Navy

The Air Force this week is spearheading a project with the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and industry entrepreneurs to emulate the kind of rapid software and hardware development pioneered by Silicon Valley start-ups in a bid to incubate Joint All Domain Command and Control -- an envisioned technical backbone to link sensors and shooters across air, land and sea.

Congressional appropriators want to allow the Navy to source certain ship components from foreign vendors for the service's new frigate, but have set a time line for when those parts must be domestically produced.

The compromise fiscal year 2020 defense spending bill includes $100 million for the Pentagon to establish a Joint Hypersonics Transition Office, marking a win for Indiana lawmakers who have pushed for the office to oversee a university consortium tasked with accelerating the development of hypersonic technologies and systems.

Congress is poised to vote on a $1.37 trillion appropriations deal this week for fiscal year 2020 that jettisons Democrats' earlier efforts to restrict the Pentagon's ability to reprogram funding, a measure intended to deter President Trump from again unilaterally transferring money meant for military construction and other defense priorities to build barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who has promised major reforms and bold investments, recently said he will soon order U.S. troops be moved from locations of "low-intensity conflict" to areas of "great power competition" in line with the National Defense Strategy, which calls for pivoting away from the Middle East and toward China and Russia.

Huntington Ingalls Industries has been the target of criticism because of delays with weapons elevators on the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford (CVN-78), but the company’s chief executive said the blowback illustrates the challenge the country faces in managing program risks.

Lawmakers are moving to slow the Navy's push for a new unmanned, corvette-sized vessel the service highlighted in its fiscal year 2020 budget, a move that follows a year of conversations between lawmakers and Navy officers about the maturity of unmanned systems.

House and Senate lawmakers are providing the Navy flexibility on cost caps for the Ford-class aircraft carriers, but are stopping short of repealing the restrictions.

Lawmakers are proposing a slew of F-35 oversight provisions as part of a defense policy bill released Monday by conference committee members, including requirements for sustainment cost and readiness details, reporting on the Block 4 modernization process and insight into efforts to rearchitect the Joint Strike Fighter's Autonomic Logistics Information System.