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Inside Defense
The Defense Department has $4 billion in remaining spending authority it could tap to send additional weapons to Ukraine but assesses that the risk of doing so to be too great as Congress has thus far failed to appropriate money that would be needed to replenish U.S. stocks. Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said DOD is not considering providing additional weapons to Ukraine via presidential drawdown authority until Congress authorizes a supplemental security spending package.
The Times of Israel
The Israeli Air Force says it has carried out strikes against more than 31,000 targets amid the ongoing war, mostly in the Gaza Strip, but also in Lebanon and other fronts, racking up over 186,000 flight hours. In the Gaza Strip, the IAF has hit over 29,000 targets belonging to Hamas and other terror groups since Oct. 7.
The Wall Street Journal
SpaceX is deepening its ties with U.S. intelligence and military agencies, winning at least one major classified contract and expanding a secretive company satellite program called Starshield for national-security customers. The Elon Musk-led company entered into a $1.8 billion classified contract with the U.S. government in 2021, according to company documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Breaking Defense
“The war in Ukraine is spurring a revolution in drone warfare using AI,” blared a Washington Post headline last July. Then, in the fall, a flurry of reports said that both Russia and Ukraine had deployed small drones that used artificial intelligence to identify and home in on targets. Having on-board AI meant that the drones, versions of the Russian Lancet and the Ukrainian Saker Scout, wouldn’t need a human operator to guide them all the way to impact. If this AI had proved itself in battle, it really would have been a revolution.
The War Zone
The future of the U.S. Air Force's secretive Mayhem program is uncertain amid a funding issue that could at least lead to a major delay. Mayhem's stated focus has been on demonstrating an air-launched hypersonic air vehicle capable of performing strike and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, but the apparent demand for this capability within the service at all is now unclear. There could still be interest going forward in certain components of the project, including research and development work on advanced high-speed jet engines.
Defense News
America is now supplying materiel for the wars in Ukraine and Israel, which started a year and a half apart. The high demand has strained an industry that often struggled to meet needs long before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. And these wars aren’t even the Defense Department’s top priority; that’s China, whose massive military buildup over the last 20 years is the pace America’s leaders say they must match. Nowhere is this clearer than in the Pentagon’s new defense-industrial strategy, which says China’s industrial might in many areas “vastly exceeds” that of the U.S. and its allies.
DefenseScoop
The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) tapped Scale AI to produce a trustworthy means for testing and evaluating large language models that can support—and potentially disrupt—military planning and decision-making.
Military.com
The White House needs to ask Congress for enough money to reverse an “alarming erosion” of quality of life in the military in its fiscal 2025 budget request, bipartisan leaders from the House Armed Services Committee wrote in a recent letter to President Joe Biden. In a letter dated Feb. 16 and released publicly Feb. 20, the chairmen and ranking members of the full committee and its military quality-of-life subpanel pressed Biden to “focus significantly more attention and resources” on service members’ quality of life in its upcoming budget request.
Defense One
The U.S. Space Force wants a hotline with China to prevent crises in space, as China’s growing number of anti-satellite weapons challenge U.S. dominance in the domain. “We have to gain consensus among our allies and partners, but it's also important that we have a shared understanding with the potential adversaries so that there is no miscalculation…that's the value of the hotline, because the international norms are not well-established yet, despite U.S. efforts to take a leadership role in that area,” said Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific.
SpaceNews
For decades, the Global Positioning System (GPS) constellation has reigned supreme as the world’s go-to navigation tool—guiding everything from aircraft carriers to Uber drivers. But GPS is susceptible to jamming and spoofing. Malicious actors can deliberately disrupt or manipulate the signals, leading to inaccurate or misleading positioning information. These vulnerabilities endanger critical infrastructure, emergency response and military operations, prompting increased interest in alternative PNT, or positioning, navigation, and timing technologies that do not depend on GPS.
Defense News
The Air Force expects to finish qualification testing of the new engines planned for the B-52 Stratofortress by the end of 2024. And the service plans to make a Milestone B decision on the Commercial Engine Replacement Program by the end of the summer, which would allow it to move into its engineering and manufacturing development phase, officials said in an interview with Defense News.
Breaking Defense
As the Space Force rolls out plans for reorganizing its work force to meet the readiness demands of a potential fight with China, the service’s command responsible for providing personnel to operate space systems is eyeing using contractors rather than Guardians to run some satellite networks. If America’s newest military branch moves forward with the idea, experts say it would represent a major shift in how directly contractors play a role in operating American space assets.
One More Thing
DOD Release
About 1,000 seniors at the U.S. Air Force Academy took a significant step forward in their future roles as officers during Firstie Flag—an exercise to prepare them for potential conflicts with a great power adversary.
