Monday, June 1, 2020
Key Issues NNSA report Iron Dome to CENTCOM LOGCAP V
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 Navy is seeking $1 billion in fiscal year 2021 for the Conventional Prompt Strike program, providing the most detail to date about its plans to arm two submarine classes with a sea-launched, conventionally armed ultra-fast, maneuvering weapon for long-range strike options.
The U.S. combatant commander responsible for defending the United States from North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles today publicly renounced the Pentagon's 10-year plan to develop a Next Generation Interceptor, revealing a new effort to scale back requirements for the guided-missile project in order to accelerate fielding.
The U.S. military plans to have an initial space sensor layer operational as soon as fiscal year 2022 -- a new capability that will begin to close a blind spot in today's sensor network by giving commanders the ability to continuously track hypersonic boost glide weapons as well as long-range ballistic missiles from launch to impact.
The estimated price tag for the Army's project to develop and field a long-range, offensive hypersonic weapon has ballooned to $3.6 billion and the effort has assumed the highest perch in the service's fiscal year 2021 research and development request, an $801 million ask that is the largest single program claim on research and development funding in nearly a decade.
The Pentagon is proposing a major reconfiguration of plans to protect the nation from North Korean ballistic missiles by starting a new Next Generation Interceptor program while simultaneously adding two "layers" beneath the current defense shield -- a new Terminal High Altitude Area Defense homeland defense capability to work in concert with the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA.
The Army has launched an effort to identify "5th generation combat vehicle technologies" as part of a new anti-armor study that aims to produce a roadmap for building a tank meant to counter projected threats in 2040.
The Pentagon is settling on a concept for a Next-Generation Interceptor, a nearly 10-year project that will require a radical overhaul of planned missile defense spending while raising questions about the efficacy of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system to protect the nation in the interim.
The Air Force has tallied a $2.6 billion tab for its Enhanced Polar System-Recapitalization program, an extremely high frequency satellite system that when combined with an associated ground component is designed to provide naval forces operating in north polar regions -- such as nuclear-armed submarines -- secure, anti-jam communications that are difficult for an adversary to detect.
The Defense Department has imposed a "strategic pause" on Ground-based Midcourse Defense testing -- assessments used to bolster confidence in the system designed to protect the United States from a North Korean attack -- in an apparent consequence of the August decision to terminate the Redesigned Kill Vehicle program.
The Pentagon is eyeing a two-way competition for its prototype hypersonic defense interceptor program with plans to down select in the first 18 months to a single concept and later culminate with a non-intercept flight test.
North Korea could challenge the ability of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system to protect the U.S. homeland as soon as 2025, according to an assessment by U.S. Northern Command -- revealed by a lawmaker and verified by a top Pentagon official -- that anticipates continued advances in Pyongyang's long-range missile program.
The Pentagon is considering a proposal to bolster Guam's defense by replacing the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system with an Aegis Ashore site -- a move that would mark the first Pacific deployment of the land-based Standard Missile system to protect forward-deployed forces in the western-most U.S. territory against North Korean threats.
Raytheon has bowed out of a multibillion-dollar maritime airborne electronic attack competition, setting up a two-way race between L3Harris and Northrop Grumman for the Navy and Marine Corps' Next Generation Jammer-Low Band (NGJ-LB) program.
The Defense Department has tapped Northrop Grumman to lead Glide Breaker -- an advanced technology development program that aims to develop components that one day could enable a lightweight interceptor to defeat hypersonic boost-glide weapons at very long range.
The newest Virginia-class submarine order is estimated to cost nearly $10 billion more than the $22.2 billion contract announced last month, thanks to the price tag of major subsystems the government must separately procure and deliver to the shipbuilder for inclusion in the new boats.
Setbacks in the Air Force's program to ready the B-2 bomber to fight in contested environments triggered a new Selected Acquisition Report for the project, generating a previously unreported October assessment on the consequences of an 18-month, key software delivery delay that is forecast to push initial operations of the modernized bomber from 2022 to 2024.
The Navy is expected to finalize next month a major new analysis of its future surface combatant fleet that recommends how many medium- and large-displacement unmanned surface vehicles to fold into fighting formations with destroyers, cruisers, Littoral Combat Ships and frigates.
Nearly a year after it was created, the Space Development Agency is today beginning its work in earnest by asking industry to propose a wide range of "good enough" systems, technologies and capabilities that "enable leap-ahead improvements" that can be rapidly put on orbit in two-year tranches beginning in fiscal year 2022 in order to begin fleshing out a new National Defense Space Architecture.
The Pentagon's No. 2 military official today issued a stinging rebuke of Defense Department deliberations over developing a new satellite urgently needed to track -- among other things -- adversary hypersonic weapons.
The Navy's top advocate for surface forces said the DDG-1000 -- a low signature destroyer capable of independent, open-ocean patrols whose role in the fleet the service is still defining -- should be armed with long-range hypersonic weapons to "put the fear of God in our adversaries."