Sunday, June 23, 2024
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 Pentagon's acquisition executive is readying a verdict on the Army's Integrated Air and Missile Defense program -- a $7.9 billion effort vital to U.S. ground-force plans to detect, track and defeat modern air threats -- following last week's milestone review where the service requested permission to pivot from development to initial production.
House and Senate lawmakers have proposed adding $1.3 billion to the Missile Defense Agency's fiscal year 2021 budget request -- a 14% hike that would allocate $10.4 billion for guided-missile interceptors, radars, space-based sensors and more -- while also taking the agency to task for inconsistent budgeting across its modernization portfolio.
Lawmakers have charged the Pentagon's top officer with overseeing a comprehensive new assessment of U.S. air and missile defense capabilities of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Missile Defense Agency against advanced threats such as hypersonic glide bodies and long-range, ultra-fast cruise missiles and to develop a plan to address these threats.
The Army contest to find an off-the-shelf wheeled 155 mm howitzer will have at least three contenders: BAE Systems, Elbit America, Global Military Products, with AM General, another potential player, unwilling to comment on its status in the competition.
The Missile Defense Agency is asking industry for ideas on how to improve the Command and Control, Battle Management, and Communications (C2BMC) system, eyeing new enhancements for potential incorporation in planned upgrades of the global system of workstations, servers, network equipment and software that collectively ties together the $202 billion Ballistic Missile Defense System.
Lawmakers have declined to authorize funding for the Missile Defense Agency's proposal to add new layers to the homeland ballistic missile defense architecture -- a centerpiece of the agency's new modernization plan -- instead directing the Pentagon to provide detailed justifications for its vision to bolster the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems.
The Army would be forced to dial back modest end strength increases planned for the near-term in order to help finance a lame-duck proposal by the Trump administration to dramatically increase the size of the Navy fleet, a move that would shave 1,700 troops from a planned increase of 6,700 -- a 25% decrement between fiscal years 2021 and 2022.
Lawmakers have delayed a statutory deadline for on-orbit testing of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor from the end of 2022 to the end of 2023, authorized additional spending and definitively assigned the Missile Defense Agency responsibility for developing the new payload project.
Lawmakers have agreed to authorize -- over the objections of the Defense Department -- an interim upgrade program of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system that could, if backed by appropriations in fiscal year 2021, divert resources from other Missile Defense Agency priorities and potentially detract from efforts to develop a Next Generation Interceptor.
The Missile Defense Agency is delaying plans to award design contracts for a Next Generation Interceptor into early 2021, pushing a decision originally expected this month into late January or possibly early February that will winnow a field of three competitors to two for the multibillion-dollar contest to build a new intercontinental ballistic missile-killing interceptor, according to multiple sources.
Lawmakers are declining to immediately authorize U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's No. 1 unfunded priority in fiscal year 2021 -- a Guam missile defense system -- instead directing a sweeping assessment of the requirement and a report on potential regional consequences of arming the island with an advanced new system to provide 360-degree protection against advanced ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles.
The Missile Defense Agency appears to be closing in on a final acquisition strategy for a follow-on Ground-based Midcourse Defense development and sustainment contract, an effort that appears on track to break up a single support contract for the homeland defense ballistic missile defense system into multiple projects.
Russian military aircraft activity near the United States and Canada has sharply increased this year, prompting North American Aerospace and Defense Command to scramble 14 times since January on intercept missions -- more than twice the annual average and one shy of the post-Cold War peak of 15 Russian sorties in 2014, according to recently declassified information.
Senate lawmakers have recommended funding to upgrade the Standard Missile-3 Block IIA, a move that would add more than $100 million to the Pentagon's fiscal year 2021 budget for an engineering change proposal for improvements to the newest Aegis interceptor which has not yet cleared hurdles to full-rate production.
The Defense Department today disclosed a new hypersonic research project with Australia called the Southern Cross Integrated Flight Research Experiment (SCIFiRE), an endeavor that aims to feed new technology into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept.
The Army's Integrated Air and Missile Defense program -- a $7.9 billion effort vital to service plans to detect, track and defeat modern air threats -- suffered a minor setback this week, missing a planned Nov. 20 milestone review that aimed to transition it from more than a decade of development to initial production.
The Missile Defense Agency is delaying initial fielding of the Long Range Discrimination Radar -- originally slated for next month -- to June 2021, a change of plans forced by the COVID-19 pandemic which hampered facility construction and installation of the new sensor in Alaska earlier this year.
Lawmakers have proposed a nearly $40 million addition to the Pentagon's budget in fiscal year 2021 to advance efforts aimed at adding a layer to the Ballistic Missile Defense System for detecting and tracking cruise missiles to address the growing threat to the United States and Canada from Russian bombers.
Lawmakers have proposed buying the Army an additional Terminal High Altitude Area Defense battery, a move that if adopted would tack on $319 million to the Missile Defense Agency's budget, providing a denouement to a debate that flared two years ago when the Army secretary demanded $10 billion to take the program off MDA's books.
The Navy is entertaining future scenarios where the size of the Columbia-class submarine fleet grows beyond current plans for 12 boats, a potential option that would involve extending the production line beyond 2035 and require adjusting procurement plans for a follow-on Trident missile and associated weapon system the service is in the early stages of defining.