Saturday, June 1, 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.
Russia and China are poised to field new stealth bombers as soon as 2025 and 12 foreign fifth-generation fighter aircraft programs are now in development -- including systems designed to challenge the F-22A and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, according to a new Air Force intelligence assessment of foreign airborne threats.
The Navy's top modernization priority -- the Ohio Replacement Program -- missed a planned high-level Pentagon review in August, delaying a decision until this fall on whether the new strategic submarine program is ready to transition from technology development into detailed design and construction, according to government officials.
The Air Force has awarded Boeing a $700 million contract for three new production lots of Small Diameter Bomb Increment I precision munitions -- a sum that appears to effectively reverse a 2010 decision to slash the original program of record by half -- and follows strong demand for the Boeing-built weapon in the air campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
The Defense Department last month tweaked its $1.6 trillion roster of big-ticket weapon system projects by adding four new programs and formally advising Congress of schedule changes for three high-profile projects.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who has established proliferating unmanned systems as a strategic goal for the Navy and Marine Corps, has directed a new study to tease out the technical underpinnings that must be finessed to support this objective.
In the wake of proposals earlier this year by Congress and the Office of the Secretary of Defense to reform the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has directed an advisory panel to assess Navy and Marine Corps organization structure, operations and effectiveness to tease out potential recommendations for further changes that might improve force agility and effectiveness.
The Navy is formally investigating the possibility of a two-aircraft carrier block buy -- lashing procurement of CVN-80 and CVN-81 together across more than a decade -- as part of an effort to identify potential options for reducing the total price tag for new Ford-class mega warships, according to the service.
The Pentagon has ordered 47 additional Standard Missile-3 Block IB guided missile interceptors from Raytheon, which is 90 percent of the 52-per-year production cap set by Defense Department executives and two fewer than the 49 Congress provided funding for in fiscal year 2016.
The Defense Department has delivered to Congress a classified report on existing U.S. military capabilities and shortfalls to counter remotely piloted aircraft operating in restricted and "special-use" airspace, a report that follows last year's incursion by a recreational UAV operator of White House airspace and grounds.
The Air Force is tweaking the acquisition schedule for two major nuclear modernization projects, slightly delaying estimated contract award dates compared to the most recently published plan for a new silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile and a new cruise missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
The Army reported dramatic shifts in its annual "superior supplier" list, dropping 20 business units from its annual ranking of defense contractors compared to 2015 -- more than half the entire roster -- while promoting 17 suppliers to higher positions, including seven new business segments in the most prestigious Tier 1 group.
Five Navy suppliers improved their position -- and three made a new appearance -- in the service's annual "superior" rankings, a Defense Department program the service pioneered to identify exceptional cost, schedule, performance, quality and business relations by defense contractors.
More than a dozen business segments from major defense contractors muscled their way to a privileged Air Force supplier status in 2016 compared to 2015 in the service's third annual ranking of so-called "superior suppliers" -- a new positioning that also included downgrades, including eight business units that were dropped entirely.
The Army in June concluded demonstrations of a new capability for the service's mobile internet network, assessing a new waveform with potential to support networking with aircraft and significantly extend the range of operations on the battlefield, according to the service.
The Army Science Board on July 27-28 will review findings of five studies that are part of a collective effort to recommend bold, transformational ideas on new options to give the future force a disruptive advantage against potential adversaries.
The Defense Department estimates the cost to modernize U.S. nuclear forces will be between $350 billion and $450 billion over two decades -- a sum that does not include warhead acquisition nor operations cost -- providing a key data point in a policy debate that until now has been largely framed by cost estimates from think tanks and congressional auditors.
The Air Force calculates that modernizing the silo-based missile portion of the nuclear triad will yield as much as $20 billion in cost avoidance over five decades compared with extending the life of the current fleet of Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, according to a senior service official.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter is warning that House-passed legislation that proposes increasing the size of the military by 54,000 in fiscal year 2017 -- most of which would grow the Army -- would create "unacceptable risk" and "hollow" out the force.
While Operation Inherent Resolve -- the U.S. military effort to degrade and defeat the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq -- is widely viewed as an air campaign, Army ground forces have expended enough precision munitions in the fight to ask Congress for permission to shift fiscal year 2016 funds to immediately replenish top-shelf artillery weapons.
The Army has awarded a pair of grants for advanced research on technologies for its planned next-generation radar, tapping Raytheon and Baylor University to develop modular building blocks that could be easily plugged into a future sensor system that is not yet a program of record but the service envisions fielding around 2030.