Missile Defense

The Chinese government is exporting armed drones advertised as being capable of "full autonomy," Defense Secretary Mark Esper said today in a speech aimed at drawing distinctions between the United States and China's competing approaches to artificial intelligence.

The Missile Defense Agency has formally lifted a restraint imposed last year on production of the newest Aegis ballistic missile interceptor following an early 2018 flight test failure, awarding Raytheon a $267 million option to proceed with building 24 Standard Missile-3 Block IIA rounds.

The plan for a technologically ambitious Next Generation Interceptor -- a potential decade-long project to develop a new long-range, guided missile to protect the nation against anticipated North Korean and Iranian ballistic missile threats beginning in 2030 -- is fueling a debate about the shape of the program late in the fiscal year 2021 budget endgame.

The Air Force plans to submit a formal acquisition strategy for its latest effort to modernize space command-and-control architecture and is working to mitigate early technical and program management concerns, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

The Pentagon is set to this week receive recommendations for principles guiding the U.S. military's development and use of artificial intelligence, the latest step in DOD’s effort to both take advantage of the rapidly advancing technology and keep it within ethical boundaries.

Congress, despite having agreed to a broad budget deal, has begun looking for stopgaps and schedule extensions for the defense spending and policy bills, which are already overdue and remain stalled amid partisan fighting over President Trump's use of military construction funds to build a southern border wall.

The White House Office of Management and Budget is balking at Defense Department plans for a Next Generation Interceptor, exposing a rift inside the Trump administration over how to modernize the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system just weeks after Mike Griffin, the Pentagon's top technology officer, sold Senate appropriators on plans for the new-start program.

Following the Air Force's decision to stop funding Boeing's contract supporting the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent program, the company has transitioned its employees to other internal jobs and issued a stop-work order to its suppliers.

The effort to replace the Mk21 reentry vehicle fuze -- intended to be deployed on the Air Force's legacy and future intercontinental ballistic missile systems -- is being rebaselined as a result of technical issues with energy storage components called capacitors.