Saturday, April 20, 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 conceded a major missile defense flight test yesterday in Hawaii failed, a setback for Raytheon's Standard Missile-3 Block IIA development program and potentially the $600 million in orders for the new guided missile interceptor the Pentagon placed last summer.
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Boeing a sole-source, six-year, $6.6 billion contract modification to modernize and sustain the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, extending the company's role managing all aspects of the guided-missile interceptor program until 2023 and raising the potential value of the contract originally awarded in 2011 to $12.6 billion.
The Defense Department executed a ballistic missile defense flight test over Hawaii today but will not disclose whether the interceptor hit the target.
The Navy last year began planning for an unmanned Aegis self-defense test ship only after repeated arm-twisting by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, according to a Defense Department report.
Early testing of the Pentagon's $7 billion replacement program for the Army and Marine Corps' laser- and radar-guided air-launch missiles -- the Joint-Air-to-Ground Missile (JAGM) -- has turned up cyber vulnerabilities and difficulty in select situations launching it from the Army's most advanced attack helicopter, the AH-64E Apache.
The Air Force last year completed a fourth round of upgrades to Boeing's Massive Ordnance Penetrator -- a 30,000-pound bunker-busting bomb designed to hit deeply buried targets -- and established the weapon, the largest conventional explosive in the U.S. military inventory, as a formal program of record, according to a new report.
The Missile Defense Agency effectively cordoned off salient elements of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system from independent cybersecurity experts attempting to assess its vulnerability during a marquee 2017 flight test, which the Pentagon hailed as a success after intercepting an intercontinental ballistic missile-class target, according to a new report.
Following a year of exploring potential options for a next-generation cruise missile for its ships and submarines, the Navy is not ready to commit to a new acquisition program and instead plans to extend its Next-Generation Land Attack Weapon analysis of alternatives.
The Trump administration could be opening the door to a larger fleet of Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines than the Defense Department has planned, according to a leaked draft of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which characterizes the current goal of building 12 new subs as a "minimum" fleet objective.
A draft of the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review brands the Pentagon's estimated two-decade-long project to modernize U.S. nuclear forces an "affordable priority" that will carry a cost, as a proportion of total defense spending, significantly lower than previous nuclear modernization campaigns.
The Defense Department has formally added a new project to its roster of big-ticket weapon system acquisitions: the John Lewis (T-AO 205)-class fleet oiler program, a $10.7 billion effort to build 17 new Navy logistics ships to recapitalize the aging T-AO 187-class cargo and fuel haulers.
In 2016, the Navy considered a need for hundreds more warships than the 355 the service eventually decided represents the force-level goal needed to execute the Obama administration's defense strategy, according to a senior official involved in crafting the 2016 Force Structure Assessment.
Lockheed Martin has connected technologies being developed as part of two separate ballistic missile defense programs with an eye toward giving Japan an option to buy a radar that extends the reach of the Aegis Ashore systems it plans to acquire.
The Navy is laying out plans to outfit an amphibious warship with a high-energy laser, expanding a technology demonstration with speed-of-light weapons in a follow-on to a 2014 the proof-of-concept deployment of a laser weapon on the Afloat Forward Staging Base Ponce.
Development of the Knifefish unmanned undersea vehicle is facing new delays stemming from a funding shortfall, forcing a 15-month delay to plans for declaring the newest variant of the Littoral Combat Ship mine countermeasure mission package operational.
Congressional auditors believe the $128 billion cost estimate to develop and build the new Columbia-class submarine fleet is "optimistic" and that program costs are likely to exceed requested funding, despite the Pentagon's adoption last year of the higher of two independently prepared cost estimates.
Thirty-six House members are lobbying top defense appropriators to "send a clear signal of support" to fleet commanders and the industrial base as they finalize the Pentagon's fiscal year 2018 spending bill by funding the Virginia-class attack submarine program "to the maximum extent possible" with levels authorized for FY-18.
The Navy's multibillion-dollar Air and Missile Defense Radar program is now realigning testing activities due to a schedule slip in construction plans of the lead ship that will host the powerful, next-generation radar system: the new Flight III variant of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.
The Army is reviewing a draft proposal from the Missile Defense Agency that calls for transferring responsibility for the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system from the agency to the service, a long-planned move first envisioned when MDA was established in 2002 to field an operational Ballistic Missile Defense System.
The Air Force is delaying a key acquisition milestone for Raytheon's $4.5 billion Small Diameter Bomb II program, pushing the target date for initial fielding of the new weapon on both naval variants of the Joint Strike Fighter due to a schedule slip stemming from the F-35 Joint Program Office's effort to formalize the Block 4 package of capabilities for the new stealth fighter.