Friday, May 3, 2024
Key Issues Budget 'parity' Summer CUAS demo EW in Ukraine
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 Air Force this week is spearheading a project with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and industry entrepreneurs to emulate the kind of rapid software and hardware development pioneered by Silicon Valley start-ups in a bid to incubate Joint All Domain Command and Control -- an envisioned technical backbone to link sensors and shooters across air, land and sea.
House and Senate lawmakers are backing plans for a new Ground-based Interceptor by adding more than $100 million for homeland defense interceptor development in fiscal year 2020. At the same time, they are qualifying support offered in September by Senate appropriators for the Next Generation Interceptor program, imposing additional oversight on the proposed new-start project.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- Army leaders, for a third consecutive year, are commencing a top-down review of the service's entire spending plan to hunt for projects that can be canceled, reduced or delayed to bolster modernization projects in the fiscal year 2022 budget.
The Pentagon is beginning a new weapon system project to defeat hypersonic glide vehicles, briefing industry next week on what is likely a decades-long project to expand the reach of the Ballistic Missile Defense System to counter these ultra-fast, maneuvering menaces that exploit current seams in U.S. defenses.
House and Senate lawmakers resoundingly rejected a Pentagon plan by Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin to subordinate the Strategic Capabilities Office under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- The Marine Corps plans to commence early next year a major realignment of its investment accounts, building a new five-year budget plan that sheds select weapons acquired during land operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and invests in capabilities optimized for expeditionary fights against technologically sophisticated adversaries such as China and Russia.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- The U.S. military service chiefs said today China and Russia's rise as great military powers pose significant and varied challenges to the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, called on leaders of U.S. big technology firms to not "turn their backs" on the Defense Department, even if some employees have misgivings about developing new technology for the U.S. military.
SIMI VALLEY, CA -- House and Senate lawmakers have concluded prolonged negotiations over a fiscal year 2020 defense policy bill, paving the way for votes in both chambers beginning as soon as this week, Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee Mac Thornberry (R-TX) announced here today.
SANTA MONICA, CA -- The Air Force has readied a plan for immediate formation of a new Space Force in anticipation of direction from Congress, identifying the bulk of the forces, units and missions to be transitioned to the new U.S. military branch in fiscal year 2021 along with "a large pot of money," according to a senior service official.
High-priority Missile Defense Agency projects slated for fiscal year 2020 are at risk of being hamstrung beginning this month if Congress and the White House do not agree to a spending bill, with a Standard Missile-3 Block IB multiyear procurement deal, launch of the Next Generation Interceptor program and more at risk in the event of a yearlong continuing resolution.
A Pentagon spokesman said Defense Secretary Mark Esper took no part in the Army's selection this fall of his former employer Raytheon to build the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, a project company officials expect will deliver a potential $20 billion line of new business.
The growing proliferation of weapons with global reach is prompting Pentagon leaders to launch a study on the need for a robust domestic air defense capability to protect the entire nation -- which, since the advent of flight more than a century ago, has relied in part on two vast oceans as a buffer against adversaries attacking American citizens and soil with low-flying aircraft and missiles.
Two long-time Missile Defense Agency civilian leaders -- the No. 2 and No. 3 officials with more than three decades of MDA leadership roles between them -- stepped down suddenly from their posts last week against a backdrop of tension between the agency and the Pentagon's weapon technology boss over a wide array of issues over how to proceed with new missile defense capabilities.
The Air Force as soon as January plans to begin initial modification of the first of two commercial Boeing 747-8 jumbo jets slated for the $5.3 billion next Air Force One program, dubbed the VC-25B, a major event in the high-profile effort to demonstrate initial flight in late 2021.
U.S. missile defense contractors are pitching ideas for improving the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system with alternative interceptor concepts in a gambit to provide near-term upgrades should the Pentagon proceed with the technically ambitious Next-Generation Interceptor program that could take a decade or more to field.
The Defense Department plans to update the cost estimate for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent in late spring of next year, setting the stage for a potential major recalibration of the price tag for the new ballistic missile program that generated a pair of valuations in 2017 that varied by more than $20 billion.
An influential Air Force advisory panel has concluded that an alternative intelligence enterprise derived in part from data fused from open sources could provide a new way to locate, identify and attack targets in highly contested environments, according to an abstract of a new study by the group.
The Pentagon's independent cost estimators have pared back forecasted savings the Navy can expect to realize under a multiyear procurement of Virginia-class submarines from $2.5 billion to $1.8 billion, giving the planned 2019 deal the most anemic cost avoidance package achieved through a block buy in the program's two decades of consolidated purchases.
The Pentagon's push to develop a new interceptor for the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system would require the Missile Defense Agency to swap out existing antennae for new sensors optimized for a notional Next Generation Interceptor at six sites around the world with facilities that play a pivotal role guiding exo-atmospheric kill vehicles through space to intercept enemy warheads.