Thursday, June 1, 2023
Key Issues AUKUS & AI EXX-TACAMO Ukraine equipment
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 last year conducted a test of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, not previously reported, that was designed to assess capabilities to defend against threats to the United States from a North Korean intercontinental ballistic missile.
Lockheed Martin has activated a 50-kilowatt high-energy laser designed for ground forces air defense, a key developmental milestone in the company's prototype design of a directed energy weapon for the Army's Stryker vehicle and an important step toward giving the government a viable alternative for a planned competition against incumbent Raytheon.
The Defense Department is readying a first-ever hypersonic weapon test over the Atlantic Ocean, preparing to launch a rocket from Florida that will loft a glide vehicle thousands of miles into the open water in a high-stakes assessment that aims to validate design of a new, two-stage booster paired with the ultra-fast maneuvering payload.
The Army Integrated Air and Missile Defense program is on track to declare initial operational capability in April -- a delay of one year from the objective plan but still within the approved schedule -- a milestone that will allow soldiers, who for years have been testing the IAMD Battle Command Systems (IBCS), to pivot to real-world missions.
The Missile Defense Agency has tapped General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems to study diode-pumped alkali laser (DPAL) technology -- including potential applications for shooting down long-range threats as part of the Missile Defense System.
The Army is now required by law to open the Extended Range Cannon Artillery program to competition after the service buys an initial batch of 20 prototypes, setting the stage for a contest before the planned production decision late next year.
The United States and Japan -- two global technology innovation powerhouses -- are teaming up to collaborate on high-power microwaves, autonomous systems and counter-hypersonic weapons, inking new agreements to expand military research and development while advancing plans for potential collaboration on a new Aegis guided-missile interceptor.
The Defense Department plans to bolster the U.S. military presence in the Pacific region by converting a unit based in Japan to a Marine Littoral Regiment, a new formation designed to fight its way onto islands and maritime choke points, deploy its own long-range strike capabilities and create anti-access challenges for Chinese forces.
The Defense Department has added a small buffer to its limited inventory of intercontinental ballistic missile-killing interceptors, growing the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program by two guided missiles after harvesting enough spare parts to assemble a pair of the most modern variants of the homeland defense interceptor.
The Missile Defense Agency is accelerating development of a counter-hypersonic weapon after Congress injected nearly $300 million for the Glide Phase Interceptor project in fiscal year 2023, raising development spending on the Hypersonic Defense program to more than half-a-billion dollars this year following a classified independent cost assessment completed for the GPI last fall.
The Defense Department is eyeing a potential seven-year megadeal with Raytheon to buy the most advanced Aegis guided missiles -- the Block IB and Block IIA variants of the Standard Missile-3 -- as part of a sole-source contract to support orders between fiscal years 2023 and 2029.
A classified Defense Department investigation has identified what is believed to be the root cause of a 2021 missile defense failure, giving the Missile Defense Agency confidence to plan a do-over flight test this year that will pit a pair of Standard Missile-6 interceptors against a medium-range ballistic missile target.
The Missile Defense Agency is on the cusp of securing a major bureaucratic victory after prevailing on lawmakers to roll back a law mandating weapon system procurement authority be transitioned to the military departments, a policy shift with implications most immediately for the Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense program.
Legislation, poised to become law, would require the Pentagon to craft a strategy to add a new layer of asymmetric countermeasures to the U.S. missile defense system to defeat ultra-fast maneuvering threats -- including hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles.
Congress has settled on three new 2023 policy initiatives related to the Guam air and missile defense project, including the requirement that the Defense Department appoint a senior official to oversee the wrangling of personnel, equipment, budgets and more across military services associated with the effort to begin fielding a new capability as soon as 2024.
Congress is poised to lay a major new requirement on the U.S. military's long-range missile defense enterprise, mandating a comprehensive set of actions to establish persistent cybersecurity operations and testing for ballistic missile defense systems and networks.
The Defense Department would be required to draft a plan to triple the size of the Next Generation Interceptor inventory -- from 20 to 64 guided missiles -- a move that could drive the procurement price tag for the homeland defense interceptor fleet from $2.3 billion to more than $7 billion.
The Army will begin experimenting with prototype big guns in the Arizona desert next week to assess the potential for mounting artillery on wheeled vehicles, conducting live-fire tests of extended-range, soft-recoil technology paired with new tubes, including a Next-Generation Cannon, to possibly replace towed systems now vulnerable to counterbattery fire.
The Pentagon's new status report on China's military power highlights three potential threats to Guam -- advanced air, sea and ground systems -- that could credibly strike U.S. military bases on the Western Pacific U.S. territory and complicate any attempt by Washington to counter a Beijing offensive against Taiwan.
The Army shot down a cruise missile target last week in a paradigm-changing demonstration of a prototype technology that could dramatically increase the defensive range of Patriot interceptors by allowing the guided missiles to use any sensor -- air, ground or sea -- available on the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS).