Wednesday, May 31, 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 U.S. government is protecting select strategic sites from small-uncrewed air systems with new counter-drone technology developed by a Utah startup that nabs a threat mid-air with a net, a system that is also proving itself in operations over Ukraine by thwarting some Russian intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions as well as kamikaze drone strikes. (UPDATED)
The Missile Defense Agency wants to know why a solicitation for a big-ticket contract -- one that eventually tallied $3.2 billion -- failed to entice more than a single industry bid after the government spent many years designing an acquisition strategy that aimed to revive competition in the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program.
The Army's fiscal year 2024 budget request is a "balancing act" that aims to fund the service's modernization goals while also paying for personnel and improvements to housing infrastructure, said the service's top civilian -- and will not include any dramatic funding shifts compared with the FY-23 spending proposal.
The Defense Department has completed a new, long-term aviation inventory and funding report, and -- in a major break with prior practice -- will no longer make the document public, withholding from scrutiny investment plans for one of the government's largest portfolios that cost more than $50 billion annually to support about 14,000 aircraft.
Lockheed Martin's venture capital arm, Hanwha Aerospace and AIM13|Crumpton Venture Partners are collectively investing $17.8 million in Fortem Technologies to help the Utah company scale its counter-drone capabilities, a market forecast to grow to $4.7 billion by 2027.
A key House lawmaker is calling for wide ranging enhancements to homeland ballistic missile defense after North Korea over the weekend launched an intercontinental ballistic missile on a lofted flight into the sea that experts said demonstrated the potential for Pyongyang to strike anywhere in the United States.
The Defense Department next month will conduct a full-rate production review of the Army Integrated Air and Missile Defense (AIAMD) program, a final milestone in the program's 14-year development that aims to unlock a planned $2.2 billion production run through 2027 and pave the way for both fielding to U.S. forces as well as potential foreign customer sales.
The U.S. and Canadian governments are augmenting the aging North Warning System with a new radar network armed with classified collection capabilities called "Crossbow," which is intended to improve the ability to detect approaching airborne threats while the two nations work to develop and build a new Over the Horizon Radar system.
The Defense Department is moving to lay the industrial groundwork necessary to mass produce high-energy lasers across the force -- on ground vehicles, ships and aircraft -- by shoring up weaknesses in manufacturing capacity of critical components needed to scale production of these powerful speed-of-light weapons.
Key lawmakers have directed the Pentagon to prepare a fiscal year 2024 proposal that ensures the U.S. military has a counter-high-altitude surveillance balloon capability in response to the Chinese airship that flew across the United States before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean.
Accelerating U.S. military hypersonic weapon projects -- both offensive and defensive -- will be the top priority of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee while marking up the fiscal year 2024 policy bill, according to the panel's new chairman.
The Defense Department is exploring the possibility of packing Navy ships with Army missiles after a hardware demonstration last year in Hawaii proved the feasibility of integrating the most advanced Patriot interceptor, the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement, with the Aegis weapon system.
The heads of U.S. Northern and Strategic commands took "maximum precautions" to prevent the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon from collecting intelligence on domestic military sites during its flight over states with sensitive installations -- including key strategic nuclear locations.
The Defense Department is clearing a path this month to establish additional domestic large solid rocket motor production, opening a competition to qualify a supplier to support Navy and Army plans for surging offensive hypersonic missile production in the coming years.
Defense Department plans to develop and field long-range offensive hypersonic missiles could cost one-third more than ballistic missiles of the same range with maneuverable warheads, a Congressional Budget Office analysis finds in a new report that provides the most detailed, government-published, unclassified discussions of U.S. hypersonic weapon programs.
The Navy program executive office for unmanned and surface combatants plans a three-day series of briefings for industry to outline the current state of projects and new opportunities for companies in a portfolio that is expected to grow in coming years.
Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne -- along with two government partners -- executed a second flight test of the Hypersonic Air-Breathing Weapon Concept, demonstrating technology with potential application for a next-generation, ultra-fast cruise missile and a key objective for the advanced component development effort.
The Army is looking to add a second interceptor to its still-in-development, next-generation cruise missile defense system, seeking a guided-missile to counter supersonic air-breathing threats as well as large-caliber rockets and setting the stage for a likely new round of competition for the Indirect Fire Protection Capability Increment 2 program.
The Missile Defense Agency executed a covert launch of the nation's most advanced Aegis guided missile interceptor over the Pacific Ocean, keeping under wraps until now an experiment -- which one senior Pentagon official also called a developmental test -- of a highly classified potential new capability for the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA.
The Missile Defense Agency last year conducted a test of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, not previously reported, that was designed to assess capabilities to defend against threats to the United States from a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile.