Tuesday, September 28, 2021
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.
Russia is arming naval forces in the Pacific region this year with a new advanced cruise missile that will give its submarines and ships the ability to sink other ships and -- for the first time -- execute long-range strikes against land targets, according to a senior Pentagon official.
The Defense Department has begun work on a Guam Defense System -- following high-profile advocacy over the last year by the top U.S. military commander in the Asia-Pacific region -- and directing the Missile Defense Agency to start designing the first operational Aegis Ashore system on U.S. territory.
The Pentagon has turned to software engineers at three different universities to conduct an independent technical assessment of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, a move that signals failure of a 2012 recovery plan for the fifth-generation fighter in the wake of a December decision to indefinitely postpone a full-rate production review required no later than this month.
China is on track to overtake the United States as the most powerful military in the Pacific within the decade -- potentially as soon as 2026 -- with the wherewithal sooner than previously expected to establish permanent, regional primacy, the top U.S. military official in the Asia-Pacific region warned March 4.
U.S. Indo-Pacific Command has reset its Pacific Defense Initiative by elevating the priority of a new sensor project in Palau, dropping a Hawaii radar project in favor of space sensors and adding to a list of unfunded long-term needs, taking it from $20 billion to $27 billion, a 35% hike compared to last year's estimate.
The Missile Defense Agency is soliciting the public's feedback regarding a revised plan for potentially locating a new radar in Hawaii, specifically a proposal to emplace a large sensor on the Navy-controlled Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai after efforts over the last three years to place the large array at three alternative sites failed.
A source selection decision on the Next Generation Interceptor -- expected as soon as this week -- is now being pushed into March at the earliest, according to DOD.
The COVID pandemic has revealed the U.S. defense industrial base to be "not healthy" and hampered by "weak" supply chains that threaten the ability of the nation to nimbly develop and field new capabilities to keep ahead of technological advances by other nations, according to the Pentagon's No. 2 military official.
The Navy is readying plans this spring to begin in earnest collaboration with industry and academia at a prototype "software factory" called the Forge -- an entity that aims to accelerate delivery of new capabilities by the program executive office for integrated warfare systems to the surface combatant fleet.
The U.S. and Israel today announced the start of a new collaborative weapon system project: Arrow-4, a "next-generation" guided-missile interceptor -- a project neither previously disclosed by the Missile Defense Agency nor explicitly authorized by Congress -- that aims to improve the Missile Eastern nation's ability to defeat both endo- and exoatmospheric threats.
The Defense Department is readying -- as soon as next week -- an announcement on two winning design proposals for a Next Generation Interceptor, a major missile defense modernization initiative launched in August 2019 by the Trump administration whose fate now rests with the Biden administration.
The Missile Defense Agency is exploring a new laser project to advance technology able to destroy ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missile threats in all phases of flight -- from the ground, air, sea and also space.
A cruise missile defense system to protect the U.S. homeland would cost between $75 billion and $466 billion, a hefty sum that would protect the lower 48 states only and could still be defeated by an adversary capable of launching a cruise missile from near the U.S. border in Mexico or Canada as well as from the sea, near the U.S. coastline -- raising questions about the efficacy of any such investment.
A bureaucratic maneuver last summer by the Office of the Secretary of Defense aimed at clipping the wings of the Missile Defense Agency has drawn an investigation and a statutory directive to halt any action that would lock in rules subjecting MDA to increased oversight by other arms of the Defense Department.
A new Army study -- launched during the last weeks of the Trump administration and now subject to a review by the Biden administration -- aims to assess the ability of ground forces to operate on a radioactive battlefield as well as explore the prospects for a high-tech, networked force against a high-altitude, nuclear detonation.
The U.S. military has delayed until 2028 plans for a major flight test to demonstrate the ability of three major ballistic missile defense systems to collaborate, a goal that if not further postponed will be 15 years after the Pentagon's top weapon tester called for the Navy and Army systems to establish rudimentary engagement coordination for theater-level threats.
The Defense Department last month launched a new study to assess emerging biotechnologies and national security, a project required by law that was supposed to begin a year ago and which will likely be further delayed due to a department-wide review of all federal advisory committee activity mandated by the defense secretary.
The Missile Defense Agency is recalibrating plans to develop a counter-hypersonic capability by scrapping a prototype development project in favor of moving directly to an interceptor program of record, a major change that aims to accelerate by many years delivery of a new guided missile that could arm the U.S. military with a weapon to intercept long-range hypersonic warheads during the glide phase. (UPDATED)
The Navy has set an initial delivery target for its new No. 2 modernization priority with plans to push a "minimally viable capability" to the Theodore Roosevelt strike group in 2023, the first formal output of Project Overmatch in its mission to enable a fleet that "swarms the sea" and executes lethal and non-lethal attacks across every axis and domain.
The Missile Defense Agency is readying a sole-source contract for a major upgrade of the Long Range Discrimination Radar, advancing plans to tap Lockheed Martin to develop a second configuration of the not-yet-operational ground-based sensor that would add new capabilities as soon as 2024 -- including space situational awareness and space object identification.