Tuesday, February 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 United States and Japan advanced a project to field a new ballistic missile defense capability by demonstrating improved software on a special variant of the Aegis system -- one slated for land deployment but now on a ship -- that integrated for the first time the SPY-7 radar, marking completion of a "majority of the development" effort.
The Defense Department, which for 20 years has treated the acquisition objective for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as sacrosanct, is now contemplating curtailing future purchases to offset new fleet modernization initiatives, possibly signaling a new era where program cost growth will be borne by the project instead of budget topline increases.
The Defense Department is aiming to deliver elements of a new Guam air and missile defense system as soon as fiscal year 2024, a schedule that would appear to exceed the 2026 target top brass at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command set to counter advanced Chinese threats from every direction on the western U.S. territory.
An influential Pentagon advisory panel is readying recommendations on uncrewed, intelligent combat aircraft that can fight semi-autonomously alongside piloted weapon systems, specifically technologies and concepts of operation needed for swarming, attritable capabilities to support the Air Force's vision for next-generation air dominance.
The Army is exploring the potential of linking a radar designed to warn friendly forces of incoming indirect fire with sensors built to track aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles -- as part of an effort to provide as comprehensive as possible a picture of air threats to ground forces, according to a senior service official.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Boeing a potential $5 billion contract to support the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, allowing the company -- which fended off two competitors -- to maintain a key role in the GMD program which the Pentagon has broken into smaller parts and which Boeing has been prime contractor for more than a decade.
The Missile Defense Agency has tapped Lockheed Martin to "design, develop and deliver" what is being dubbed the Homeland Defense Radar-Guam, utilizing technology at the core of the Long Range Discrimination Radar, the SPY-7 and a large sensor planned for Hawaii as a central component of a new air and missile defense capability for the western U.S. territory.
The Defense Department is putting the final touches on detailed annual reports for its major weapon system acquisition portfolio, a nearly $2 trillion package of investments, that will provide lawmakers the first high-fidelity insight into long-term modernization plans in nearly two years. (UPDATED)
The Missile Defense Agency has set a summer 2026 target for the inaugural test of the Next Generation Interceptor -- giving the agency and a yet-to-be-identified contractor four years until the first of two planned ground assessments that will set the stage for flight testing the new homeland defense guided missile.
China's surprise demonstration last year of a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System prompted the U.S. military this summer to conduct an air defense exercise against a hypothetical threat approaching the U.S. from the south, a significant reorientation from the usual focus on the north, west and east.
For the first time, Australia and Canada participated in a multinational missile defense exercise with the United States, Japan and South Korea, a significant expansion of efforts to build advanced interoperability among five nations that, in theory, could lock arms in response to a Pacific crisis.
The Missile Defense Agency is working to hand over its fledgling domestic counter-cruise missile portfolio to the Air Force in accordance with a recent directive, but also plans -- for now -- to press ahead with a project launched last year that is slated to culminate with a homeland defense demonstration in 2023.
The United States executed a ballistic missile intercept test over the Pacific Ocean during a multinational maritime exercise that included Japan, South Korea and other nations, in an event that overlapped with China's coercive military exercises -- including missile launches -- around Taiwan.
The Pentagon's inspector general is beginning an audit of the U.S. military's marquee hypersonic strike project that will focus on one of the most salient aspects of the program: scheduled plans to begin fielding a new class of ultra-fast weapons by the Army in 2023 and the Navy in 2025.
Industry proposals for new weapon projects are "almost unaffordable," a senior Defense Department acquisition official said today, sounding a clarion call for the private sector to better account for increased costs attributed to economic uncertainty, including rising inflation, supply chain interruptions and labor shortages.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks has assigned the Air Force responsibility for acquiring a capability to defend the homeland against cruise missiles, setting the stage for a potential multibillion-dollar project and breaking a long-running bureaucratic logjam that in recent years had the Missile Defense Agency lobbying for the role. (UPDATED)
The Missile Defense Agency, after nearly four years of market research and analysis on how best to inject competition into the nearly billion-dollar-a-year effort to sustain, maintain and improve the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, managed to draw only a single proposal for a major new GMD Futures contract -- handing Northrop Grumman a $3.2 billion prize.
Senate appropriators want to dock $80 million from the high-priority Guam air defense project in fiscal year 2023 because the Pentagon has failed to account for its plans for the new project -- specifically the architecture -- in accordance with congressional directives issued a year ago.
The Defense Department is poised this month to significantly expand its fledgling fleet of high-altitude, long-endurance aircraft dedicated to monitor U.S. hypersonic flight tests, a development intended to support plans for an increased pace of assessments as well as opening new corridors for regular testing off the East Coast into the Atlantic Ocean.
Lawmakers want an independent assessment of the domestic, precision-munition industrial base, particularly any gap limitations on the Pentagon's capacity to replenish nearly two-dozen "critical" weapon systems in the event of a fight against Russia or China that extends more than six months.