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 Air Force hopes to demonstrate a radical new industrial feat that could signal a major leap forward for the aerospace industry by designing an aircraft and certifying its airworthiness before ever building a physical component as part of a new project launched last month to prototype a fixed-wing drone from concept through Military Flight Release inside a computer.
Lockheed Martin's venture capital arm has teamed with other investors to provide $12.7 million to Vayu Robotics -- a "non-traditional robotics company" that is making its public debut with this development -- to scale development of artificial intelligence-backed autonomy technologies for potential use across a wide range of markets.
A Defense Department study exploring the feasibility of opening up a stretch of the electromagnetic spectrum -- currently the exclusive preserve of the U.S. military -- for use by commercial telecommunications companies for 5G technology is complete and has been forwarded to the Commerce Department.
The Air Force and Navy are beefing up their capability to sink Chinese warships from the air by nearly doubling the planned purchase of Lockheed Martin-built missiles designed to strike heavily defended surface combatants: the Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare Increment 1 -- also called the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM).
The Navy plans to establish a dedicated program to manage procurement of a hypersonic capability -- both defensive and offensive -- in development since 2018 and slated to begin production in fiscal year 2024, breaking the Standard Missile-6 Block IB off from other variants of the SM-6 for cost and schedule reporting.
The Army has tallied a $7.2 billion price tag for its Mobile Protected Firepower program, a project to buy 377 light tanks for infantry brigades that will outfit six battalions but still leave the service shy of more than 30% of the total infantry requirement for a direct-fire capability needed to neutralize hardened enemy positions and armored vehicles.
The Pentagon estimates the total price tag for Boeing's F-15EX fighter aircraft program is $12.5 billion, a sum that allows the Air Force to replace its oldest two-seater fighters with a modernized variant of the 1970s-design combat system and puts a significant six-year squeeze on available funding to buy F-35 aircraft as Lockheed Martin struggles to reach objective manufacturing rates.
The United States and Canada are close to declaring initial operational capability of Cloud-Based C2 -- a new homeland defense battle management, command and control system to replace a tool established after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- that top brass say is needed to defend North America from modern threats and is a likely candidate to be part of a future domestic cruise missile defense system.
The Defense Department is set to begin reviewing Next Generation Interceptor designs, a major mid-point assessment in the $17 billion contest between Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman that will determine whether the respective proposals are sufficiently mature to proceed with developing prototype intercontinental ballistic missile killers.
The Defense Department earlier this month completed a joint tactical integrated fire control demonstration that culminated with simulated missile attack and response in skies over the Washington, DC area that will now inform an ongoing Air Force effort to design a program of record for a domestic cruise missile defense capability.
The telecommunications industry will not receive "carte blanche" to auction off lower portions of the mid-band electromagnetic spectrum that are critical to U.S. military air and missile defense capabilities, the Defense and Commerce departments have determined in a long-anticipated report, according to a lawmaker briefed on not-yet-public findings.
The Defense Department has unveiled plans to compete a new, high-priority radar project in the Indo-Pacific region -- a long-range surveillance sensor slated for emplacement in the Republic of Palau that top brass say is needed to plug air domain awareness gaps in the Western Pacific by providing thousands of square miles of wide-area surveillance.
Now outside the paywall: our story on the public push to put new teeth into a nearly 20-year-old validated -- but still unfulfilled -- joint requirement for an elevated sensor to counter cruise missiles.
Boeing has elbowed its way into the hypersonic defense game, winning the second phase of the Glide Breaker program, an important advanced technology development contract that aims to provide a foundation for U.S. and Japanese efforts to jointly develop a hit-to-kill interceptor capable of chasing down and defeating ultra-fast maneuvering warheads.
The U.S. military should resuscitate a 2004 requirement for a high-flying, stationary radar to bolster defense of Guam, a top Army official argued, noting capabilities demonstrated by the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System before its 2018 termination are now urgently needed.
Army leaders have determined -- five decades after launching the Abrams program and following five years of closely held analysis -- that the time has come for a clean-sheet tank design to invent a new combat vehicle optimized for machine-speed warfare, armed not only with a big gun but artificial intelligence, new components to significantly reduce weight and more.
We've moved our exclusive story on the Defense Department's new project to develop an Air and Cruise Missile Defense Homeland capability outside the paywall.
The United States -- which since the advent of flight more than a century ago has relied on two vast oceans as a buffer against adversaries attacking U.S. citizens and soil with low-flying aircraft and missiles -- this summer began designing a next-generation domestic air defense system to protect cities and critical infrastructure from Russian and Chinese cruise missiles.
A ballistic missile target malfunctioned during a key test required to make an operational assessment of the Long Range Discrimination Radar, dealing the new sensor project another schedule setback and putting the Pentagon in the position of taking ownership of a new weapon before validating it works as promised.
The Pentagon is considering expanding current national missile defense policy -- which is focused on threats from North Korea and, should Tehran obtain a long-range nuclear capability, Iran -- to also counter "regional" aggressors, including Russia or China, according to a senior Defense Department official.