Friday, April 26, 2024
Key Issues Optical clocks Prototype funding SPAFORGEN
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 Defense Department this summer must produce a strategy for ground-based, theater-range, conventional missiles in the Indo-Pacific, explaining to Congress how billions of dollars in planned new offensive strike capabilities -- cruise, ballistic and hypersonic -- will be deployed across the region to counter China.
The Defense Department this spring must re-write its seminal missile defense governance policy to replace a controversial memorandum advanced during the Trump administration that curtailed the Missile Defense Agency's autonomy by elevating approval authority for key activities to senior Pentagon officials.
The Missile Defense Agency must extend a statutory accountability checklist for the Next Generation Interceptor program that was originally designed to end with the technology development phase after Congress lengthened the mandated reporting regime through production.
The Pentagon has a new missile defense assignment: craft a comprehensive strategy for developing, acquiring and operationally establishing an integrated air and missile defense architecture for select locations across U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, a 100-million-square-mile region that constitutes more than 50% of the earth's surface.
The Pentagon must think anew about missile defense in Europe, including how to defend against air and missile strikes from not only the east -- but also north, south and west -- and provide Congress a report this summer on options for adopting a 360-degree approach to address Russian threats emerging from all strategic directions.
A pair of U.S. and Japanese defense contractors announced a new teaming agreement to "collaborate" on integrated and missile defense capabilities for Japan's ground-based systems, in a move that could be a first step toward exporting to a Pacific ally the U.S. Army's new "game changing" Integrated Battle Command System.
The Defense Department is looking for help thinking through the complexities of deterrence and escalation dynamics in a world with more than two major nuclear-armed powers, fulfilling a statutory mandate to seek outside expertise in thinking anew about strategic deterrence with the advent of China as a second near-peer strategic competitor.
Space has emerged as the U.S. military's "most essential" warfighting domain, integral to all other aspects of combat power, according to the Pentagon's top requirements officer.
The Missile Defense Agency, which limped along last year without a Senate-confirmed three-star director for an extended period during which some of its top projects were nominated for budget cuts, is reinstating a post eliminated as part of a 2020 organizational overhaul: a deputy director who must be a two-star general or flag officer.
The Navy -- which failed to draw more than a single bid during its inaugural $3.2 billion air-and-missile-defense radar production competition -- is readying a follow-on contest for the SPY-6 family of radars likely worth billions of dollars that appears to reflect a lesson learned from the initial acquisition stumble.
The Defense Department can now re-purpose a homeland defense radar for Guam after the Senate dropped its opposition to the move, lending speed to the project to improve air- and missile defenses of the Western Pacific U.S. territory. The radar was originally purchased for Hawaii but never emplaced due to local opposition over the size and impact of the large sensor.
The Pentagon is wrapping a veil of secrecy around the substance of an upcoming Defense Science Board summer study, marking as classified particular areas of focus that will be explored as part of the influential advisory panel's marquee 2024 investigation, an effort that typically culminates in August and often shapes future weapon system investment plans.
The Defense Department is considering earlier-than-planned design selections for the Next Generation Interceptor and Glide Phase Interceptor to free up funds needed to finance fiscal year 2025 shortfalls caused by GOP-mandated debt ceiling negotiations that trimmed the Biden administration's FY-25 military spending forecast.
A proposal to dramatically expand in law the national missile defense policy -- with a provision proposed in the House version of the fiscal year 2024 defense authorization bill the Biden administration warned would be destabilizing, unaffordable and undoable -- was rolled back in the final version of the legislation.
Lawmakers have more than doubled authorized spending for hypersonic defense in fiscal year 2024, fully funding the Missile Defense Agency's off-budget wish to add $225 million to the Pentagon's $208 million formal request and directing an accelerated development and fielding plan for the Glide Phase Interceptor.
The potential for space-based missile defense capabilities -- including orbiting interceptors -- will get another serious assessment in 2024, more than 40 years after President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative and nearly six years after the Pentagon last explored the matter, this time at Congress' direction.
The Defense Department plans next month to conduct the second of two major technical reviews for the Next Generation Interceptor competition, assessing Northrop Grumman's design and select components for a homeland defense guided-missile prototype after completing a similar review in October of the same for Lockheed Martin.
A new variant of the Ground-based Interceptor successfully stopped an intermediate-range ballistic missile today over the Pacific Ocean using a booster that utilized only two of three available rocket stages -- demonstrating the ability to release the kill vehicle earlier, significantly expanding both the engagement area and time available to counter inbound threats.
The Defense Department plans to conduct a test of the homeland ballistic missile defense system today, launching a Ground-based Interceptor from Vandenberg Space Force Base, CA this morning.
The conflicts in Ukraine and Israel have ushered in a new "era of missile-centric warfare" and elevated the importance of missile defense systems, demonstrating in real-world events capabilities previously relegated to intelligence forecasts and baked into key policy documents, including the 2022 National Defense Strategy, according to a senior Pentagon official.