Thursday, April 18, 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 has provided Congress a $1.9 billion wish list to finance 11 projects above and beyond the agency's $9.4 billion fiscal year 2020 budget request, including bolstering spending for a new space sensor to track hypersonic and ballistic missiles, additional THAAD interceptors and additional investments for lasers and new warhead development.
ANDOVER, MA -- Raytheon has developed a new high-tech, Gallium Nitride transmitter for legacy Patriot interceptors -- the GEM-T variant which makes up the bulk of the Army's inventory -- that promises to significantly improve reliability and service life of the guided missile, a capability the company hopes will sweeten interest in its proposed Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor.
The U.S. military, in a major test of the Ballistic Missile Defense System, destroyed an intercontinental ballistic missile target with a pair of Ground-based Interceptors in the first-ever salvo launch of the homeland defense guided-missile fleet, an event likely to bolster confidence in the current fielded system and the exoatmospheric kill vehicle in particular.
The Missile Defense Agency has pared back to $4.1 billion an originally planned $6.6 billion contract with Boeing to modernize and sustain the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program though 2023, a nearly 40 percent reduction that reflects a narrowing of the scope of the project following delays in developing a new interceptor warhead.
Lockheed Martin is poised to effectively nab a third major hypersonic booster contract, locking in a pivotal role on all three legs of the Defense Department's conventionally armed, hypersonic boost-glide programs after the Navy today announced plans to adapt its in-development submarine-launched rocket for Army use.
Northrop Grumman has designed what it says is a blueprint for the U.S. military to quash the hypersonic threat, unveiling a "Defeat Invincible" marketing campaign that aims to stake out a leadership position in the hypersonic defense business by proposing an "end-to-end" approach that would utilize new space sensors and interceptors as well as cyber, laser, and electronic weapons.
Israel and the United States executed what the two countries claim was a successful series of tests of David's Sling, a jointly developed missile defense system for the Middle East nation.
The Defense Department is seeking $15 million in fiscal year 2020 to begin work on a space-based interceptor that could destroy an enemy ballistic missile during the boost phase of flight.
The Army has lifted the veil on its plans for a Strategic Long Range Cannon, outlining a $228 million, three-year funding project that aims to mature technologies for both weapons and munitions in order to one day dramatically increase the reach of its artillery forces and advance a key leadership priority to bolster the punch of the service's long-range precision fires inventory.
The Army wants to launch a new-start Future Interceptor program in fiscal year 2020, a milestone development for the service's lower-tier missile enterprise that envisions a possible follow-on to the Patriot missile, setting the stage for a major competition to provide a new air-and-missile-defense interceptor.
The Army's fiscal year 2020 budget request seeks to launch a new "Mobile Medium-Range Missile," a next-generation artillery round and new component of the service's long-range precision fires portfolio, in an estimated $900 million development project that aims to utilize "non-traditional" acquisition rules to address an "extremely high-risk capability gap."
The Army has mapped out a five-year, $1.1 billion new-start program to develop a Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, a planned road-mobile system that will adapt a two-stage booster to launch a common hypersonic glide body to execute deep-strikes against enemy anti-access, area-denial capabilities. (UPDATED)
The Pentagon's top weapons developer is hosting a two-day event with industry to brief interested parties on U.S. military efforts to develop offensive and defensive hypersonic weapons and to hear from defense contractors on their ideas for a new class of ultrafast weapons that are poised to change the nature of modern combat.
The Pentagon's top weapons development official directed an independent assessment of Raytheon's Standard Missile-3 Block IIA guided missile to scrutinize the reliability of the new ballistic missile interceptor in advance of considering a proposal to transition the weapon -- the first such interceptor developed with a foreign partner -- from development to production.
The Pentagon's fiscal year 2020 five-year spending plan includes $10.5 billion to accelerate development and prototyping of hypersonic capabilities, a "significant" increase over prior plans. The move reflects a new policy goal of establishing U.S. military battlefield dominance by 2028, achieved in part by fielding a family of land-, sea-, and air-launched hypersonic weapons.
In a major setback to Pentagon plans to accelerate development of a new ballistic missile defense interceptor to protect against North Korean and potential Iranian threats, the Missile Defense Agency is delaying development and fielding of the Redesigned Kill Vehicle by up to two years because the warhead blueprint is not ready for prototype manufacturing.
The Army's fiscal year 2020 budget request will include $7.5 million in research and development funding to launch a new program that aims to modernize the balance of the service's humvee fleet -- about 50,000 vehicles -- that will not be replaced by the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. (UPDATED)
The Missile Defense Agency has identified the nine companies that proposed conceptual designs for a Space Sensor Layer, establishing a competitive field for a network of orbiting satellites optimized to give U.S. military commanders a long-desired capability: the means to continuously track long-range missiles from launch to impact -- a tool deemed essential to defend against hypersonic threats.
The Defense Department has re-opened a competitive project in its expanding efforts to develop an arsenal of hypersonic weapons, pulling Raytheon back into a program launched in 2015 to go head-to-head against Lockheed Martin in an effort to develop a tactical-range, hypersonic boost-glide weapon that could be air-launched -- and possibly also fired from a ship.
The Pentagon has issued more than a dozen contracts to develop insect-scale robotic technologies needed for a new-class of ultra-small platforms the size of ants that might one day clandestinely move within 10 centimeters of a target.