Friday, April 26, 2024
Key Issues Optical clocks Prototype funding SPAFORGEN
While Navy surface warfare officials work to finish a radar road map requested by Congress last year, the service is looking at the production capabilities of Lockheed Martin, one of the two contractors competing for Navy radar work, service and industry officials told InsideDefense.com late last week.
The Boeing Company announced today that it has reached an agreement with the union that represents the defense contractor's engineers that may put an end to a 38-day strike.
The Sense and Destroy Armor munition, being developed for the Army as an anti-tank and anti-armor weapon, achieved a 79 percent reliability rate during technical tests held March 7-11 at the Army's Yuma Proving Grounds, AZ, prime contractor Aerojet said today.
If the Navy were given an extra $2.2 billion it could field a theater missile defense system capable of defeating unsophisticated missiles by fiscal year 2005, two years sooner than now planned, and could have a fully robust system at sea by FY-08, also two years early, according to a new "white paper" put together by the service's Theater Wide missile defense program office.
Boeing officials do not expect a first flight of the company's Joint Strike Fighter demonstrator by spring as originally planned due to the impact of a labor strike by the company's engineers, a Boeing spokesman said yesterday.
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones, who is growing increasingly worried about the service's ability to recruit and retain Marines, has ordered a two-day retention "stand-down" to focus on convincing as many Marines as possible to sign up for another tour of duty.
The labor strike against the Boeing Corporation, one of two competitors for the tri-service Joint Strike Fighter aircraft, may have already eaten into any cushion the program's schedule has and the Pentagon may be looking at a "day-for-day" delay the longer the strike continues, the Marine Corps' top acquisition officer told a House subcommittee yesterday.
The Navy's surface ship radar road map, over a year in the making, is once again under review by senior Navy surface warfare officials after it was approved by the vice chief of naval operations earlier this month, according to service and industry officials.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jay Johnson and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones late last week kicked off a year-long review of the service's joint amphibious warfighting doctrine.
A Pennsylvania company that pled guilty to arms sales violations involving China last year has been disbarred from doing business overseas, the State Department officially announced today.
Army officials are studying the technologies from several artillery pieces, such as the lightweight 155 mm howitzer and the Crusader advanced field artillery system, to see if they can be combined into one weapon that can work with the Army's new, lighter infantry forces, Lt. Gen. Paul Kern told InsideDefense.com today.
After months of sometimes highly contentious maneuverings between the Navy and industry, the service has begun internal briefings on a completed surface ship radar road map, according to a Navy memo obtained today by InsideDefense.com.
A squadron of Marine Corps F/A-18D Hornets will begin enforcing the no-fly zone in southern Iraq this week as the service takes part for the first time in Operation Southern Watch, according to a Marine Corps spokeswoman.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan said today the service hopes to reprogram money within its fiscal year 2000 budget to modify B-2 and B-1 bombers to carry up to 82 500-pound bombs.
The commander-in-chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific today said the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act, recently passed by the House and awaiting review by the Senate, will not improve his warfighting ability and will move China and Taiwan further away from a peaceful resolution to their problems.
Assistant Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Terrence Dake is leading an internal assessment of the service's force-level needs for the 21st century, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones told InsideDefense.com last week.
Senior Marine Corps and Army leaders will discuss ways the nation's two land warfare services can work more closely together at a closed-door meeting in May, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones told InsideDefense.com this week.
Armed with a larger-than-expected federal budget surplus, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) yesterday said he will try to pump more money into the Defense Department's budget this year and pay for some of the programs on the military services' unfunded priorities lists.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) will offer an amendment to the $2 billion Kosovo supplemental appropriation asking for a tally of what European governments have pledged toward the Kosovo peacekeeping mission and what they have delivered.
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton has told the commander of U.S. peacekeeping forces in Kosovo that only under "extraordinary" circumstances should American troops be sent out of the sector they are patrolling to back up other international peacekeeping forces, a Pentagon spokesman said today.