Wednesday, November 29, 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 Defense Department is seeking feedback on plans to fabricate a pair of Over the Horizon Radar Systems in remote areas of Alaska, publishing a solicitation that sheds new light on government plans for the sensor project -- including construction completion by 2028, a year later than the original targeted fielding date.
The Army this month is expected to flesh out proposals for senior Pentagon leaders for all facets of standing up a new 360-degree air and missile defense system on Guam, including an organizational construct, program strategy and proposals for transitioning elements to different military services for operation.
Pentagon leaders are working to clarify lanes of responsibility for the defense of Guam, an unusually complex project -- even for the Defense Department -- that involves many intertwined organizational, functional and technological dimensions in a high-stakes, quick-moving project deemed crucial to defending, if necessary, Taiwan from China beginning in 2024.
The Pentagon has established an Innovation Capability and Modernization team to spearhead an effort to forge a hypersonic industrial base -- directing government investments to prop up fledgling suppliers in an ambitious goal to eventually wring as much as 80% of the estimated production cost of long-range, ultra-fast, maneuvering strike systems.
The Pentagon's top technology development official has designated a one-star admiral to head the Missile Defense Agency until the nomination for a new director to fill the three-star billet -- one of many senior officer promotions being blocked by Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) -- is confirmed by the Senate.
North American Aerospace and Defense and U.S. Northern commands are spearheading an effort to detect, track and identify the emerging threat of attack by small uncrewed air systems on the White House, the Congress and other critically important locations in the wider National Capitol Region.
Navy plans to launch a Maritime Prepositioning Force Next (MPF-X) project later this year are on track after the Senate Appropriations Committee proposed action that aligns with three other congressional panels overseeing Pentagon funding to back a proposal for the new-start project in fiscal year 2024.
The Defense Department should consider expanding current national missile defense policy -- which is focused on threats from North Korea and, should Tehran obtain a long-range nuclear capability, Iran -- to also counter a "limited" attack on the United States by Russia or China, the general nominated to oversee homeland missile defense told lawmakers today.
Next month, the U.S. military will begin bringing online enhanced, dynamic space capabilities that allow select sea- and land-based radars originally designed for ballistic missile defense missions to simultaneously conduct the new task of tracking orbiting objects to help fill gaps in the Space Force's Space Surveillance Network.
A House lawmaker is effectively blockading Pentagon requests to shift funds between accounts -- denying the U.S. military the ability to use budgetary maneuvers routinely used to finance last-minute, high-priority needs -- in a move that could cripple critical modernization efforts, rotations essential to integrated deterrence strategy in the Indo-Pacific region and more.
The Navy estimates a key contract to launch the Next Generation Jammer-Low Band into engineering and manufacturing development -- a milestone originally reached in December 2020 but delayed by a series of protests and legal wrangling -- will now be awarded in September.
An influential Army advisory panel is tackling digital engineering with an eye to reporting on the service's progress in adopting bleeding-edge practices as well as challenges and opportunities in this area in an effort to improve development and procurement of new weapon systems.
A Space Force project to provide an additional satellite layer needed for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to better detect North Korean and Chinese missile launches will hit the skids unless Congress allows the Pentagon to shift more than $100 million between accounts to keep the Wide Field of View space vehicles project -- led by RTX, formerly Raytheon Technologies -- on schedule.
The Pentagon is seeking congressional permission to shift $4 billion between budget accounts as part of an annual reallocation of funds the U.S. military has in hand, revealing a launch failure in the Defense Department's marquee hypersonic weapons project and proposals for eight new-start projects -- including a loitering missile system for the Army.
Lockheed Martin and the Navy conducted a successful ground test of a prototype datalink that allowed an Army Patriot guided-missile interceptor -- the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement -- to communicate with a Navy SPY-1 radar, validating design of the communication device and clearing the project to advance toward a planned flight test early next year. (UPDATED)
The Biden administration is balking at a House proposal the executive branch argues could upend two decades of missile defense policy by expanding the limited objective of defending the nation against intercontinental ballistic missile attack from North Korea and Iran to shielding the nation from the massive nuclear arsenals of Russia and China.
The Army is kicking off an "urgent" acquisition effort to give dismounted infantry a new tank-killing capability: a man-portable, tube-launched, kamikaze uncrewed aircraft called the Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (LASSO) program -- the latest indication of how the Russia-Ukraine war is changing modern combat.
The Defense Department's proposal to begin a new project called Large Scale Global Exercise passed muster with a key House panel that has agreed to fund the effort in fiscal year 2024 as part of the Joint Staff's portfolio of projects to replicate complex and changing operational environments during training.
House lawmakers have approved a Pentagon request to launch a new-start program in fiscal year 2024 that aims to allow combatant commanders to integrate "exquisite capabilities" into their global campaigns to counter weapons of mass destruction.
The State Department has approved for export to Poland a potential $15 billion package of air-defense capabilities that -- if completed as a final sale -- would give the NATO nation the most advanced package of radar and guided missiles, paired with a previously acquired command and control capability, available to ground forces in the U.S. inventory.