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 Missile Defense Agency, which spends more than $1 billion annually on testing, did something completely new today as part of announcing the most significant flight test on its 2020 calendar: it made public a two-minute animation of the event to help explain what goes into a complex ballistic missile defense scenario such as this week's Flight Test Aegis Weapon System-44 (FTM-44) that stretched across multiple time zones and military test ranges.
A Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor shot down an intercontinental ballistic missile target during a flight test over the Pacific Ocean last night, demonstrating the extended reach of a weapon originally designed for shorter-range regional threats and bolstering Pentagon plans to add a second layer of homeland defenses against a limited ICBM attack from North Korea and potentially Iran.
A key congressional panel, concerned by a recent independent cost estimate for the Pentagon's marquee offensive hypersonic strike weapon, is moving to rein in plans for the Conventional Prompt Strike program by clipping Navy-requested procurement funding as well as resources sought for a Block 2 variant and blueprint efforts to integrate the two-stage booster and hypersonic glide vehicle into the Virginia-class submarine.
Senate appropriators have rejected the Pentagon's gambit to give the Space Development Agency funding control of the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor project in a recommendation that appears set to end a bureaucratic turf skirmish and consolidate the Missile Defense Agency's role as the lead entity for the new orbiting technology project.
A Missile Defense Agency signature project -- adding two "layers” to the homeland ballistic missile defense architecture by folding in the newest Aegis ballistic missile interceptor and a future variant of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptor -- is on the ropes after lawmakers raised serious concern about the endeavor's maturity.
The Defense Department is reversing gears on plans to halt the Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii project, exploring a new potential location for the sensor at the Navy-controlled Pacific Missile Range Facility, charting a course to continuing the program in the face of united support by all four congressional defense committees to reinstate funding for the effort in fiscal year 2021. (UPDATED)
The Army has tapped Lockheed Martin to oversee integration of a Mid-Range Capability prototype battery, awarding a sole-source contract to design a land-based launcher for two mainstay Navy strike weapons built by competitor Raytheon -- the Tomahawk cruise missile and Standard Missile-6 -- as part of a major push by the Pentagon to rapidly address a shortfall highlighted by a recent service assessment and combatant commanders.
The Defense Department has slammed the door on public access to a Google-like research tool that allows users to quickly navigate the U.S. military’s unclassified and unwieldy annual budget -- now more than $700 billion and spread across scores of volumes, some thousands of pages long -- moving the important resource behind a firewall where it sits with classified research accessible to government employees only.
The Defense Department has awarded Lockheed Martin a contract to upgrade the Aegis Weapon System to improve Navy cruisers' and destroyers' ability to detect, track, and defeat new intermediate-range threats as well as track and report on maneuvering hypersonic threats.
The Defense Department this week moved to turn the tables on China, forming a new University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics to accelerate work on ultra-fast weapons by increasing collaboration with academic communities -- a project that aims to replicate an idea born in Beijing where professors and students work closely to advance national aims.
The Defense Department this week disclosed a significant new hypersonic project that is tailored to potentially outfit naval aviators with an ultrafast cruise missile -- particularly F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters operating from aircraft carriers -- that aims to advance a Boeing concept for a dual-mode scramjet design.
The Army is moving to adopt land-based variants of the Navy's strike inventory -- eyeing the Tomahawk cruise missile and Standard Missile-6 -- in order to field by 2023 a prototype Mid-Range Capability battery, filling an "extremely high risk" capability gap by adding a layer to its long-range precision fires portfolio for targets between the ranges of its planned Precision Strike Missile and Long Range Hypersonic Weapon.
Northrop Grumman has revealed key suppliers for its Next Generation Interceptor proposal, including Aerojet Rocketdyne and four other companies.
Oshkosh Defense and the Army have agreed to design changes for the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles A2 variant that aim to resolve problems that surfaced during reliability evaluations in May, with the contractor set next month to begin "shakedown" testing in an effort to resume reliability testing in 2021.
Boeing, prime contractor for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, has warned government auditors that if the Missile Defense Agency breaks the current contract used to manage the homeland defense system into smaller projects as the Defense Department is currenting considering, then the company could lose "irreplaceable" personnel with experience and expertise on the program.
The Army's new contest to find a wheeled 155 mm howitzer will have at least two candidates, with BAE Systems today announcing it is offering the Archer, in service with the Swedish army, and AM General offering its Brutus, a M777 cannon mounted on a Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles truck.
Lockheed Martin is drafting plans for a sea-based variant of its most advanced Patriot interceptor -- the Missile Segment Enhancement -- in response to the Missile Defense Agency's request for ideas on ways to defeat a hypersonic weapon during the terminal phase.
Lockheed Martin today disclosed it has teamed with Aerojet Rocketdyne on the Next Generation Interceptor competition, effectively guaranteeing Aerojet Rocketdyne a spot on a winning bid.
Congress has blessed an Army proposal to accelerate the next round of competition on the Precision Strike Missile, allowing the service to more than double spending immediately on multimode seeker technology for the new ground-launched, long-range munition.
The Army is preparing to acquire a small set of humvee-mounted cannon prototypes, setting the stage to potentially replace light-tactical-vehicle-towed big guns with a new class of fast and nimble indirect fires to fight peer competitors like Russia and China.