The INSIDER daily digest -- March 24, 2022

This Thursday INSIDER Daily Digest has news on the Pentagon's fiscal year 2023 budget request and more.

We now know how much money the Pentagon will seek for fiscal year 2023:

White House seeks $276B for defense modernization in FY-23

The White House will seek $813 billion in total national defense spending for fiscal year 2023, with $773 billion for the Pentagon, including $146 billion for procurement and $130 billion for research, development, test and evaluation funds, Inside Defense has confirmed.

Those involved in the Skyborg program say there's more science and technology maturation needed:

With combat drone programs forthcoming, transition of 'technology feeders' unclear

As the Air Force prepares to debut two classified combat drone programs in its forthcoming budget request, it remains unclear how or to what extent underlying contributors -- including the service's autonomous aircraft teaming endeavor -- could be wrapped into those new efforts down the line.

In the world of Microsoft Office 365, the Navy is stuck in 2017 or 2018 capability-wise but is "moving rapidly to the right," according to Aaron Weis, the service's chief information officer:

Navy over 10 years behind in enabling cloud infrastructure

While the Navy is rapidly working to enable a cloud environment, the service is still playing catch-up when it comes to modernizing its technology.

Sandia National Laboratories launched a trio of research rockets last October from Wallops Island, VA, carrying a total of 23 experiments on behalf of the Defense Department office spearheading the main project to field a hypersonic weapon by 2023:

Hypersonic defense experiments featured prominently in Wallops flights last fall

The Missile Defense Agency sponsored nearly a third of the projects flight tested last fall during a series of sounding rocket tests to evaluate potential technologies to improve the U.S. military's hypersonic program -- a strong showing for the defensive portfolio which represents about 10% of total Pentagon spending on hypersonic capabilities.

The U.S. military has sent or has plans to send a total of 4,600 Javelin missiles to Ukraine so far:

Surge capacity exists for Javelin, but Army has yet to say how many it wants

There is enough surge production capacity available in the Javelin missile supply chain to build thousands more per year, to refill U.S. stockpiles that have supplied Ukraine, but the Army has made no public announcements yet concerning how many missiles it will buy or how much they will cost.