Saturday, April 27, 2024
Key Issues Optical clocks Prototype funding SPAFORGEN
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 awarded a pair of technology risk-reduction contracts to advance a potential game-changing missile defense capability: developing a single warhead that, once boosted into space, could deploy multiple kill vehicles to intercept more than one enemy ballistic missile.
The Navy has established an $8.3 billion placeholder in its long-term spending plan to develop and launch procurement of a yet-to-be-defined fast frigate -- the planned follow-on to the Littoral Combat Ship.
The Army's Common Infrared Countermeasure program -- an effort led by Northrup Grumman to outfit U.S. military helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft with a next-generation defense against infrared-guided missiles -- is a $2.6 billion endeavor to buy more than 1,000 missile warning and countermeasure systems, congressional auditors reveal in a new report.
The Army's long-term project to replace the engines of its Black Hawk and Apache helicopter fleets is now a potential $10.4 billion project, according to government auditors, a $1 billion increase from two years ago.
The Defense Department is seeking to catapult funding for a Third Offset Strategy project to mature a new technology designed to help re-energize conventional deterrence against China and Russia: a potential new way to defeat road-mobile ballistic missiles.
In today's digest, Boeing cuts the government a little slack to find money for the V-22 program, the Air Force moves forward with a key modernization project for the B-52 bomber fleet, the GAO serves up its latest report on the KC-46A program and much more.
The Air Force's KC-46A aerial refueling tanker, a developmental program buffeted by repeated schedule delays and cost growth for prime contractor Boeing, continues to face risk of meeting the current delivery schedule, according to a new report by congressional auditors.
The Bell-Boeing Joint Program Office, prime contractor for the V-22 Osprey, has again granted the Navy more time to figure out how to come up with funds to buy aircraft the government is contractually obligated to purchase in fiscal year 2017 -- or risk abrogating a $6.5 billion multiyear deal that originally promised $850 million worth of savings.
The Air Force has formally selected Boeing to be the integrator for the B-52 Radar Modernization Program, a key early step in moving forward with a planned major improvement that aims to swap out 1960s radar technology -- upgraded in the 1980s -- with modern capabilities to allow the Global Strike Command to fully utilize the capabilities and payload of the legacy bomber fleet.
Today's digest is packed: the Army locks in fewer than planned AH-64E buys; F-35; all sorts of budget news and more.
Lawmakers have tossed a lifeline to the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System Recapitalization program -- a $3.1 billion development project that can't freely execute its fiscal year 2017 plans due to concerns raised by Congress last year -- granting the Air Force permission to shift an additional $15 million into JSTARS Recap to keep the program on track.
The Army last week backed off its original plan to commit to buying 275 AH-64E Apache attack helicopters from Boeing in a five-year contract, instead executing a deal to buy 244 aircraft -- a more than 10 percent drop -- and offset these reductions by folding foreign purchases by Saudi Arabia into the deal to increase the multiyear package to 268 rotorcraft.
In today's INSIDER Daily Digest, Defense Secretary Mattis is planning to soon sit down with industry executives and Lockheed Martin chief Marillyn Hewson says the company is seeking increased international sales.
The White House Office of Management and Budget has directed executive branch officials slated to testify before Congress in the coming weeks to keep mum for now about details of the Trump administration's fiscal year 2018 budget and limit discussion of the forthcoming spending proposal to the broad strokes outlined in the "skinny budget" published last week.
The Pentagon wants to surge funds into a new ballistic missile defense project that aims to deal with one of the most challenging threats to U.S. military forces: road-mobile ballistic missile threats.
The Trump administration is seeking a $30 billion increase to the Pentagon's fiscal year 2017 budget, a promissory note on larger plans going forward to try to reverse cuts to military spending stemming from the 2011 Budget Control Act, which has cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the Defense Department's since 2012.
The Air Force is seeking an immediate and dramatic increase in funding for its Next-Generation Air Dominance program, suggesting plans for a new penetrating counterair capability -- also referred to as a sixth-generation fighter -- are poised to accelerate if Congress can provide an additional $147 million in fiscal year 2017 above the $20 million the service originally requested.
The Air Force has conducted not one, but two, preliminary design reviews of its planned new bomber, the B-21 Raider, an unorthodox level of scrutiny for a new major weapon system that included one assessment during the technology development phase that concluded in 2015 and one recently as part of the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the new program.
The Air Force, which once argued a need for a maximum of 100 new bombers, has formally inverted its B-21 requirement, adopting 100 aircraft as the “minimum” number of state-of-the-art, long-range strike bombers the service now needs -- a move that could set the stage to grow the $80 billion, Northrop Grumman-led project.
The Defense Department is laying the groundwork for a major acquisition effort to modernize and sustain the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, a planned follow-on effort to the eight-year, $4 billion deal with Boeing to manage all aspects of the guided-missile interceptor program that expires in 2018.