Thursday, December 7, 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.
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.
The Army has identified seven candidate locations for basing its Iron Dome systems -- two batteries purchased from Israel at the behest of Congress which top brass, however, now say do not meet the U.S. military's needs to defend against advanced air threats -- eyeing options to either consolidate basing of the two units or splitting them across the country.
The U.S. military has assessed China's program to improve its nuclear forces has achieved "strategic breakout" -- a status that indicates the Defense Department is undertaking significant new planning, and possibly considering capability shifts, to meet Beijing's rapid qualitative and quantitative military improvements.
The Navy has drafted notional requirements for a next-generation X-band radar to outfit its major surface combatant fleet with an improved ability to scan the horizon to hunt low-flying anti-ship cruise missiles, setting the stage for a multibillion-dollar competition to replace the venerable SPQ-9B which has been in the fleet since the 1990s.
The Missile Defense Agency -- which seeks $1.3 billion annually for testing -- could not account for more than half of the $3.5 billion appropriated for such activities between 2017 and 2020, according to a federal audit.
The Navy is readying for Congress a proposal for a future long-term buy of Arleigh Burke-class destroyers beginning in fiscal year 2023, a package that would mark a fifth multiyear procurement and potentially the final bulk order of DDG-51s before the service transitions to a planned follow-on Large Surface Combatant.
The Missile Defense Agency is drafting a new acquisition strategy for the Standard Missile-3, eying a potential omnibus package that would bundle three variants of the guided-missile interceptor into a contract vehicle beginning in 2023 that could include options that extend for up to a decade.
The Missile Defense Agency continues to obfuscate cost growth and schedule delays in its $202 billion project portfolio by not clearly disclosing changes to program baselines, bucking recommendations nearly a decade old by federal auditors to provide clear traceability to provide lawmakers a clear sense of cost performance and the total price tag.
The Army last fall rebranded its marquee, big-bet, long-range fires science and technology project by stripping "strategic" from the title of the effort to develop a mega-cannon capable of firing a projectile more than 1,000 miles.
The Defense Department's chief technology official has expanded the list of critical areas for research and engineering in a gambit to "drive innovation" to new sectors such as renewable energy generation -- a push to enlarge the U.S. military technology development portfolio even as inflation is threatening to squeeze Pentagon investment plans.
New details about technologies demonstrated during a hypersonic technology flight test last fall were revealed today when General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems announced its self-destruct units were flown on two of three sounding rockets launched to assess potential new capabilities for the Pentagon's marquee hypersonic glide vehicle projects.
The Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense system -- rapidly acquired by the Army in response to capabilities Russia demonstrated in 2014 against Ukraine and which is now being fielded to units in Europe -- is not yet operationally effective nor operationally suitable.
The Air Force has released Boeing from future cost-growth liability on the KC-46A tanker, altering the fundamental terms of a 2011 contract that capped government costs at $4.9 billion and forced the defense contractor to pay out-of-hide for remedial work that so far totals $5.5 billion -- a move that comes as Boeing saddles the Air Force with a new major milestone delay.
The Defense Department is looking to the video game industry to help improve a high-consequence system used by U.S. military forces to determine where best to position guided missile interceptors and radars to defeat long-range missile threats, including North Korean nuclear-armed rockets.