While the Air Force will originally focus on a competition to place new ejection seats in the service's F-16 fleet, “decisions following the competition could extend to other platforms, including the F-22 and B-1," the Air Force said.
Supportability issues that affected the availability and performance of early, stealthy aircraft are being addressed by Northrop Grumman on this new program.
Reducing cognitive overload on warfighters while improving “time to trust” for autonomous systems is a matter of design.
Advanced software development techniques are reducing risk and will enable the Air Force and Northrop Grumman to more efficiently integrate weapons on future aircraft, like the B-21.
“I think long-range strike is about trying to keep stability in a crisis situation. And if you're going to use it as a deterrence," former Air Marshal Geoff Brown says. "It's got to be responsive, it's got to be potent, but you've also got to be able to signal that you can use it."
Northrop Grumman is employing this new derivative of DevOps to ensure that the B-21’s mission-critical functions are baked in long before the bomber’s first flight.
Risk reduction is vital in the development of this new Air Force bomber. Northrop Grumman is driving risk out of the program with digital capabilities throughout design, build, prototype, and test.
The network transport architecture for NGC2 could be a hybrid approach that combines high assurance communications with 5G, WiFi, and multi-orbit satellites.
For L3Harris, the sale helps it reach its stated goal of divesting 8 to 10 percent of revenue as part an overarching effort to reshape its business portfolio.
In 2006, a relatively obscure book caused a major stir among the U.S. Air Force leadership. Why Air Forces Fail, edited by Robin Higham and Stephen J. Harris, lays out the determinants of failure: deficiencies in the industrial base, misguided technology and tactical picks, inattention to logistics and neglect of training. The case studies are broken […]
Double the buy rate on F-35A starting in 2020 and plan on a minimum of 200 B-21 bombers built in rapid fashion. That will begin to get to the Air Force that America needs to meets the challenges of the future.
For years, the Pentagon has dreamed and worked to build what it has called Prompt Global Strike, The idea is simple: to build a hypersonic weapon that can destroy targets anywhere on earth within an hour of getting targeting data and permission to launch. The technology and the physics are not simple; nor are they cheap. […]
Knowing when to build on commercial systems and when to develop something new can be the difference between parity and information dominance.
PENTAGON: The Air Force was eclipsed as the biggest budget winner this year, partially because of its decision to begin shifting from current weapons to new ones. The Army, which has greatly increased its commitment to land weapons, increased 14.9 percent and the Air Force is up 14.1 percent. Meanwhile the Navy Department — which includes […]
CORRECTED: Minuteman Was First Solid-Fueled ICBM; Jon Wolfsthal’s name The first solid-fueled InterContinental Ballistic Missile, Minuteman 1, was deployed some 55 years ago on the same day that President Kennedy announced that Soviet missiles were being deployed in Cuba. At the end of the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy credited the newly deployed Minuteman ICBM as his “ace […]
The United States Air Force should consider shifting its balance of its strike forces from fighters to long-range bombers. At the end of the Cold War, the Air Force’s combat aircraft inventory included 411 bombers. Today, it has a total of 158 B-1, B-52, and B-2 bombers, of which only 96 are designated as Primary […]
UPDATED: We Run Op-Ed; Pentagon Announces LRSO Contract The Pentagon just awarded the third major contract in the modernization of the nuclear triad. First came the B-21 bomber. Then the Columbia-class submarine, to replace the Ohio class boomers. Two days ago they awarded Boeing and Northrop Grumman contracts to begin work on the new version […]