US nuclear missile program costs soar to around $160 billion, sources say

On the same subject

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  August 16, 2019 | International, Land

  Slippery slope: MDA boss fights transfer of missile defense system to Army

  By: Jen Judson HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The new U.S. Missile Defense Agency director is opposed to the transfer of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System, or THAAD, to the Army — something Senate authorizers want to do this year in the fiscal 2020 authorization bill. Talk of transferring THAAD to the Army has been ongoing for roughly a decade. The Army officially operates the system, but the MDA conducts its development and continued modernization. Both MDA and Army leadership have said if Congress were to authorize a transfer, they would not oppose the move as long as the necessary funding is made available and not taken from other portfolios within the service. But there's still a fear that programs transferred to the services is where they go to die, either in their entirety or at least the chance of continued system modernization. For instance, there could be a plan down the road to extend the range of the THAAD interceptor. Historically, at times, when programs are transferred, funding meant to further improve systems has been cannibalized for more pressing, immediate needs within the armed services. “Why would we hand that off to the Army or Air Force, that sort of transfer to a service where it won't be prioritized? They have many other priorities,” MDA Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill told Defense News in an exclusive interview at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “I don't like organizational experiments on programs that are delivering more fighting capability,” he added. The challenge Before Congress, the military or the MDA consider transferring such a capability, a better definition for “transfer of services” must be ironed out, Hill said. He considers defining this one of his top challenges. “It gets suspicious when we don't have a fully defined term because all it really results in is fracturing of a program during a time where it's most critical to have those programs stable and taking care of the war fighter,” Hill said. “There's been a lot of discussion about the THAAD and the SM-3 [missile] transfer to the services. What does that mean?” The definition of transfer “ranges everything from a full-up transfer of the system over to the service, which assumes that the system is static and how it's designed today is how it's going to be designed forever,” Hill said. If it means transferring operations and sustainment responsibility, and then “put that in the done pile. The Army invests heavily in the operations and sustainment of that. I don't know what more we would want out of them,” he said. The argument MDA is examining whether it is doing enough to support the Army's successful operation and sustainment of the system, he noted, such as whether the service has the right logistics line in place and the right training. A THAAD transfer could also be disruptive to production at a time when THAAD interceptors are in high demand and orders continue to grow. Even if the transfer of THAAD meant the service would responsible for interceptor procurement, the MDA would have to break contracts for the Army to take over, which could result in delayed production, according to Hill. “We know right now, in today's operational environment, we need more,” Hill said. “So that makes no sense to me.” And for Hill, a THAAD transfer is a slippery slope. If the Army took complete control of the batteries, “then there's this discussion, ‘Well, let's include the TPY/2 radar and let's walk it a little bit further and let's take the homeland defense radars that are deployed globally that have a totally different mission.” The resistance to transfer THAAD in its entirety is not a sign of a resistance to transfer where it makes sense, Hill noted. “I often hear that we don't know how to transfer. Well look at the Aegis ships today. Navy procures those ships with ballistic missile defense capability. The Navy has come in and said: ‘Hey, we're going to build a multimission radar to include BMD capability in a SPY-6 [radar],' ” Hill said. “Man, what's wrong with that? That's fantastic.” MDA has also fully transferred the Patriot air and missile defense system to the Army. “Where Patriot is different, is it's a multimission system,” Hill said. “They have air defense as part of the maneuver force. It's sort of like cruise missile defense on a ship. We don't need to take over the Navy's cruise missile defense. ... Patriot is sort of the same thing.” THAAD is part of a wider integrated missile defense system, he added. “THAAD has to stay in MDA ... for the interoperability and integration into the other domains from across the services," Riki Ellison, chairman and founder of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, told Defense News. "THAAD is not an Army-centric weapon system. It should never be deployed as a standoff, alone weapon system.” The Joint Urgent Operational Need out of the Korean theater that calls for the integration of THAAD and Patriot is a prime example, Ellison noted. “MDA is the only one that has cross-domain [Command and Control, Battle Management and Communications] development and operational development as proven with the [Ground-Based Midcourse Defense] System," he said. Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, said: “I'm afraid the Army won't fund THAAD if it's their responsibility. We need to free up more money in MDA so it can focus on research and development, so we have a dilemma. Something has to give.” Short of the defense secretary directing the services to fund and support systems like THAAD, Heinrichs said, “they're probably just going to have to stay in MDA. That means we need a much bigger top line in MDA ... to fund the new technologies needed for advanced threats, especially.” The agency is currently advising the Pentagon and Congress on the right plan for where THAAD should live. “That's something that we have to work internally," Hill noted, "and so we need to get our act together on both sides.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/smd/2019/08/14/mda-director-opposes-transfer-of-terminal-missile-defense-system-to-army/

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  September 17, 2021 | International, Naval

  Australia details its nuclear-submarine ambitions

  The Australian government has established a Future Nuclear Submarine Task Force which will work with U.K. and U.S. counterparts over the next twelve to eighteen months to determine the best way to acquire the boats.

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  November 18, 2019 | International, C4ISR

  How Lockheed Martin Is Trying To Link Everything on the Battlefield

  BY PATRICK TUCKER Experiment by experiment, the company is weaving aircraft, ground vehicles, satellites, and the rest into a network that will someday give commanders unprecedented decision-support options. The Pentagon's efforts to digitally connect everything on the battlefield is has a big challenge to overcome: getting disparate vehicles and weapons to share data. “The interoperability of various, different systems, that's really where we are struggling. We don't have that machine to machine connection to begin with,” Air Force Brig. Gen. David Kumashiro recently told the audience at last week's Defense One Outlook 2020 conference. Over the past several years, Lockheed Martin officials say they've been working to build those connections, piece by piece and plane by plane. They started by asking, “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” and then working backwards, J.D. Hammond, vice president of C4ISR systems, told reporters at one of the company's offices. The company began by asking “How would we go fight in 2030, 2045?” They started with an idea of the state they wanted to reach and then worked backward. In 2013, the company launched a project, dubbed Missouri, to link the stealthy F-22 and F-35 combat jets. The Air Force has announced that they are to test a similar link next month, but the Air Force is establishing more complete linkages, including new forms of secure radio linkagages using software defined radio, and also including other assets such as Valkyrie drones. In 2015, they launched Project Iguana, extending the datalinks to the high-flying U-2 spy plane, fourth-generation combat aircraft such as the F-16, and satellites. In February 2018, they conducted an experiment under DARPA's SoSITE program that added other aircraft and a ground station. In April, their RIOT experiment connectngi jets to ground vehicles. Experiment by experiment, Lockheed tried to “systematically work” to build the components of a larger network of networks, said Hammond. There are four experiments projects planned for next year: Mayhem, focusing on links for satellites; Edison, datalinks for the Navy; Brennan, aircraft and Army units; and Project CASTL, satellites and a “space tactical layer”. Ultimately, Lockheed wants all this to add up to a “virtualized cloud-based architecture.” Think of it like the branches of a tree. A handful of ships and planes might form one network. That will, in turn, connect to a larger network that would, in turn, would be connected to the larger JEDI cloud. “You end up with virtual private clouds on the edge with a computing architecture you could have on an aircraft, on a ship, or any of the deployed nodes,” said John Clark, Lockheed's vice president of intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance and unmanned aerial systems. Most of the linked aircraft and ships in these experiments carry an Enterprise Mission Computer 2.0 — dubbed “Einstein box” after its abbreviation, EMC2 — that translates each platform's data into a shared protocol that can go out to the larger wireless network. Lockheed officials hope that bringing all these pieces together will enable a new sort of operating system for warfare. They showed journalists a new experimental battle management display to illustrate the concept. The system presents the operator with a list of effects, from devastating explosions to a quiet disabling of some enemy system; a list of available assets, including planes or drones; a map of targets; and recommendations for the best way to deliver effects to targets. As circumstances change — fuel gets low, ammunition is depleted, targets are destroyed, new enemy forces arrive, etc. — the system can send out alerts that a new plan is needed — or automatically update the plan with new instructions for pilots and drone operators. It all depends on how high the operator wants to set the autonomy. That vision is very different from the way mission tasking works today. Preston Dunlap, the chief architect of the Air Force, said at the Defense One Outlook 2020 conference, “Right now, our commanders are very limited in who they can assign to do certain” things. “More often than not, you have to assign someone because they happen to be in front of a specific place in front of a specific computer,” he said. Of course, realtime data sharing across platforms isn't a simple or clear-cut affair, even after successful experimentation. The years-long problems with Lockheed's Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, for the F-35 show how hard it can be simply to share data between operators and just one platform. The challenges of sharing data between multiple platforms, in the middle of battle in a highly contested airspace, are far larger. But commanders say they must try. “In terms of where our adversaries are,” Kumashiro said, U.S. forces have “a need to have this joint all-domain command-and-control system.” https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2019/11/how-lockheed-martin-trying-link-everything-battlefield/161355