Friday, June 28, 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 Navy last month considered launching a long-range experimental hypersonic flight test over the Atlantic Ocean toward target areas in the open sea more than 2,000 miles from Virginia, including points northeast of the South American coast and another roughly midway between the U.S. eastern seaboard and Western Sahara.
The potential long-term budget implications of the novel coronavirus pandemic are beginning to shape thinking about what weapon system programs to defend should military spending face dramatic reductions, according to the top Air Force general in charge of Global Strike Command.
The Defense Department is exploring a vast new test and training complex that would wrap around half the planet, reaching across the near entirety of the Pacific Ocean to support large-scale experimentation of advanced warfighting concepts, a move recommended by a classified study on the future of U.S. military superiority.
Adm. Phil Davidson, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has branded a proposal to improve the missile defense of Guam a "homeland defense" need and has notified Congress that a $1.7 billion requirement for Homeland Defense System-Guam is his top unfunded priority.
The novel coronavirus global pandemic that is currently spreading around the world will lead to an eventual reordering of U.S. national priorities that squeezes defense spending and accelerates efforts to draw down U.S. overseas deployments, according to a defense and foreign policy expert.
The Pentagon is asking Congress for relief from a statutory requirement that the nation's missile defeat policy and strategy be modified by appointing one or more acquisition executives to oversee homeland cruise missile defense and left-of-launch capabilities.
Raytheon says a new $2.1 billion Standard Missile-3 Block IB production contract drove the cost for each ballistic missile guided interceptor to its lowest level yet.
Raytheon and the Missile Defense Agency are exploring options to extend the range of the Standard Missile-3 Block IB -- pushing the ballistic missile interceptor to dramatically expand a defended area by allowing the weapon to communicate with off-board radars -- a move that would require enhancing one of the Aegis ballistic missile defense system's newest features: Engage-on-Remote.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded its first-ever multiyear procurement deal, a $2.1 billion package more than five years in the making that calls for Raytheon to manufacture 230 Standard Missile-3 Block IB interceptors for the Navy and Japan.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Lockheed Martin a $932 million contract for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors in a deal to finance procurement with Saudi Arabia, which is responsible for the bulk of the purchase.
The planned launch of the Next Generation Interceptor competition was tripped up last week when plans for a review by the Missile Defense Executive Board -- whose approval is needed to release a request for proposals -- were postponed as Pentagon leaders grappled with responding to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, sources said.
The Pentagon has formally adopted the Space-based Kill Assessment as part of the Missile Defense System, delivering an initial variant to U.S. Northern Command in a recently disclosed move that marks a pivot for the small-scale pilot project to utilize commercially hosted satellites to mature the sensor network into an operational capability by 2022.
The Defense Department said today it conducted a successful long-range flight of a hypersonic glide body, an event it called a "major milestone" in advancing Army and Navy prototype weapons, flying an experimental payload more than 2,000 miles over the Pacific Ocean.
The Defense Department appears set this week to conduct a flight experiment of a long-range hypersonic glide vehicle that -- if successful -- will advance Army and Navy plans to mature prototype designs for land- and sea-launched offensive strike weapons as soon as 2023 and 2025, respectively.
Raytheon says it has completed initial testing of a portion of its new Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, the Army's Patriot replacement radar.
The Missile Defense Agency is refining plans for a potential break-up of the omnibus Ground-based Midcourse Defense system development and sustainment contract, envisioning as many as five competitive projects to support the homeland ballistic missile defense system into the 2030s.
The Defense Department's proposal to shift funding for the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor from the Missile Defense Agency to the Space Development Agency encountered continued headwinds in Congress this week, raising questions about the viability of this fiscal year 2021 request.
The Defense Department is eyeing Raytheon's Standard Missile-6 as a counter-hypersonic interceptor, a weapon already effective against "advanced maneuvering threats" and now slated for a flight test against a hypersonic boost-glide target in fiscal year 2023.
Proponents of the Next-Generation Interceptor prevailed this week on the Joint Requirements Oversight Council to allow the new project to proceed, clearing the way for a top Pentagon board next week to conduct a final review and formally launch a competition for the new multibillion-dollar weapons project, sources said.
Lockheed Martin and the Defense Department are hammering out terms for expanding the space surveillance capability of the Long Range Discrimination Radar, a planned major software upgrade that would improve the ability of the ballistic missile defense sensor to detect and track objects in orbit in the mid-2020s.