The proliferation of long-range strike options under development across all the U.S. armed forces should prompt a comprehensive review by civilian leaders, a new report by two influential think tanks concludes. Titled “Understanding the Long-Range Strike Debate,” the report by AFA's Mitchell Institute for Aerospace ...
The Defense Department's Space Development Agency wants to blanket Earth with a constellation of low-cost, open-architecture data-relay and missile-tracking satellites whose sheer numbers, along with their 1,000-kilometer-high orbits, would theoretically thwart some modes of interference—but not all. With all going according to plan so far, ...
The Air Force has a new chief scientist: Victoria Coleman, who most recently was the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Coleman started in her role as the 37th chief scientist of the Air Force last week, and was ceremoniously sworn in by ...
The Pentagon could save a lot of money on personnel and increase force structure with expanded use of “remotely crewed” systems, but the diversity of size and application of such systems demands specialized thinking, rather than just lumping them together as “drones,” according to experts ...
The government’s 70 hypersonics programs—ranging from enabling technology efforts to all-up prototyping projects—are expected to cost $15 billion from 2015 through 2024, and several have sharply exceeded cost estimates, the Government Accountability Office reported. Hypersonic research funding grew 740 percent, government-wide, between 2015 and 2020. ...
Development of a new breed of unmanned aircraft is now underway, as three major defense companies earned contracts to start designing a future system known as “LongShot.” The LongShot program wants to create an unmanned weapons porter that can be shot from another plane before ...
The Biden administration is reportedly tapping Stefanie Tompkins to run the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, spurring the third leadership change at the secretive Pentagon organization since January 2020. Defense One first reported Tompkins’s “pre-decisional” appointment to the post on Jan. 19. The White House ...
The AGM-183 Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon hypersonic missile didn't fly by the end of 2020 as forecast by service acquisition executive Will Roper. Instead, the Lockheed Martin-built prototype made a third captive-carry test, which ended up being yet another dress rehearsal. The Air Force couldn't ...
The Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) missile failed to fly in a planned test launch, due to mechanical errors, not the missile design, sources reported. The problem follows captive-carry test flight issues during the spring and summer, which led to a HAWC prototype being damaged. ...
The Pentagon has so many hypersonics projects underway there aren't enough people to conduct them and not enough facilities to test them, Air Force chief scientist Richard J. Joseph said during a Dec. 17 Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies event. His comments came on the ...
Dynetics and its partners are planning next steps for the Gremlins drone swarming program after the aircraft failed to dock with a C-130 in recent flight tests. A third round of demonstrations began Oct. 28 at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. The three X-61As individually tried ...
Aerospace experts offered a peek into how joint all-domain command and control might begin changing the Air Force over the next few years, during RAND Corp.’s West Coast Aerospace Forum on Dec. 2. Expect the upcoming fiscal 2022 and 2023 budgets to majorly accelerate combat ...