Friday, December 1, 2023
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.
SAPA Placencia, the Spanish defense contractor with a U.S. subsidiary developing next-generation transmission technology for the Army, has teamed with Honeywell Aerospace to collaborate on enhanced electric power generation for combat vehicles -- with a goal to double energy output compared with current technology.
The U.S. military has drafted a blueprint for the first incremental upgrade of its small fleet of long-range hypersonic strike weapons and has laid out plans for a two-year production of improved glide vehicles that incorporate new technology slated to be available for Army ground units and Navy ships in 2026 and 2027.
The Defense Department is drafting plans for a new air- and missile-defense capability -- a $4.4 billion near-term investment -- to provide a mobile land system that protects Guam against advanced Chinese threats as soon as 2026 that could also have utility in other regions of the world, including protecting U.S. cities and critical domestic infrastructure.
The Defense Department today successfully executed a major test that caps a five-year project to meet an "urgent requirement" to expand the protective shield over South Korea against the North's ballistic missile threats by forging new connections between the U.S. Army's upper- and lower-tier missile defense systems.
The Missile Defense Agency is seeking $9.6 billion in fiscal year 2023 to grow the guided missile inventory and support key projects, such as launching prototype Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensors, designing a new Guam defense system and continuing development on new interceptors to defeat a limited ICBM attack and hypersonic glide vehicles.
The Biden administration is adopting a key formulation of national objectives for the non-nuclear forces established by the Trump administration in 2018, a force planning construct that calls for the U.S. military to be able to defeat aggression by a major power while simultaneously deterring opportunistic aggression elsewhere.
The top U.S. military official responsible for defending the nation against a North Korean nuclear strike said he is "very concerned" about the Pentagon's ability to keep pace with Pyongyang's technical advances in developing long-range missiles and industrial capacity to expand its offensive fleet.
The Missile Defense Agency sponsored nearly a third of the projects flight tested last fall during a series of sounding rocket tests to evaluate potential technologies to improve the U.S. military's hypersonic program -- a strong showing for the defensive portfolio which represents about 10% of total Pentagon spending on hypersonic capabilities.
The U.S. government has agreed for the first time to integrate a foreign nation into the Pentagon's most critical ballistic missile defense network, approving a potential sale to the United Kingdom of a suite of technologies to create nodes that connect to the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications (C2BMC) system.
The Defense Department has set a fiscal year 2028 target for demonstrating a prototype hypersonic defense system to defeat long-range, ultrafast maneuvering glide vehicles during mid-flight -- more than 10 years after Congress directed the U.S. military to establish a program to plug an anticipated hole in U.S. air- and missile-defense capabilities.
The Defense Department last summer decommissioned a pair of missile defense satellites -- the Space Tracking and Surveillance System -- which delivered three times their original forecast service life but were nevertheless expected as recently as last year to remain in orbit supporting the U.S. military until 2023.
The Defense Department -- buoyed by recent rapid advances in directed-energy technology and alarmed by North Korean progress in maturing intercontinental rockets as well as other potential adversary threats -- is readying a proposal to accelerate development of the Holy Grail of lasers: a megawatt-powered weapon capable of killing ballistic missiles.
The Defense Department for the first time has destroyed a cruise missile target with a laser during a test in New Mexico -- a seminal achievement in the campaign to weaponize directed-energy technology and a demonstration that the game-changing potential to revolutionize operational concepts and dramatically alter the way U.S. forces fight is at hand.
The Pentagon's new five-year spending plan allocates "significant money” -- about $10 billion -- to accelerate procurement of offensive hypersonic weapons as part of an effort to not only field a new family of ultrafast maneuvering glide vehicles soon but to give U.S. commanders this next-generation strike capability "in numbers," according to a DOD official.
The Defense Department has demonstrated record-setting hypersonic speeds for cannon-launched guided projectiles during recent tests in New Mexico and Utah, part of an applied research project exploring the potential for use by the Army of a medium-range railgun for air and missile defense.
The United States will require robust force presence in Guam, Japan, the Philippines and Australia to effectively defend Taiwan against attack by mainland China, the top U.S. military commander for the region told Congress in remarks today that framed for the first time these locations as hubs in U.S. Indo-Pacific Command planning.
The Pentagon project to develop a new integrated air and missile defense system for Guam -- an undertaking with benchmark-setting potential for countering advanced ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missile threats -- won backing from Congress to accelerate the effort in the final version of the fiscal year 2022 spending bill.
A senior Defense Department official said the Russia-Ukraine war now ranks among the most significant strategic-deterrent crises the nation has faced since the advent of atomic weapons, while bemoaning the aging state of strategic weapon systems in the Pentagon's arsenal.
A major Pentagon project to bolster ballistic missile defenses on the Korean peninsula faltered last fall when the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system attempted -- and failed -- to control two Patriot guided-missile interceptors during a previously unreported flight test.
The Missile Defense Agency is bracing to tack on another year to the Ground-based Midcourse Defense development and sustainment contract, potentially extending Boeing's run as prime contractor for the marquee homeland defense weapon system to 14 consecutive years, even as the government is working to inject new competition into the GMD program.