Wednesday, November 29, 2023
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 United States and Japan -- two global technology innovation powerhouses -- are teaming up to collaborate on high-power microwaves, autonomous systems and counter-hypersonic weapons, inking new agreements to expand military research and development while advancing plans for potential collaboration on a new Aegis guided-missile interceptor.
The Defense Department plans to bolster the U.S. military presence in the Pacific region by converting a unit based in Japan to a Marine Littoral Regiment, a new formation designed to fight its way onto islands and maritime choke points, deploy its own long-range strike capabilities and create anti-access challenges for Chinese forces.
The Defense Department has added a small buffer to its limited inventory of intercontinental ballistic missile-killing interceptors, growing the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program by two guided missiles after harvesting enough spare parts to assemble a pair of the most modern variants of the homeland defense interceptor.
The Missile Defense Agency is accelerating development of a counter-hypersonic weapon after Congress injected nearly $300 million for the Glide Phase Interceptor project in fiscal year 2023, raising development spending on the Hypersonic Defense program to more than half-a-billion dollars this year following a classified independent cost assessment completed for the GPI last fall.
The Defense Department is eyeing a potential seven-year megadeal with Raytheon to buy the most advanced Aegis guided missiles -- the Block IB and Block IIA variants of the Standard Missile-3 -- as part of a sole-source contract to support orders between fiscal years 2023 and 2029.
A classified Defense Department investigation has identified what is believed to be the root cause of a 2021 missile defense failure, giving the Missile Defense Agency confidence to plan a do-over flight test this year that will pit a pair of Standard Missile-6 interceptors against a medium-range ballistic missile target.
The Missile Defense Agency is on the cusp of securing a major bureaucratic victory after prevailing on lawmakers to roll back a law mandating weapon system procurement authority be transitioned to the military departments, a policy shift with implications most immediately for the Army's Terminal High Altitude Area Defense program.
Legislation, poised to become law, would require the Pentagon to craft a strategy to add a new layer of asymmetric countermeasures to the U.S. missile defense system to defeat ultra-fast maneuvering threats -- including hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles.
Congress has settled on three new 2023 policy initiatives related to the Guam air and missile defense project, including the requirement that the Defense Department appoint a senior official to oversee the wrangling of personnel, equipment, budgets and more across military services associated with the effort to begin fielding a new capability as soon as 2024.
Congress is poised to lay a major new requirement on the U.S. military's long-range missile defense enterprise, mandating a comprehensive set of actions to establish persistent cybersecurity operations and testing for ballistic missile defense systems and networks.
The Defense Department would be required to draft a plan to triple the size of the Next Generation Interceptor inventory -- from 20 to 64 guided missiles -- a move that could drive the procurement price tag for the homeland defense interceptor fleet from $2.3 billion to more than $7 billion.
The Army will begin experimenting with prototype big guns in the Arizona desert next week to assess the potential for mounting artillery on wheeled vehicles, conducting live-fire tests of extended-range, soft-recoil technology paired with new tubes, including a Next-Generation Cannon, to possibly replace towed systems now vulnerable to counterbattery fire.
The Pentagon's new status report on China's military power highlights three potential threats to Guam -- advanced air, sea and ground systems -- that could credibly strike U.S. military bases on the Western Pacific U.S. territory and complicate any attempt by Washington to counter a Beijing offensive against Taiwan.
The Army shot down a cruise missile target last week in a paradigm-changing demonstration of a prototype technology that could dramatically increase the defensive range of Patriot interceptors by allowing the guided missiles to use any sensor -- air, ground or sea -- available on the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS).
Japan executed its maiden launch of a Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor -- the most advanced Aegis guided missile which it co-developed, and is co-producing, with the United States -- as part of a major ballistic missile defense live-fire event in the Pacific Ocean in concert with the U.S. Navy and Missile Defense Agency.
X-Bow Systems -- a New Mexico-based start-up that claims to bring 21st-century manufacturing technologies and know-how to solid-rocket motor production -- has answered the Pentagon's call for a potential new domestic supplier of boosters needed to power Army and Navy plans to scale production of long-range hypersonic strike weapons.
The Army last month experimented with a potential revolutionary new capability by using a missile defense system to spot a ground threat in a simulated setting and digitally pass the targeting information to a long-range strike system which then executed an attack against the ground target.
The U.S military has demonstrated a new capability crucial to plans to defend Guam beginning in 2024 against advanced Chinese air and missile threats, linking radar on Navy destroyers for the first time with Army and Marine Corps ground sensors as well as Air Force fighter aircraft.
Army testers are readying a final assessment of Integrated Air and Missile Defense operational effectiveness, suitability and survivability after completing a major appraisal, setting the stage for an early 2023 full-rate production decision and a pivot to follow-on development that includes integration with the F-35 fighter and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system.
The Defense Department wants a new over-the-horizon radar to be operational by 2027 to detect and decrease risk from potential Russian and Chinese cruise missile strikes against U.S. critical assets and plans to brief industry in early December on a new homeland defense sensor competition that will launch next summer to support this goal.