Monday, May 20, 2024
Key Issues GAO on F-35 SLCM-N program office PrSM funding
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 Defense Department is reaching for a next-generation microelectronics advancement that promises order-of-magnitude improvements for radar, communications and electronic warfare systems by using diamonds to reduce heat in transistors, awarding Raytheon an applied research contract to demonstrate the efficacy of such novel cooling technology.
A Pentagon advisory board commissioned to assess secure electronic processing has completed its work but is not disclosing recommendations on how to address the U.S. military's conundrum of relying on microprocessors produced by a global supply chain that allows adversaries to corrupt technologies, launch malicious code and steal weapon system blueprints.
Ursa Major, a rocket propulsion company focused on space and hypersonic systems, is jumping into the solid-rocket motor sector, offering state-of-the-art manufacturing processes -- including 3D printing -- to help replenish inventories depleted by U.S. donations to Ukraine and Israel.
The Army’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor (LTAMDS) -- in a seminal event for the service’s decade-long effort to field a next-generation, 360-degree radar -- detected a cruise missile target and guided a Patriot interceptor to destroy the threat during a live-fire test at White Sands Missile Range, NM.
The Missile Defense Agency is pumping $104 million into the Glide Phase Interceptor program, awarding RTX, formerly Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman $52 million options each for competing technology development efforts to design variants of a ship-launched missile capable of protecting an aircraft carrier from a long-range hypersonic weapon.
Lockheed Martin today announced an undisclosed investment in Launchpad.build -- a start-up that aims to collapse the traditional prototype and testing cycle by using a set of artificial intelligence driven technologies to convert an idea directly to final physical product, upending the manufacturing paradigm.
The Army project to develop a next-generation cruise missile defense system is facing a delay even as the effort -- called the Indirect Fire Protection Capability Increment 2 -- is carrying out what one senior official calls “aggressive activity” to support fielding in Guam by 2027 as part of a new air and missile defense system intended to counter China’s designs on Taiwan.
The Navy is entertaining the idea of increasing the offensive strike capability for Littoral Combat Ships after indirectly demonstrating the ability last month to fire a Tomahawk from the ship class -- a move that would add new punch and relevance for LCS, originally designed for shore-hugging missions, in a fight against a near-peer adversary.
The Army has validated the ability of a prototype speed-of-light weapon to connect with the service's main air defense command and control system, a key development in an effort to deliver a high-power microwave capable of swatting down small drone swarms to operational units as soon as next summer.
The Defense Department, concerned that potential adversaries could exploit seams in air defense coverage provided by the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and the Patriot systems, is debating a new-start program in the fiscal year 2025 budget request called the Lower Tier Future Interceptor (LTFI).
The Army last month completed a first-ever, live-fire exercise in Europe of a unit designed to break up Russia's anti-access/area-denial capabilities, dispersing troops across Germany, Poland and Romania to test and experiment elements of multidomain operations by synchronizing precision effects across the continent.
The Army may soon have the option to expand the striking power of its premier surface-to-surface artillery rocket by adding a new communications device that could allow Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System munitions to hit not only pre-programmed stationary locations, as they can today, but also moving targets such as ships or mobile missile launchers.
More than a dozen key Army modernization initiatives -- including new ship-killing missiles, a fleet of more than 1,000 small combat craft, a follow-on to the RQ-7 Shadow uncrewed aircraft and more -- are ensnared by legislation blocking service investment plans in fiscal year 2024 under the current stopgap spending measure.
The key to an affordable price tag for the XM-30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle -- a replacement for the M-2 Bradley that an early Army estimate pegged at $11 million a copy, three times the cost of a Bradley -- will be government-defined and -owned open software standards, said a senior service official.
Lockheed Martin's proposed design for a Next Generation Interceptor has passed muster with the Missile Defense Agency, clearing the way for the company to continue to mature critical technologies slated for the massive guided missile in pursuit of a critical design review slated for the summer of 2025.
The Defense Department is planning its most ambitious counter-drone demonstration to date, pitting a swarm of as many as 50 small uncrewed surrogate enemy aircraft over the New Mexico skies against a yet-to-be-determined group of candidate technologies in a contest where non-kinetic weapons, such as high-powered microwaves, may have an advantage.
The Defense Department is bracing for potential budget cuts of about $90 billion to fiscal year 2024 and 2025 plans -- painful reductions likely to squeeze weapons system modernization accounts -- in the event congressional dysfunction extends into January triggering a statutory sequester provision of the June law enacted to raise the debt ceiling.
The Defense Department is advancing plans for a 300-kilowatt combat laser -- sufficient energy to knock down enemy cruise missiles -- and has commissioned the manufacture of a pair of truck-mounted prototype systems for testing in fiscal year 2025 of a fundamentally new capability that holds the potential to change the way armed forces fight.
The Army is beginning a new Human-Machine Integrated Formations Initiative, an effort to deeply explore how robots will fight alongside soldiers, the top service civilian announced today at the Association of the U.S. Army convention.
The Defense Department has qualified a new large solid-rocket motor domestic supplier -- breaking up an effective duopoly between Northrop Grumman and Aerojet Rocketdyne -- and expanded the industrial base to support the U.S. military's high-priority project to develop and field a long-range hypersonic strike missile.