Tuesday, May 7, 2024
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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 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.
The Pentagon is concerned with the ability of the aerospace sector to sustain the unique design and manufacturing skills needed to ensure future U.S. military combat aircraft can be both designed and produced, according to a report by the Defense Department office charged with monitoring the defense industrial base.
Lawmakers added nearly $1 billion for cyberspace activities to the Pentagon's fiscal year 2017 budget -- a nearly 17 percent hike compared to the FY-16 budget -- and directed the Defense Department to make plans to overhaul cyber investment budget justification materials beginning in FY-19.
The Joint Strike Fighter program office, overseeing the Pentagon's $397 billion F-35 acquisition, provided Congress "insufficient justification and incomplete information in an untimely manner," according to House and Senate lawmakers, who soften their rebuke by adding $1.2 billion to the Defense Department's fiscal year 2017 budget request for 11 additional aircraft.
U.S. military efforts to develop a hypersonic strike capability are not driven by the higher pace of flight testing of such technologies by Russia and China, according to the Defense Department, which argues the effort to mature technology for a Conventional Prompt Global Strike capability, including ground tests and computer modeling -- is "much more aggressive."
The Missile Defense Agency is contemplating future upgrades to the Ground-based Midcourse Defense segment of the Ballistic Missile Defense System by conducting trade studies to define a new capability phase called Advanced Homeland Defense (AHD) that would be operational as soon as 2026. (UPDATED)
The Trump administration has directed the Pentagon to prepare a $573 billion fiscal year 2018 budget proposal -- a spending target that would amount to a $17 billion increase, or 3 percent hike, compared to the Obama administration's plan and would exceed current statutory spending allowed for the Defense Department by $51 billion.
In today's INSIDER Daily Digest, we take a look at a new Defense Science Board effort and report on an exclusive interview with a top Army official.
The Pentagon's expert cost estimators were effectively stumped last year by the requirement to produce a reliable forecast of the price to develop and procure a new Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile after it turned out that historical cost data for more than half a dozen past U.S. ballistic missile programs was less than ideal.
The Defense Department, which two years ago expressed doubts over near-term prospects for fielding an affordable hypersonic strike weapon, has promised U.S. commanders in Europe and the Pacific an initial hypersonic strike capability between fiscal years 2018 and 2022.
The lead ship in the Navy's new ballistic missile submarine fleet will cost $13.3 billion, the Congressional Budget Office revealed in a report providing new details about the cost estimate the Pentagon adopted last month while launching the Columbia-class program into engineering and manufacturing development.
Boeing officials plied President Trump's staff with literature on a newly rebranded variant of the Super Hornet -- the F/A-18 XT -- which the defense contractor is pitching in response to Trump's request for a proposal to compete against the Navy's Joint Strike Fighter aircraft requirement.
The Pentagon has stripped plans for the United States to participate in buying Joint Strike Fighter aircraft as part of a new three-year "block-buy" contract, largely limiting participation in the potential multiyear deal to foreign buyers, according to a senior Defense Department official. The deal was originally touted to save as much as $3 billion.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' directive to review the Joint Strike Fighter program stems from a pair of phone calls then-President-elect Donald Trump had in January with F-35 Joint Program Office director Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the senior Air Force officer told lawmakers.
The Pentagon's acquisition executive last month -- while approving the Navy's request to initiate the Ohio Replacement Program as a major defense acquisition program by starting engineering and manufacturing development on the new ballistic missile submarine -- waived a statutory requirement for one technology that has not yet demonstrated the prerequisite to operate in a relevant environment.
An Air Force advisory panel commissioned to explore options for defending against hypersonic, maneuvering weapons, such as those China and Russia are flight testing, concluded no "silver bullets" are at hand -- or in the development pipeline -- to defeat this new class of threats, arguing the best defense may be a new offense: the U.S. military's own credible, hypersonic weapon.
U.S. intelligence analysts -- in a new unclassified assessment prepared over the last year to support a new presidential administration -- predict the "risk of conflict, including inter-state conflict, will increase" during the next two decades and argue a few trends are likely to change the character of conflict over the next 20 years, predictions that carry implications for the U.S. military.