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.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- The Defense Department is awaiting "passback" guidance from the White House, a topline allocation that will allow Pentagon leaders to lock in the fiscal year 2023 budget proposal and account for inflation forecasts that could significantly diminish weapon system buying power.
SIMI VALLEY, CO -- The Army's maiden deployment of its Israeli-built Iron Dome air and missile defense system is wrapping up, capping a deployment to Guam -- billed as an experiment -- that began in early October to exercise transporting the system and setting up for operation but not conducting any live firings.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- The gambit to deliver Guam a new air and missile defense system by 2026 -- U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's No. 1 unfunded priority which the Pentagon is still working to define and Congress has not fully funded -- appears no longer achievable, with a new target date set to be identified in the fiscal year 2023 budget request.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued "a call" to U.S. industry -- particularly information and technology innovation firms -- to help "bring the American way of war to the 21st century," directly appealing to national interest in the contest against China, previewing what he said is a pillar of the forthcoming National Defense Strategy.
The Marine Corps last month executed a key test -- previously delayed by software glitches that last year tripped up plans for a full-rate production decision of the $8.2 billion Joint Air-to-Ground Missile program -- firing the next-generation, airborne launched weapon from an AH-1Z Viper helicopter as part of an effort to integrate the weapon on the maritime aircraft fleet.
Earlier this year, the Defense Department turned to a relative newcomer in the missile defense business to prototype novel technologies the U.S. military is counting on to counter Chinese and Russian hypersonic threats, awarding L3Harris one of two competitive contracts for a Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor.
The Defense Department is laying plans to upgrade its future fleet of long-range hypersonic glide vehicles as frequently as every two years, creating windows for new technology insertion as experimental capabilities prove ready for production in a bid to catch up -- and overtake -- China’s current dominance of the near-space domain.
The Defense Department last week took a major step toward fostering an industrial base needed to produce hypersonic strike weapons, capping a five-way, private-sector contest to develop one of the most sensitive technologies required to develop a long-range hypersonic glide vehicle: thermal protection systems.
The Army plans to launch a second competition for Stryker-mounted, 50-kilowatt lasers, giving Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman in fiscal year 2023 a chance at procurement planned beyond initial prototype systems that Raytheon currently owns under a rapid-development and fielding agreement.
The Missile Defense Agency has tapped three companies to advance their respective concept designs for a Glide Phase Interceptor, setting up a three-way contest between Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman for a new Aegis guided missile optimized to defeat a new class of ultra-fast maneuvering weapons and give the Navy a second layer of defense against hypersonic threats.
The Standard Missile-6 must be a non-negotiable component of whatever new air and missile defense system is designed for Guam because it is the only fielded counter-hypersonic capability, said a senior Missile Defense Agency official -- an assertion that implies the Navy’s Aegis Ashore should be a central component of any system acquired for the Western Pacific U.S. territory.
Taiwan’s ability to deter war with mainland China is “in a period of dangerous uncertainty” requiring Congress to take “urgent measures” to strengthen the credibility of U.S. military deterrence, according to a new report.
The Army’s most advanced Patriot interceptor knocked down ballistic missile targets this month during a key reliability test, an event that marked the first successful launch of a PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement by the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) as well as the beginning of a field surveillance program for the growing guided-missile fleet.
Lockheed Martin is readying to ramp up production of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors in 2022 with a new manufacturing line that -- when paired with beefed up supplier agreements -- will double the annual output of the new guided missiles.
The Defense Department did not violate the law in 2020 when it overhauled missile defense policies and governance rules, federal investigators ruled in a new report requested by Congress.
Lawmakers want the Army to begin work immediately on maneuvering submunitions for long-range precision fires while also backing a service proposal for a new project to develop a maneuvering variant of a surface-to-surface missile -- effectively doubling down on efforts to add non-ballistic capabilities to the register of planned Precision Strike Missile improvements.
The Defense Department assesses that China in 2020 fielded a hypersonic strike weapon -- the DF-17, a maneuvering glide body paired with a medium-range ballistic missile with an estimated range of 1,500 miles -- a public declaration that Beijing has operationalized a technology the U.S. military has not yet fielded and tacit admission the Chinese military for now dominates the near-space domain.
The Missile Defense Agency has formally launched a contest to scale back Boeing's decade-long grip on the entire development and sustainment prime contract for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, publishing a request for proposals for the first of two planned full-and-open competitions for future GMD work that will be in addition to a guaranteed, but smaller, continued role for Boeing.
The Pentagon has outlined for Congress options for a new integrated air and missile defense of Guam in a classified report that marks the latest development in a long-running internal Defense Department debate over the efficacy of such as system, outlining a potential capability that uses elements of the Aegis Ashore as a building block and ties in Army technologies.
The Army and Lockheed Martin are aiming by the end of this year to begin incorporating a multimode seeker into the Precision Strike Missile -- adding a sensor that will give the long-range weapon an option to attack ships as well as surface targets -- expanding the service's inventory of so-called multidomain weapons, a capability intended to complicate China's response in a potential conflict.