-Generation Interceptor, the most significant overhaul of the nation's missile defense system since 2004, setting in motion a high-stakes acquisition that could leave the United States vulnerable to North Korean threats if the project is delayed and promising, but unproven, back-up capabilities don't materialize as planned.
The Missile Defense Agency is asking industry for ideas on potential "disruptive technologies," seeking white papers by the end of June on new ways to improve defending against ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missile threats.
The Missile Defense Agency is pushing ahead with plans for a Next Generation Interceptor, circulating to industry today salient parts of a request for proposals that is still awaiting approval of the deputy defense secretary, a move that allows companies to get a jump on designing and building a new homeland defense interceptor before the project is formally accepted, according to sources.
The Pentagon plans to attack North Korean long-range missiles while on the ground -- if it can target them -- as part of its new strategy to offset anticipated shortcomings in the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system caused by modernization delays, including the Next Generation Interceptor development schedule.
The Pentagon today unveiled a collaborative research project begun in 2019 with Norway to prototype advanced technologies needed for a hypersonic cruise missile, revealing both the specific project with the Scandinavian partner as well as a previously undisclosed, overarching collaborative framework to work with allied nations on advanced technologies.
The Pentagon's inspector general is launching an assessment to evaluate the sufficiency of ground test and evaluation infrastructure to support hypersonic weapons development efforts.
The Navy last month considered launching a long-range experimental hypersonic flight test over the Atlantic Ocean toward target areas in the open sea more than 2,000 miles from Virginia, including points northeast of the South American coast and another roughly midway between the U.S. eastern seaboard and Western Sahara.
The potential long-term budget implications of the novel coronavirus pandemic are beginning to shape thinking about what weapon system programs to defend should military spending face dramatic reductions, according to the top Air Force general in charge of Global Strike Command.
The Defense Department is exploring a vast new test and training complex that would wrap around half the planet, reaching across the near entirety of the Pacific Ocean to support large-scale experimentation of advanced warfighting concepts, a move recommended by a classified study on the future of U.S. military superiority.
Adm. Phil Davidson, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has branded a proposal to improve the missile defense of Guam a "homeland defense" need and has notified Congress that a $1.7 billion requirement for Homeland Defense System-Guam is his top unfunded priority.
The novel coronavirus global pandemic that is currently spreading around the world will lead to an eventual reordering of U.S. national priorities that squeezes defense spending and accelerates efforts to draw down U.S. overseas deployments, according to a defense and foreign policy expert.
The Pentagon is asking Congress for relief from a statutory requirement that the nation's missile defeat policy and strategy be modified by appointing one or more acquisition executives to oversee homeland cruise missile defense and left-of-launch capabilities.
Raytheon says a new $2.1 billion Standard Missile-3 Block IB production contract drove the cost for each ballistic missile guided interceptor to its lowest level yet.
Raytheon and the Missile Defense Agency are exploring options to extend the range of the Standard Missile-3 Block IB -- pushing the ballistic missile interceptor to dramatically expand a defended area by allowing the weapon to communicate with off-board radars -- a move that would require enhancing one of the Aegis ballistic missile defense system's newest features: Engage-on-Remote.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded its first-ever multiyear procurement deal, a $2.1 billion package more than five years in the making that calls for Raytheon to manufacture 230 Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptors for the Navy and Japan.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Lockheed Martin a $932 million contract for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors in a deal to finance procurement with Saudi Arabia, which is responsible for the bulk of the purchase.
The planned launch of the Next Generation Interceptor competition was tripped up last week when plans for a review by the Missile Defense Executive Board -- whose approval is needed to release a request for proposals -- were postponed as Pentagon leaders grappled with responding to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, sources said.
The Pentagon has formally adopted the Space-based Kill Assessment as part of the Missile Defense System, delivering an initial variant to U.S. Northern Command in a recently disclosed move that marks a pivot for the small-scale pilot project to utilize commercially hosted satellites to mature the sensor network into an operational capability by 2022.
The Defense Department said today it conducted a successful long-range flight of a hypersonic glide body, an event it called a "major milestone" in advancing Army and Navy prototype weapons, flying an experimental payload more than 2,000 miles over the Pacific Ocean.
The Defense Department appears set this week to conduct a flight experiment of a long-range hypersonic glide vehicle that -- if successful -- will advance Army and Navy plans to mature prototype designs for land- and sea-launched offensive strike weapons as soon as 2023 and 2025, respectively.